Just Tell Me I Can't (25 page)

Moyer asked twenty-four-year-old pitcher Alex White to join him in listening to the Dorfman chapter. White faced the Dodgers the night after Moyer and, like him, was knocked out of the game in the fifth inning. The two dissected White's thinking on the mound.

“I was kind of pitching around Tony Gwynn,” White said.

“Why pitch around Gwynn? He's the leadoff hitter. He's not going to hurt you with a home run, but he might hurt you with his legs. If you walk him, there's no defense for a walk.”

“I thought I could get Ellis out,” White said. “I thought I could get a double-play ball.”

“See, to me, you didn't give yourself enough credit and you gave the hitter too much credit,” Moyer said. “Instead of letting the situation dictate to you—‘Oh my gosh, I gotta do this, I gotta do that, I gotta get that double play ball'—what Harvey is saying is
you
dictate to the situation. Take a step back and analyze what's going on.”

The two talked pitching into the night. White might just as well have been speaking for Moyer when he observed that there always seems to be one moment in every game that will determine how your outing is going to go. It's the tipping point: get past it, and you're likely to cruise on your way to a good night. If, for example, Moyer had gotten that called third strike against Abreu in the fourth against the Dodgers, he might have had a vastly different result.

Five nights later, back in Colorado, Moyer notches his second win of the young season. He goes six and a third innings, giving up just one run in a 6–1 win. But it's not his pitching that makes headlines. In the fourth, leading 3–0, Moyer bats with two outs and runners on second and third against twenty-two-year-old lefty Patrick Corbin. He squibs a 2–2 fastball off the end of his bat on the ground between Corbin and first baseman Paul Goldschmidt. Goldschmidt fields the ball and lunges for the hustling Moyer—who would later call his sojourn down the first base line a “slow crawl”—to no avail. Fowler, on second, never hesitates; the infield hit drives in two runs and Moyer has set a new record: the oldest player ever to drive in a run.

Moyer's influence on his teammates was borne out by Fowler's hustle on the play. “I was shocked that Moyer beat it out,” Fowler would say after the game. “The guy was hustling.…He's a bulldog. The guy never quits.”

The Rockies are 15–21, and Moyer is now 2–3 and his ERA 4.20, still tops among his team's starters.

They say that no matter how experienced the fighter, the knockout in a boxing match comes as a sudden, shocking surprise. Even if you see it and you're bracing for that ultimate punch, you never fully expect the end to come when it does.

Jamie Moyer is more pugilistic than most major league pitchers, having taken more than his share of punches through the years, always to rise again. After the Arizona win, right when he's thinking he may have turned some kind of corner, he feels the sting of a powerful one-two combination.

First comes an outing in Miami, where Giancarlo Stanton hits a mammoth grand slam against him in the fourth inning, after Moyer had carried a 4–0 lead through three. He ends up giving up six runs and taking the loss. Five days later, in Cincinnati, as at Miami, every pitch seems to be up in the zone. The Reds tee off, crushing four home runs in his five innings. The two losses are part of an epic Colorado slide. After beating Arizona, the Rockies win only two of their next ten games.

Moyer has a feeling about what's coming. It's only ten days since the encouraging signs in Los Angeles and at home against Arizona, but in the high-stakes realm of professional baseball, whole fates can be determined in such a short time span. Particularly if you're a forty-nine-year-old pitcher on a bad team that shows no signs of getting better.

When Moyer is called into general manager Dan O'Dowd's office, Jim Tracy is there, choked up. They say the most complimentary things about his work ethic, his class, his effort. But they're a bad team that won't contend and they have young arms to develop. Moyer thanks them from the bottom of his heart for the opportunity.

He cleans out his locker while Tracy makes the announcement. “He was up against the odds of late,” the manager says. “There is no difference in the man, there's no difference in his will to compete. There is a difference in that the 82- or 83-mile-per-hour that he had as a fastball had started to come back and get closer to where some of his off-speed pitches were. There's very little variance between his pitches.”

When Moyer takes the podium, he's smiling. He thanks O'Dowd, says that Tracy “stuck his neck out for me,” and—as Harvey would have had him do—he takes responsibility. “Unfortunately, I didn't hold up my end of the bargain,” he says. “That's what happens in this business.”

Ever the glass-half-full type, Moyer drinks a beer on his way to the airport and focuses on the positive. “I get to sleep in my own bed tonight,” he says. “And I get to go to Hutton's high school graduation. That'll be pretty cool.” After that, Hutton's high school—Cathedral Catholic in suburban San Diego—will play in a playoff game that, were he still employed, Jamie would have kept tabs on via text messages from Karen. Instead, he'll be able to see his second-born play playoff baseball.

