Just Tell Me I Can't (2 page)

Jamie was now coming around to the thought of a different kind of sports book. One that told the story of his forthcoming comeback attempt, but that also, in alternating chapters, flashed back to moments of critical challenge throughout his long career: in short, a chronicle of his continuing education. Turns out, he wasn't done learning. A few months after our first meeting came arm surgery, followed by exhaustive rehab. That was followed by one of the most audacious comebacks in sports history—a forty-nine-year-old pitcher with a rebuilt arm making one last stand on the mound. This is the story of that comeback, but of many others as well.

It's the story of what it takes to come back, time and again, in the pressure cooker of professional sports, when you find yourself a punch line on
SportsCenter
or dismissed time and again by the purveyors of conventional wisdom. Is there more of an Everyman on the sporting scene than Moyer? When he's on the mound, he looks like us; all sweat and struggle, graying hair at the temples, lines creasing his face; in the last couple of years, he has found himself middle-aged, with his two eldest children off to college, while he defiantly stares down a potential forced retirement. That temerity has long characterized Moyer. If he had listened to others—high school coaches, pro scouts, major league managers, his own relatives, sabermetrician devotees—he would have been out of baseball years ago.

It's also the story of the ultimate battle that all athletes wage—the one against the calendar. In recent years, we've seen Michael Jordan, Brett Favre, and Roger Clemens all fight the clock; all were, if not tarnished in the attempt, certainly diminished. We may have admired their effort to reclaim past glory, but when Jordan missed that dunk in the 2003 NBA All-Star Game or when Favre limped off the field after that last flurry of interceptions, we were saddened by the spectacle. Moyer, on the other hand, is arguably the first star athlete who actually kept getting
better
deep into his forties. Hall of Fame pitcher and three-time Cy Young winner Tom Seaver, for example, posted a 66–64 record between the ages of thirty-seven and forty-one. At the same ages, Moyer was 74–44, including two 20-win seasons, at thirty-eight and forty. Between the ages of forty-four and forty-seven, Moyer's record was 51–38.

Of course, the Seaver trajectory is the norm. The careers of great athletes tend to be contracted versions of the typical life span. Major league pitchers peak at twenty-seven; most are out of baseball by their midthirties. Moyer's Seattle teammate Ken Griffey Jr. played until he was forty, but his peak power years were from ages twenty-six to twenty-nine. Even a legend like Joe DiMaggio, who retired at thirty-six, had his best year at twenty-two. Dwight Gooden pitched until he was thirty-five, but never came close to the season he had at twenty. Moyer, though, has defied the script. His Inner Warrior has spent the last decade giving the middle finger to mortality.

But this is also the story of what pitching
is
—the mystery and mastery of it, as seen through the eyes of its most cerebral, seeking student. It's a story deep inside the ever-elusive mental side of sports, in today's Moneyball-dominated culture of spreadsheets and analytics. And most of all, it's the story of two men, professional sports' ultimate odd couple, the unlikely All-Star pitcher with his 80-mile-per-hour fastball, and the unlikely psychologist with his in-your-face observations (“
I know your act, kid!
”) and absence of sentiment.

A
s it was for many ballplayers, the idea of seeing a psychologist—a shrink!—was total anathema to Jamie Moyer. But there he was, on a crisp, sunny day, wandering the baggage claim area of Phoenix's Sky Harbor International Airport, looking for his last and best hope at salvaging the only career he'd ever wanted. He was twenty-nine years old, with a wife and infant son at home, and he was without a baseball team for the first time since he was eight years old.

Back then, Moyer would tell whoever would barely listen that he was going to be a major league pitcher. There were plenty of doubters, even as he dominated in high school and college. But he'd made it to the Show, using the naysaying as psychic fuel along the way. But when the call came from Tom Grieve, general manager of the Texas Rangers, on November 12, 1990, how Moyer had always defined himself was suddenly no longer applicable. With six terse words—“We don't see you helping us”—Jamie Moyer became a former big leaguer. And one with a desultory 34–49 career record.

Rock, meet bottom.

So Moyer thought,
What do I have to lose?
before flying to Arizona to meet someone his agent, Jim Bronner, thought could be of help. As Karen said before sending Jamie on his way, “Treat this as a learning experience.”

He was here to meet Harvey Dorfman, who was arriving on another flight. Together they would drive to Dorfman's home in Prescott, Arizona, about ninety miles away, for a weekend of sessions that…what? Would have him unearth long-dormant resentments about his mother while he was lying on a couch?

In truth, Moyer had read and been intrigued by Dorfman's classic book
The Mental Game of Baseball: A Guide to Peak Performance
, and he'd heard good things about Dorfman from players in the Oakland organization, where Dorfman was on staff and in the process of revolutionizing the subterranean world of sports psychology. But Moyer had grown up in the tiny blue-collar hamlet of Souderton, Pennsylvania, not exactly a New Age zip code.

