Just Tell Me I Can't (19 page)

Next to the
Daily News
cover is a framed Pat Burrell number 5 Phillies jersey, signed by Pat the Bat himself. Moyer is standing at the counter, taking in the memorabilia that line the walls and looking at the menu board, when rushing out of the open kitchen comes a wild-eyed, well-built young man.

“I gotta thank you! I just gotta thank you!” Giovanni Caranci is saying, coming out from behind the counter, arm extended for what turns out to be part handshake, part South Philly hug. “I gotta thank you for the World Series!”

Caranci, who relocated to Arizona a few years ago and opened a chain of Philly-themed sandwich and pizza shops, had season tickets to the magical 2008 season. “I think I remember you,” Moyer says. “Didn't I get you and your son some stuff?”

Caranci is stunned—one day, Moyer tossed some T-shirts from the bullpen to him. They reconnect like old war vets; Caranci wishes Moyer were back with the Phils this season. They talk about this year's Phillies team. “A lot is going to depend on Roy,” Moyer says of ace pitcher Roy Halladay. “He didn't look good the other night.”

In fact, Moyer watched Halladay, his friend and fellow Dorfman pupil, and immediately texted him: “Looks like you're drifting to the plate.”

On this night, though, he can waste little time worrying about Halladay's mechanics; he spent today looking at his. Tomorrow will be his first start, but four days ago he made his first appearance of the season (not counting the intra-squad exhibition), and he spent this morning looking at video from the outing.

Moyer pitched two innings in relief against San Francisco at Scottsdale Stadium. The Rockies had shelled starter Tim
Lincecum
for five runs in two innings by the time Moyer came in. His command was much improved; in the fourth inning, his mix of fastball and changeup led to three straight soft groundouts to second base. In the fifth, he gave up a single, the only one he'd surrender. He stepped off the mound and turned to second base umpire Dana DeMuth.

“I was absent last year,” Moyer said. “Can I still bring my hand to my mouth on the mound?”

DeMuth laughed. “Yes, you can.”

“Okay. Just checking.”

In two scoreless innings, he threw only 22 pitches; Giants catcher Chris Stewart was seen muttering to himself on his way back to the dugout after flailing at a two-strike changeup.

“I was terrible,” Giants ace Lincecum said after the game, before being asked to comment on Moyer. “Wow! He's forty-nine. He's going back out there.”

While Moyer was happy with his command, something felt off. The cutter still isn't ready. More importantly, every pitch should ideally come from the same release point, lest the pitcher tip the batter off to the forthcoming pitch, and Moyer was not in the same arm slot on every throw.

In the last decade, watching video had become all the rage in the major leagues. Every team has a video coordinator, and players and coaches spend countless hours “breaking down tape,” deconstructing at-bats and pitching sequences into intricate frame-by-frame parts. During games, hitters will leave the dugout to view their last at-bat, and pitchers will sneak looks between innings.

Moyer is not a video devotee. Part of that is generational—he's more comfortable with his own hand-scrawled notes from his decades of confrontations on the mound; beyond those, he relies on what, as he puts it, each at-bat is telling him in real time, what he's gleaning from a hitter's body language or expression, not unlike a poker player looking to identify and exploit the opposition's tell.

Which isn't to say he never watches video—Moyer is too open-minded to dismiss it out of hand. He just doesn't rely on it as much as other players. He doesn't trust the centerfield camera angle, so he can never be sure where a pitch actually
is
, and for Moyer, where the pitch is, its exact placement, is the whole ball game.

He watches himself on video when he's trying to solve a particular mechanical mystery, but even to his keen eye, the nuanced differences in pitch-by-pitch arm slot positioning evade him. He's searching for a
feeling
when he throws, the familiar sensation of muscle memory at work, and he's found that watching tape of himself in pursuit of that can actually distract him from finding it.

Moyer does watch hitters' at-bats. He subscribes to a major league service that makes available on his iPad every at-bat in the league. He'll watch and search for what he calls hitters' “jam spots,” the farthest location inside that a hitter will offer at and be unable to keep in fair play. Once he has the jam spot, he'll work it time and again, until the batter proves he can get around on it.