Within minutes, many of the stories that start to move on the wire include the words “Career Likely Over” in their headlines. Of course, that's what they wrote when the Rangers released him in 1990. That's what the smart money thought when Joe Torre sent him packing in 1991. That's what even his closest friends and relatives thought when the Cubs cut him out of spring training in 1992. That's what the Seattle media assumed when he was traded to Philly in 2006 for two no-name minor leaguers. That's what Ruben Amaro Jr. said when he blew out the elbow in 2010. But surely, now that he had made history, and now that his comeback
was
history, surely this would be it. Jamie Moyer would finally be a former professional baseball player. Right?

As he approaches the airport, one other positive of this latest roundhouse suddenly dawns on him. “This could give me some time to get with Dom, have a few bullpens, and work on some things,” he says.

O
n Tuesday, June 8, at 12:13 p.m., Jamie Moyer texts a friend: “In Atlanta, should I continue to Buffalo or go on to Grand Cayman?” He answers himself thirty-three minutes later: “Decided on boarding to Buffalo. I'm in my seat.”

He's joking, but the ambivalence is real. It's been nearly two weeks since the baseball know-it-alls yet again pronounced his career DOA, two weeks in which he'd carried on an internal wrestling match:
Should I pull this plug?
Yet here he is, boarding that connecting flight for Buffalo, where he'll pitch for the Norfolk Tides, the Baltimore Orioles' Triple A team.

Back in Rancho Sante Fe after his release by the Rockies, Moyer had once again comfortably slid into his Mr. Mom role: golfing with Mac, picking up Grady at gymnastics and Duffy at soccer, helping Kati and Yeni with their Kumon. Meantime, the Orioles called, who were surprisingly in first place in the AL East and looking to add a pitcher to eat some innings in anticipation of the Yankees making one of their inevitable runs. The Blue Jays also expressed interest after a handful of starters went down to injury. Both were intrigued enough by Moyer's early results for Colorado to want to see which was the outlier: April or May.

Part of Moyer wondered just what the hell he was doing. Being there for Hutton's graduation reminded him of all that he'd missed through the years, plays and games and birthdays he'd have to listen to over the phone or through the filter of Karen's texts and jpegs. As his agent, Jim Bronner, called with the details behind what would be a brief minor league showcase—two or three starts, $5,000—he wondered,
Why would you get on a plane and leave these kids, when you just got back to them? Why?

He wished Harvey were still around. But he knew what his mentor would say. Harvey's response would no doubt be identical to the advice Dorfman once gave to Jim Abbott, when Abbott was contemplating stepping away from the game after a disastrous 2–18 1996 season. “Using your family as a way out,” Dorfman told the pitcher, as recounted in Abbott's memoir,
Imperfect
, is “a cop-out…we invent motives for our behavior. You use the separation from family in one context but not the other? Does that make sense? If you were pitching well, you'd still live for your family. To what extent will you regret this? What about in five years? Can you live with it appropriately? Use all the info, then you'll have no regret.”

Ah, yes, the absence of regret. Two months ago, Moyer was baseball's feel-good story. Now, the media narrative had ever so slightly turned. “Jamie Moyer embodies the sort of player who has competed for too many years,” one blogger opined. Another concurred: “It's getting hard to watch as the 49-year-old desperately tries to prolong an amazing and historic career.”

But for Moyer, desperation didn't enter into it. He knew that had he listened to the press, he would have retired long ago and that those who chronicle the game seem somehow threatened by the example of aging in it. Moyer had heard the pundits' clichéd calls to “go out on top” at least since 2006. It had always sparked a defiant streak in him. Besides, for him, this wasn't about “going out on top”; it was about going out on his terms.

Harvey used to say, “If you want to know who a person is, watch how he responds to adversity.” Moyer had gotten clocked at the end of May; did that mean he was done showing who he is, someone who gets up time and again after being knocked down?

