Just Tell Me I Can't (23 page)

Now it had been two batters and two breaks that hadn't gone Moyer's way: the strike calls against Scutaro and the seeming double play ball against Pedroia. Moyer took a deep breath, recognizing his negative thoughts, and tried to collect himself. Pitching from the stretch, he looked down at his hands holding the ball at his belt. Something was not right. He was not comfortable. Victor Martinez looked at three straight pitches; on the last of them, Moyer felt himself fading off to the left of the mound on his follow-through, instead of toward home plate. On a 2–1 pitch, Martinez clubbed an 82-mile-per-hour two-seamer off the Green Monster in left, just above the Granite City Supply advertisement.

As slugger David “Big Papi” Ortiz settled into the batter's box, with his .361 lifetime average against Moyer, Moyer noticed a powwow in the Sox dugout. Francona and four or five others were having an animated discussion on the dugout steps. Were they picking up signs? Where they plotting what was beginning to look like a purposeful strategy of not swinging the bat unless they were ahead in the count?

Indeed, Papi looked at the first three pitches. On 2–2, Moyer threw an 82-mile-per-hour two-seamer inside that froze the power hitter; umpire Paul Emmel clenched his fist as if to call a strike, but held back. Papi then ripped the next pitch, a cutter up in the zone, waist high, off the wall in left. The score was 2–0, Sox.

Adrian Beltre, true to form, took the first two pitches, before turning on a good cutter in tight, fighting it off down the leftfield line for yet another double: 3–0. When good pitches get turned into RBI base hits, it's often a sign that you're about to be in for a long night.

The Beltre hit confirmed that it was happening, that rabbit hole feeling, when nothing works and you start replaying all the “what ifs” in your head:
What if those pitches against Scutaro and that one against Big Papi had been called strikes? What if we'd turned that double play?

The next hitter, Mike Lowell, looked at the first three pitches—no shocker there—and got ahead in the count 2–1. The defensive move would be for Moyer to give in and serve up a fastball in order to avoid going 3–1. He'd refuse—just like Francona predicted, and was likely telling his players. Moyer threw a cutter low and in for a strike, followed by a 74-mile-per-hour changeup high in the strike zone. Lowell wasted no time, crushing a two-run homer to left.

Moyer walked off the mound to curse himself:
I'm getting what I deserve. Look where that pitch was. Freakin' batting practice
. At times like this, he'd search the stands for something—anything—outside of himself to focus on. He saw a hot dog vendor. His eyes followed the vendor for about fifteen seconds. Out came pitching coach Rich Dubee.

“Awright, let's refocus here,” Dubee said. “Concentrate on making quality pitches. Let's get an out.”

Billy Hall looked at a called third strike—
They're looking at everything!
—and then a backdoor cutter induced a flyout from the number nine hitter, Darnell McDonald. Nine batters, five runs.

After the Phillies failed to score in their half of the second, the descent continued. The Red Sox stayed patient, the umpire remained stingy, and Moyer's response was to pitch angry, rejecting his own advice.
Don't try and get it all back with one pitch
, he'd tell himself, only to rear back and throw harder—precisely what the Sox hitters were looking for. Back-to-back doubles by Martinez and Big Papi made it 8–0. Moyer hadn't registered a single out in the second inning when Manuel took the ball and mercifully ended the carnage.

Sixty-one pitches. Ultimately nine runs. One inning. In the dugout, Moyer put his red Phillies jacket on and took a long swig of water before staring off into the middle distance. Dubee walked by with an encouraging slap on the knee, Charlie came by with a fatherly tap to the shoulder. Hamels and Blanton sat nearby. Not a word was spoken. They'd all been there and they knew there was nothing to be said.

Early in his career, the days between a performance like the shelling in Boston and Moyer's next start would be interminable. The shame and embarrassment, the feeling of having let down his teammates, the sense that all eyes in the clubhouse were on him because he had
failed
would last until he got the chance to make it right again five days later.

Ever since Seattle, though, Moyer had been able to lick his wounds overnight. As Harvey was fond of pointing out, other people aren't thinking about us quite as much as we think they are. What made Moyer think his teammates weren't as obsessed with their own challenges and failings, instead of fixating on
his
?

That realization helped ease the morning-after transition. The secret to handling such a public flogging is to begin to devise a positive plan forward. So Moyer asked Dubee if he'd noticed anything in his follow-through; he'd felt like he was “landing heavy” toward the first base side, which could explain the heightened elevation of his pitches. Dubee hadn't noticed it, but said they could look at it on tape. But Moyer didn't need to see it—he felt it. Besides, in the past, when he'd gone wrong, that trail-off had been a familiar rut. He'd work on it in his bullpen session.

Meantime, he'd start reviewing his notes on the Yankees. Yes, he was jumping from the frying pan into an all-out grease fire. But instead of shrinking from being on baseball's biggest stage, Moyer welcomed the challenge of pitching in Yankee Stadium. He'd always hated the Yankees. Like Dorfman, he felt Steinbrenner's team was too powerful, too arrogant, and too corporate. Years ago, they were the first team (of course) to have security cameras outside the clubhouse door. Moyer promptly dropped trou and mooned a hallway camera. When he shared the hijinx with Harvey, Dorfman's laughter filled the phone line and morphed into a part laugh, part coughing fit.