Plus they weren't a particularly emotive bunch, the Moyers. They expressed themselves through a shared love of baseball. Neighbors would pass the nearby ball field and see those baseball-crazy Moyers—mom Joan, sis Jill, and Jamie all in the outfield, shagging dad Jim's fly balls. Jim, a former minor league shortstop, served as Jamie's coach throughout American Legion ball. Souderton, a working-class suburban town of some 6,000 residents an hour outside Philadelphia, was where Moyer's baseball education took hold—as well as his values. His early baseball journey was nurtured by an entire town that seemed to jump right out of some idealized version of America's past; the same folks who cheered on his three no-hitters his junior year of high school populated Friday night's football games
and
prayed together at church on Sunday. He'd gone from that atavistic world into the macho realm of the professional baseball clubhouse, where introspection is traditionally looked upon with suspicion.

“Hi, I'm Harvey Dorfman,” a waddling, croaky-voiced fiftysomething said, approaching with outstretched hand. Dorfman didn't look like an athlete, with his hunched shoulders, gimpy gait, and baggy sweatshirt, but Moyer knew that during the season he was in the dugout in an Oakland A's uniform. And anyone—even a shrink—who wore the uniform deserved the benefit of the doubt.

On the awkward ride to Dorfman's house, the two men made small talk. Dorfman asked open-ended questions about Moyer's upbringing and his history in the game, and soon Moyer was unburdening himself:

“I can't throw my curveball for strikes.”

Dorfman said nothing.

“I got to the major leagues because of my changeup, but I just show it now. I don't throw it for strikes.”

Dorfman said nothing.

“When I'm on the mound, I can't stop thinking about being pulled. Or released.”

Dorfman said nothing. He simply smiled.

Isn't this guy going to tell me what to do?
Moyer wondered.

A few months before Moyer's pilgrimage to Prescott,
Saturday Night Live
broadcast an uproarious skit featuring guest host Michael Jordan. Called “Daily Affirmations with Stuart Smalley,” it was a classic send-up of what happens at the intersection of self-help culture and jockdom. Al Franken played Smalley, a cable TV host described as a “caring nurturer” and “member of several twelve-step programs,” who was looking to provide gentle encouragement to “Michael J.,” an anonymous basketball player.

Jordan is coaxed into admitting that sometimes before big games he gets nervous. Smalley tells Jordan to look in the mirror and quell those “critical inner thoughts” by reciting his daily affirmation: “I don't have to dribble the ball fast, or throw the ball into the basket. All I have to do is be the best Michael I can be. Because I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!” The skit ends with a hug between the best athlete in the world and this comical, cliché-ridden would-be therapist.

Harvey Dorfman was the real-world anti–Stuart Smalley. He knew that the calm, nurturing counselor, with that soothing NPR voice, was a total nonstarter in sports. Unlike other sports psychologists, he knew he had to have a macho persona in order to break through to the modern-day athlete. Even though Dorfman was a bibliophile who could deconstruct the novels of Somerset Maugham in great detail, ballplayers just knew him as a foulmouthed taskmaster. “I don't care about your
feelings
,” Dorfman would tell them. “I care about what you
do
.”

The character of
SNL
's Stuart Smalley was everything Dorfman disdained about those in his own profession: too precious, too solicitous. But the skit did nail the crisis in confidence world-class athletes inevitably face. Dorfman had had a procession of major league ballplayers walk through the door to his study over the years, all doing battle with their internal demons, all—no matter the runs batted in or hitters fanned—feeling like, as Smalley would say, imposters. Dorfman knew, of course, that they weren't imposters—just works in progress. But try telling that to an athletic prodigy who, through achingly dull repetition, is raised to train his muscle memory so that the physical act becomes something done by rote. Without fail, ballplayers—and for that matter the wider, retro world of baseball—had never contemplated the possibility that the same type of discipline might be needed to train the mind, so its overactive chatter could get the hell out of the muscles' way. Dorfman adopted an in-your-face persona, more tough-love coach than shrink, designed to jump-start his clients into awareness and action. As he'd tell them, “Muscles are morons. Self-consciousness will screw you up.”

Not exactly Freudian wisdom. But then Dorfman wasn't even a shrink. No, he'd been a high school English teacher and basketball coach at Burr and Burton Academy in Manchester, Vermont, where he coached the girls' team to a state title. He was equal parts jock and man of letters, as likely to quote Shakespeare as to dissect the virtues of the two-hand chest pass. He contributed columns to the local paper, slice-of-life profiles of local characters. A baseball column he penned for the
Berkshire Sampler
led him to profile minor leaguers on the Pittsfield Rangers, a Double A farm team of the Texas Rangers. He and top draft pick Roy Smalley sat for hours, sharing psychological insights. Smalley, who had attended the University of Southern California, recommended the book
Psycho-Cybernetics
, by Maxwell Maltz. When Dorfman indicated he'd already read and liked the book, Smalley knew he'd found a kindred spirit.

Once he made the Show, Smalley introduced Dorfman to Karl Kuehl, a coach with the Minnesota Twins. Kuehl, who passed away in 2008, had noticed that players excelled when they were able to simply stay in the moment and set aside their doubts and fears. Dorfman partnered with Kuehl in researching the mental side of the game, and the two began working on a book that would become the bible of sports psychology.
The Mental Game of Baseball
was published in 1989, and dog-eared copies fast became a staple in baseball clubhouses throughout the major and minor leagues.