Harvey would also say, “Good learners risk doing things badly in order to learn how to do things well.” Moyer asked himself,
Do I still have room to learn?
As for his family, Karen and Dillon and Hutton were pushing him to give it one last shot. So he made his way across the Ted Williams Highway to the tiny hamlet of Poway, where he found Dom Johnson in his backyard, as if the pitching whisperer had been visited by a vision of an aging seeker's impending arrival. There was no gopher this time, just Moyer on the mound and Johnson eyeing the mechanics. Johnson noticed some of the same things Moyer had been working on: the hand coming too slow, too passively out of the glove on the windup, leading to a lessening in arm speed through the motion. Similarly, when his left hand reared all the way back, Moyer would stop for a nanosecond, instead of continuing in one uninterrupted flow; again, deceleration. Finally, when stopping at the back of the delivery, the left arm was swinging too far toward third base, giving batters a clean “back window” look at the grip on the pitch about to come.

“I had a feeling Joey Votto picked up the grip on that homer in Cincinnati,” Moyer said.

“That's how, no doubt,” Johnson said.

So they went to work. Keeping the arm in, shielded by the body, while refraining from any stop-motion. After two bullpens together, it felt crisper, cleaner—and maybe even faster.

Those bullpen workouts led Moyer to determine that there was indeed a project to be finished. Ever since coming under Dorfman's spell, Moyer had been a testament to the notion that process matters—even more than results. Forget about what the media said: did
he
really think his process was over? Standing on Dom's mound, it didn't feel that way. He might not get back to the majors, but he
could
get better.

Karen was ecstatic, seeing her husband's quest not as some abandonment of their kids, but as a teachable moment for them. Their father would be modeling a whole range of character traits, from persistence to preparation to self-confidence to, perhaps most important of all, seeing something through to the end, even in the face of potential ridicule.

So now he's about to meet his new team, the Norfolk Tides, in Buffalo. He gets picked up at the airport and is taken to the team's hotel. The wire services are reporting that he ain't done yet. Jamie is now forty-nine years old—and he's back in the minors.
There's something appropriate about that
, he thinks, smiling to himself as he walks over to a local steakhouse, where he'll sit at the bar, have a beer, and watch
SportsCenter
.

It's
Star Wars
night at Coca-Cola Field in downtown Buffalo, which means it's a stadium packed full of relics. Not only Darth Vader and Jamie Moyer; the Tides also have on the roster veteran Miguel Tejada and Moyer's former teammate in Philly, J. C. Romero, not to mention Bill Hall, who was one of the few Red Sox not to hit Moyer in that 2010 shellacking administered by Boston in Moyer's last season in Philly.

It's the biggest crowd of Buffalo's season. Families are drawn to see the
Star Wars
promotion, but baseball aficionados are here to see this forty-nine-year-old pitching curiosity. Most of Moyer's teammates weren't even born when
Star Wars
debuted. Moyer was in high school.

On this June night, Moyer is masterful. The bullpen sessions with Dom appear to have paid off: his fastball in the first inning is clocked at 82 miles per hour—the hardest he's thrown since 2010. He pairs the fastball with 72-mile-per-hour changeups and 76-mile-per-hour cutters. As Harvey would have it, Moyer is basking in the moment on the mound. At one point, he doesn't hear the home plate umpire's call.

“Ball or strike?” Moyer asks.

The ump comes out from behind home plate, removes his mask. “Ball,” he says.

Moyer smiles. “You lose your hearing when you get to be my age,” he says.

The Bisons, who are managed by fifty-three-year-old Wally Backman, seem helpless, hitting only one ball hard, a single back through the middle, the only hit Moyer surrenders. Fifty-two of Moyer's 84 pitches are strikes over five shutout innings, with five strikeouts and no walks. He gets the win.

After the fifth, Moyer sits on the bench in the dugout as his teammates—all of whom seem to have Dillon's fresh, ruddy cheeks—parade by to offer high fives. He runs a towel through his soaked hair. Pitching coach Mike Griffin sits next to him.

“How'd it feel?”

Moyer takes a deep breath, looking off into the expanse of outfield green. “I've got to tell you, this feeling is just…” He trails off, searching. “Priceless. It's just priceless. I'm in a minor league ballpark, with a bunch of kids not much older than my son, and it's just you and the game, you know what I mean? There's nothing here between you and the game.”

Griffin is fifty-five, a lifer who pitched six years in the majors. The two are silent for a moment, looking out at the outfield lawn. Finally, Griffin speaks. “Helluva job tonight,” he says, getting up to go.

Afterwards, in the clubhouse, four local reporters crowd around Moyer. They ask what keeps him going. “This,” he says. “Playing for a team, taking on another challenge.”