This morning he looked at tape to see if he could discern his arm slot, but instead he noticed something else. “My right hip was leaning too far to the plate on my leg kick,” he says now, taking a bite of his cheesesteak and waving a thumbs-up in the air to the nervous proprietor keeping an eye on him from the kitchen.

Now he puts the sandwich down and rises in the middle of Corleone's, starting his pitching motion from the stretch right next to the condiments stand while other customers look on. He shows what he's been doing—the right hip is out front, leaning toward home perhaps an inch and a nanosecond ahead of where it should be—compared to the motion he practiced this morning. “So, okay, now this is something I have to work on,” he says. A lefty leading too much with the right hip runs the risk of opening up too soon. That's when balls get up in the zone and when pitches targeted inside to righthanded batters can catch too much of the plate.

He sits down and returns his attention to the cheesesteak. Tomorrow, he'll start against the White Sox in a three-inning stint. For now, though, he's just a Phillies fan, the memorabilia and the food taking him back to another time. “Remember Big Bull Luzinski?” he says, referring to the Phillies team of his youth. “Now there was a tough out.”

Luzinski was preceded in the lineup by the majestically talented Mike Schmidt, though for most of Moyer's adolescence Schmidt was an underachiever who was a target of the Philly boo-birds. It wasn't lost on Moyer that Schmidt turned an underachieving career into a Hall of Fame one through work ethic and by figuring out the game.

“Very few in the game worked as hard as I did, and I never got credit for that,” Schmidt said in 1995, sounding as old-school as Moyer. “I'm talking about being consumed by the sport. Players today come to the park, watch some TV, read a newspaper, make a sandwich, have a few laughs, break out the cards, ease into their uniforms, and then it's time for batting practice. When I got to the park, I started preparing immediately. I was all business.”

It was long before Harvey and the era of the sports shrink, but Schmidt got better because—not in spite of—his cerebral nature. “I went from ducking every time they threw a breaking ball to being the best righthanded breaking ball hitter in the league, because I had the patience and the drive to learn the game,” Schmidt recalled. It's true—it was arguably Schmidt's analytical nature, not his natural talent, that turned him into a Hall of Famer. When his career started to wane in the mid-'80s, it was his studied approach to the craft of hitting that resurrected him. He changed his approach, started hitting down on the ball, and began using the whole field instead of trying to pull everything.

“At this level,” Moyer says now, “everyone is talented, or they wouldn't be here. What separates the best from the rest is this.” He taps his head.

This waltz down memory lane concludes with Moyer's last bite of his cheesesteak. “You can't get good cheesesteaks outside of Philly,” he says, noting that a shop in, of all places, Bradenton, Florida, also makes a mean one. He wipes his mouth. “This is a very good one.”

As their son completes his warm-up tosses, Jim and Joan Moyer are a study in contrasts. They have just arrived, along with daughter Jill, on a flight from Philly.

“You didn't think we'd miss his first start in nearly two years?” Joan says. Her legs bob nervously as she grabs scoopful after scoopful of popcorn. Jim, on the other hand, is placid, holding the game program open in his lap, pen poised to score each play as he's done for decades. This was what it was like when Jamie pitched for the Phillies, and Jill would drive their parents an hour each way to every home game he pitched. Before that, during his time in Seattle, the Moyers would stay up late to watch on the satellite dish, Jim scoring silently, Joan fidgeting nervously.

Karen and a bunch of the kids are here too. Fourteen-year-old Duffy helps watch “the littles,” Kati and Yeni, while eighteen-year-old Hutton and eight-year-old Mac look forward to going into the clubhouse after their dad pitches.

They won't have long to wait. On the field, Moyer looks sharp in the first. He retires the side on just seven pitches, all strikes. It's more of the same in the second, when a two-seam fastball below the zone induces an inning-ending grounder to Tulowitzki at short for a double play. That's thirteen pitches through two innings today, and four scoreless innings thus far. Karen looks relieved enough to chat with some of the other wives in the stands.