When Kuehl became the Oakland A's farm director in 1983, he persuaded general manager Sandy Alderson to hire Dorfman. Alderson, as documented by Michael Lewis in
Moneyball
, would later take on the baseball establishment by playing a critical role in the embryonic stages of the sabermetric revolution. A former Marine and Harvard Law grad, Alderson didn't come up through the baseball ranks and was wired to challenge the game's conventional wisdom. Putting Dorfman in uniform, placing him in the dugout, and making him responsible for, as Harvey put it, everything above the shoulders on every player was a move ahead of its time.

The same could be said of Dorfman's theories. In the last decade, the science of the mental side of sports has become a popular topic among the intelligentsia. In 2000, the
New Yorker
's Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article entitled “The Art of Failure.” In it, he defines “choking”—the worst kind of athletic failure—as the opposite of panic. He might as well have been quoting Dorfman from the 1980s. “Choking is about thinking too much,” Gladwell writes. “Panic is about thinking too little.” In 2012, writer Jonah Lehrer cited in
Neuron
a study by a team of researchers at Caltech and University College London, in which escalating monetary rewards were offered to players of a simple arcade game. As the stakes got higher, player performance significantly worsened.

Intellectuals like Gladwell and Lehrer buttressed their writings with reports from the front lines of neuroscience research, which had become all the rage, but their findings echoed Dorfman from the '80s. Only Dorfman didn't need to don a white coat in order to discover the degree to which self-consciousness altered athletic outcome. His laboratory was Major League Baseball itself, and after Alderson gave him the opportunity, the ensuing years found him developing his unique approach and putting his theories into practice.

There was, for example, the mano a mano with Jose Canseco in the minors, after the phenom failed to run out a grounder. There Dorfman was, right in the slugger's face after Canseco nonchalantly shrugged off his lack of hustle by chalking it up to “normal” frustration.

“
Normal?
” Dorfman shrieked. “You want to be
normal
? You're an elite athlete. You're already exceptional—and that's what you should want for yourself. To be extraordinary, not ordinary.”

Canseco, backing down, asked how he should have handled his emotions. “Just train yourself by saying, ‘Hit the ball, run. Hit the ball, run. Hit the ball, run,'” Dorfman explained. “It'll become an acquired instinct. It doesn't matter how you
feel
during combat; you fight.”

Just a year and a half prior to Moyer's visit, Dorfman had been instrumental in settling down A's pitcher Bob Welch. Welch, a recovering alcoholic, had always been a jumble of nerves, fidgeting on the mound to the point of distraction, especially when the pressure mounted. “You can make coffee nervous,” Dorfman told him. Welch would become frenetic on the mound, in a rush to get the ball back from his catcher. Dorfman and catcher Terry Steinbach conspired together. When Welch would walk to the front of the mound, waving his glove in order to get the ball returned—
now!
—Steinbach wouldn't throw it. That, Dorfman told his pupil pitcher, would trigger the signal in Welch's mind to take a deep breath, exhaling slowly, bringing himself down.

To the ballplayers, Dorfman was as in-your-face as the other coaches, it's just that he provided practical
mental
tips. Welch joked, “If you told Harvey you just killed somebody, he'd say, ‘What are you going to do about that?'”

Dorfman's emphasis on practical tactics was an actual psychological school of thought he was the first to apply to baseball: semantitherapy. Freudians, Dorfman believed, in their search for the long-dormant cause of a patient's fear or neurosis, forgot to treat the manifestation of those fears. Perhaps the root of a fear of flying
is
in a patient's childhood in the form of a long-ago traumatic experience. But just as real are the current-day sweaty palms and heart palpitations as the plane readies for takeoff. In baseball, Dorfman realized, if you conquer the symptoms, you kill the disease.

Now this kid Moyer presented with some familiar indications. Fear, doubt, lack of confidence, distracting thoughts. For the better part of three days, Dorfman would give the kid the full treatment. He and Anita, Dorfman's wife of thirty-one years, a schoolteacher who'd grown used to and welcomed these visits from shy, awkward athletes, lived in a house at the top of a hill on a secluded cul-de-sac. He and Moyer would do multiple two-hour sessions in Dorfman's study each day, go for long walks in the Arizona hills, and have breakfasts of oatmeal and bagels with Anita. Dorfman didn't usually work with players who weren't in the A's system, but this was a favor to Moyer's agent, Jim Bronner. The kid was nearly thirty and had a losing record. There was a lot of work to be done.

At least there's no couch
, Moyer thought, entering Dorfman's study. Dorfman settled in behind a big oak desk, in front of a bookcase that housed many of the inspirational quotes and anecdotes that Dorfman would pepper his life lessons with. Moyer would hear those gems over the next twenty-odd years; they'd seep into his consciousness much like Harvey himself, everything from Cromwell's “The man who doesn't know where he's going goes the fastest” to Marcus Aurelius's “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”