Gene Michael, the former Yankees general manager, had once told Moyer that though he was a good pitcher, he didn't have the mental toughness to succeed in New York. The media, the fans, the city itself—they demanded a certain type of personality in their athletes. Like so many other high achievers, Moyer has long fueled off a sense of umbrage, collecting old slights in order to push himself to higher heights. How sweet it always was to win against the Yankees.

In New York, Moyer often took the subway to games. He liked to be a fan, on his way to the ballpark, who just happened to pitch. On June 16, however, he took a cab to the Bronx from Midtown. Karen was flying in, but hadn't landed yet; in Boston, while her husband was getting beat up on the mound, her father had been undergoing prostate surgery. Now Digger was officially cancer-free and Jamie had a chance to erase the memory of the Boston massacre.

Moyer, meantime, wanted to be alone with his thoughts. For the first time since coming to Philly, his team was playing without fire. Was it that Jimmy was out? He didn't know, but he knew the night's big challenge was to somehow recapture the passion that had driven his team to the last two Fall Classics. Last night, they'd lost behind Halladay. In Seattle, and two years ago in Philly, Moyer had been the guy who took it upon himself to put an end to his team's slide. Could he be that guy tonight?

In their pregame meeting, Dubee conceded what Moyer had been feeling. “Look, I don't know why, but we're playing like crap,” the pitching coach said. “But you can't let that get to you—”

“Don't you worry,” Moyer snapped. “It won't. We're turning this damn thing around tonight.” On his walk to the bullpen, he felt the anger coursing through his body: he was tired of the sluggish feeling, both in the dugout and on the field.
if you can control this feeling, this might be good. Let's be fed up. It might give us a little edge.

When the game began, Moyer could sense the eagerness of the Yankees hitters. Many of them had long feasted on him: his old friend A-Rod averaged .389 with six homers against him; Jeter, .324; Jorge Posada, .333; Mark Teixeira, .306.

It's all good. Use their aggression
. Jeter helped matters in the bottom of the first, grounding out to Utley on the first pitch, a fastball. Next up came Nick Swisher, who got ahead in the count 3–1. Rather than give in, Moyer placed an 81-mile-per-hour two-seamer on the outside corner that Swisher hit to centerfield for an out. Teixeira was next and Moyer could see his handwritten notes in his mind's eye:
Get in on him, make him speed up bat speed
. He opened with a fastball for a strike on the inside corner. Then came a cutter, down and in, the same pitch Beltre had golfed for a double in Boston. This time, Teixeira grounded it foul. After a high fastball came three straight inside pitches: two cutters and one two-seamer. Teixeira kept fouling them off, wondering, no doubt, when the deviation would come. That would be the next pitch: a backdoor cutter on the outside corner that froze Teixeira for strike three. Thirteen pitches, three outs.

In the dugout, Moyer uncharacteristically paced up and down, exhorting his teammates. “Let's go, no letup,” he yelled. “Let's go, let's go!”

Ryan Howard and Jayson Werth homered for the Phils. Yankees starter A. J. Burnett labored just as hard as Moyer had in his last start, and the Phils built a 6–1 lead after three. And Moyer just continued to coast on the mound, while not letting up on his teammates in the dugout.

His tempo was quicker, his delivery quick and easy. He finished up square to home plate, ready to field a comebacker after each pitch, instead of falling off to the side after each release. The Yankees tried to do what the Sox had done—keep from swinging, wait him out—but Jamie kept the ball on the black and, critically, got those calls from the umpire. And he did the unexpected. The Yankees were sitting on his changeup, but that was the old Jamie Moyer. In this game, of 107 pitches, he would throw only two changeups and two curveballs. The rest were all two-seamers, straight fastballs, and—especially—cutters.

In the sixth, he got Jeter to again weakly offer at a first-pitch two-seamer away, lining out, before setting up Nick Swisher with a succession of cutters in on his hands, inducing foul ball after foul ball. Just when Swisher was looking for another pitch in tight, Moyer dropped yet another cutter on the outside corner for a called third strike. Before a packed crowd that included aging rock duo Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, Moyer lasted eight innings, giving up just two runs and earning an improbable win.

Afterward, the New York media crowded around him—the same crew Gene Michael years ago said he wouldn't be able to handle. “I don't think that I'm old,” he said simply, when asked for the secret to his unlikely success.

He'd continue his winning ways. Five days later, he'd go another eight innings against Cleveland, giving up one earned run. Five days after that, Toronto fell under his spell: seven innings, two runs. His only mistake was a two-run home run by Vernon Wells in the third inning, which made for some dubious history: it was the 506th home run allowed by Moyer, eclipsing the major league record held since 1957 by Phillies ace Robin Roberts.