In the third, Moyer gives up his first run of the spring on an RBI base hit by Eduardo Escobar. With a runner on and two outs, up comes White Sox catcher A. J. Pierzynski, a 6´3˝, 240-pound lefty who struck out all of 33 times last season and has never seen a fastball he didn't want to crush. Moyer starts him with a 72-mile-per-hour changeup that breaks down and in, right over the inside part of the plate. Strike one.

After getting something soft and in, most hitters will look for something hard and outside. Moyer toys with busting him inside again, but decides to mess with Pierzynski's rhythm even more. He throws a 65-mile-per-hour looping curveball that starts out heading for Pierzynski's right hip and quickly drops out of the zone and away from the hitter; Pierzynski lurches for it, swinging well in front
and
well over it. Strike two.

Pierzynski is something of a hothead, with a reputation as an emotional—some say dirty—player. Now he steps outside of the batter's box, clearly frustrated. This is the part of the game Moyer loves.
Will he? Won't he?
At 0–2, having just seen two slow pitches, Pierzynski is likely looking off-speed again or expecting a waste pitch—something well out of the strike zone in the hope that he'll chase a bad ball.

Moyer doesn't like the phrase “waste pitch,” because he considers every pitch to have a purpose. Besides, why give the hitter what he expects, even if it's well outside of the zone? No, having caught Pierzynski off guard by a slow pitch followed by an even slower one, Moyer now has the batter out of sync. Uncomfortable. Better to keep attacking. He comes back with a two-seam fastball at 79 miles per hour—79 following 65 and 72 is really equivalent to a pitch in the 90s—and it freezes Pierzynski, who takes it on the inside black for a called third strike.

Moyer comes off the field to loud applause, and manager Jim Tracy's outstretched hand greets him at the top of the dugout steps. Within minutes, Karen's cell phone rings. “Send Hutton and Mac down,” Moyer says, and they're off like base runners given the double steal sign.

After the game, Karen and the kids wait outside the clubhouse. Moyer comes out with a stat sheet, showing him credited with the win. Karen smiles. “It's been a long time since one of those,” she says. Three innings, three hits, one run, two strikeouts. And that's having thrown only two cutters; one for a ball and the other, up in the zone, for a base hit.

“Today's a good day,” Moyer says, Kati and Yeni both grabbing a leg. Moyer hasn't seen the kids in a couple of weeks, and dinner with the brood awaits. As he leads the pack toward the parking lot, he wants to know something. “How was my velocity?” he asks. Seventy-nine, he's told. He winces, partly because he wants to get a 10-mile-per-hour differential between his fastball and his changeup, instead of the six or seven miles he's now averaging. But the pained facial expression may also be because he's got some discomfort in his groin. Probably nothing, he thinks.
It's all good.

Jamie Moyer has been in a conversation with his body as long as he can remember. He'd learned to trust it; trust, after all, is the cornerstone of any such intimate relationship. He'd listened to its aches, pains, tweaks and dings, and, most of all, its weariness. When his legs felt like logs, he knew that it was the midseason blahs—and he knew as sure as he knew anything that it was just something to “gut out.” He recognized “dead arm,” that tranquilized feeling in the dog days when his left arm seemed to have had the life drained from it, as something to slog through. Through it all, Moyer had taken comfort in the knowledge that, as he'd often explain, his body clock knew how to recover just enough to get him to his next start.

Now, just days after his triumph over the White Sox, what he'd thought was a minor tweak of the groin has flared up into full-on pain every time he plants to throw. At first he thought it was something he could once again gut out. He'd come to camp with his own supply of anti-inflammatory pills; knowing how sensitive management would be to having a forty-nine-year-old trying to make the roster—rightfully so—he didn't want to ask the trainers for anything and thereby reinforce any doubts the front office might have about his physical state.

But now the pain hasn't subsided, so Moyer makes his way to the trainer's room. In 2009, his season in Philadelphia ended when he required surgery for a torn groin; the speculation is that this latest episode is the inflammation of some scar tissue from that procedure. The team announces that he'll miss his next start and undergo treatment. He'll get a cortisone shot, which will help quiet things. He also calls Liba, and she e-mails him a series of stretching exercises.