But he doesn't want to talk about tonight's game. Instead, he turns the tables on his interlocutors and Bison PR man Brad Bisbing. The return to the minors has kick-started his memory. “Hey, the Earl of Bud isn't here anymore?” Moyer asks the group, referring to the legendary Bisons beer vendor back in the old War Memorial Stadium. Moyer, who visited Buffalo as a minor leaguer in the 1980s, remembers how the Earl's dancing antics would bring the crowd to its feet.

“We're having an Earl of Bud bobblehead night in August,” Bisbing says. “He's coming back for it.”

“I remember once our manager Mark DeJohn got up and danced with him,” Moyer says. “And what about the Butcher?”

The Butcher was another icon, a 425-pound bat boy who would eat ten or twelve peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the clubhouse before each game—egged on by the players—but would nonetheless delight the crowd with his athleticism. He'd sprint behind home plate to catch foul balls rolling down the backstop net, but he'd do so behind his back, or in his cap. When he'd miss, the PA announcer would intone, “The Butcher—no range!”

“He's fallen on hard times,” one of the writers says. “They had a fund-raiser for him not that long ago.”

Meantime, in his office, fifty-five-year-old manager Ron Johnson has googled Moyer's career stats. “Wow,” he says, eyeing them. Johnson had a three-year stint in the majors in the early '80s, and was once the first base coach for the Red Sox. “This guy makes me want to start working out again,“ he tells the local reporters.

Outside the stadium, a handful of fans wait for autographs. Moyer signs each one before hailing a cab over to Gabriel's Gate—he has a hankering for what he hears are the best wings in wingtown. When they come, they don't disappoint. Neither does the beer, which is cold and thirst-quenching. After a couple, for the first time since he blew out his arm nearly two years ago, this most present-tense of thinkers—a man who has trained himself to focus only on the task at hand—pivots to the future. He starts talking about what could be next. About maybe teaching pitching to kids from Little League to the pros. About rounding up guys like his buddy Trevor Hoffman and starting an academy that teaches mechanics, the mental game, and arm maintenance. Videos. Classroom instruction. Bullpen sessions.

Moyer takes a long pull on his beer. A host of practical concerns invade. “Of course, I'd have to find a facility somewhere,” he says. “And I bet a lot of major league pitching coaches wouldn't want someone like me in their pitchers' ears. Teams can be territorial about that.” He takes another swig. Those challenges are far off. Tonight was a good night. Because he was back on a baseball field.

“It's crazy to say, and I know I can't do it,” he says. “I doubt Karen would want me to. And I have responsibilities. So I can't do it. But if I could, you know what? I'd play the rest of the season in Triple A. It's just so…pure. It's just…baseball.
It's what baseball always was to me
.”

In two days, the Tides will board a bus for the eleven-hour ride back to Norfolk. “I can't wait,” Moyer says, and there is not a hint of sarcasm in his voice; he knows his baseball days are waning, and he's going to embrace every detail of this twilight, even if it leaves him tired and his legs stiff and sore.

There are two outs in the seventh inning of Moyer's second start. This time, he has befuddled one of his many former teams, the Toledo Mud Hens. He has given up two earned runs and seven hits, and has struck out seven while walking none.

He takes a deep breath on the mound. Behind home plate, just to the right of Karen and the kids, are a group of college-age kids chanting, “JA-MIE! JA-MIE! JA-MIE!” He makes eye contact with Toledo coach Leon “Bull” Durham, his teammate on the Cubs in the '80s. Earlier, when Durham was tossing batting practice, Moyer had teased him: “Throw strikes, Bull!”

Now, with the Mud Hens flustered and the kids in the stands making a ruckus, Moyer looks at his old friend and slightly shrugs, as if to say,
You believe this?
He throws a two-seamer and the ball is smoked right back to him on a line, but the old reflexes aren't shot yet; he snares it and theatrically flips the ball back toward home plate while sprinting off the mound to the dugout, the chant of “JA-MIE! JA-MIE!” now catching on among the eight thousand fans in attendance.

Five days later, Moyer pitches four innings, giving up one run on three hits and striking out four without issuing a walk. In 16 innings, he now has a 1.69 ERA with 16 strikeouts and not a single walk. Most important, his velocity is back to 82, and he feels he's found his arm slot again.

In the press box, the speculation is that Moyer has been removed from the game after four innings because a call-up to the Orioles is imminent. That's what Moyer's agent, Jim Bronner, has been led to believe too. Over the next few days, however, the call doesn't come. Orioles general manager Dan Duquette is unavailable to speak to Bronner and doesn't return his messages. Finally, Duquette tells Bronner they'd like Moyer to make one more start.