Moyer didn't look at the new record as anything to be ashamed of; it was simply a testament to his longevity and resiliency. Had there ever been a pitcher better at taking punches? Karen promptly commissioned the printing of T-shirts that listed, on the front, the twenty-five players who had hit 500 or more home runs. On the back, it read, “But There's Only Two Who Have Given Up 500 Home Runs Or More: Robin Roberts (505) And Jamie Moyer (506 And Counting…).”

After the game, Moyer wouldn't be dragged into a discussion about the home run record. “I have a desire to be here, and I won't allow myself to get caught up in all the things that come with it,” he said. He'd learned to avoid anything that took his focus away “from playing with these guys in this room.” But there was a hint of the internal drive fueling his season thus far: “I really have to stay focused because whether it's the media, the coaching staff, the front office, if I have a bad game, they say, ‘Well, you're too old, you're not going to do it.'”

It was the end of June and Moyer was now 9–6—among the National League leaders in wins—with a 4.30 ERA.

Some pundits called him the Phillies' ace—preposterous on a team with Halladay and Hamels—and the
Philadelphia Daily News
asked, is “Cooperstown now on his itinerary?” The story, by Ed Barkowitz, pointed out that he'd passed Hall of Famers Bob Gibson and Bob Feller in career wins. “Moyer is on pace to register the most wins he's had in a season since winning 21 as a spry 40-year-old with the Mariners in 2003,” Barkowitz wrote.

But what Barkowitz didn't know was that Moyer was starting to feel a weird sensation in his elbow. He figured it was nothing, just some midseason dead-arm to work through. It felt like there was a rubber band in his arm, pulling and stretching. He took anti-inflammatories, but it continued to bother him through his next three starts, all losses. If anything, his elbow was getting worse.

Then came that fateful July night in St. Louis when it felt like something had snapped. And the taut words to Cholly in the dugout: “I can't throw.” And the trip to California to see Dr. Jobe, while Ruben was prematurely telling the media the Moyer career was over. And the trip to the Dominican, to pitch for Moises Alou, only to have the flexor pronator and ulnar collateral ligament come clean off the bone.

Certainly, this was it. The end of a singular, improbable, thrilling career.

Wasn't it?

W
ell, that's not how I would've scripted this
, Jamie Moyer thinks to himself as his 78-mile-per-hour fastball rockets off the bat of Jordan Schafer, the Houston Astros' centerfielder and leadoff hitter. Moyer doesn't even need to turn and follow the flight of the ball into deep rightfield. He knows. Welcome back to the majors.

First batter, 512th home run allowed, adding to the Moyer long ball record. Somehow appropriate. He gets the ball back from his catcher and walks behind the mound, bending down to squeeze the resin bag. He is wearing the stirrup socks that were all the rage when he was a fresh-faced rookie; now, with ash-colored stubble dotting his chin and wisps of gray peeking out from under his cap, the vision of Moyer on the mound in 2012 has a distinct Movietone feel to it.

The next batter, Brian Bixler, walks on a full count. Uh-oh. Much had been made of Moyer's pursuit of history tonight: he is trying to become the oldest pitcher in history to win a game, and he is doing it against the youngest team in the league. Karen, the kids, Mom, Dad, Jill, and Digger and his fiancée, Linda, are all in the stands. Getting roughed up in the first inning would make for a pretty anticlimactic first start.

But three pitches later, Moyer is walking off the mound relatively unscathed, having once again avoided deep damage. He gets J. D. Martinez to hit into a double play, and then slugger Carlos Lee grounds back to him for an easy out. He then retires the next six Astros he faces, two of them strikeouts.

In the fourth, in what would become a pattern, the Rockies' defense falters. Bixler hits a ground ball to third baseman Chris Nelson, who had been given the starting job at third base because of his superior glove; he promptly throws the ball well wide of first, and second baseman Marco Scutaro, trying to overcompensate for his teammate's gaffe, recovers the ball and mimics the play, throwing wildly to second. “They look like a damned Little League team!” Digger fumes in the stands.

Martinez follows by clubbing a home run to leftfield on a 1–1 changeup that Moyer leaves up in the zone. The inning ends with the Astros ahead 3–0, but not before another Scutaro error.

In the fifth, Houston manufactures a run after Marwin Gonzalez tags Moyer with a double in the left-center gap. Pitcher Lucas Harrell, trying to sacrifice, bunts his way on, and then Bixler legs out an infield grounder to Tulowitzki at short. Meantime, the Rockies can't touch Harrell, who would stymie them over seven innings. Moyer, lifted for a pinch hitter with a line of five innings, five hits, and three earned runs, takes the loss.

But he felt strong and had pitched competitively. After the game, manager Jim Tracy offers a ringing endorsement. “We're going ahead with Jamie,” he says. “He gave us a competitive effort. Hopefully next time we'll get him some run support.”

After he talks to the media and showers, Moyer emerges from the visiting team's clubhouse and his kids—the little ones—come running to him. They all pile into the Moyer-mobile, a van Karen rented to transport the crew from the hotel to the ballpark all weekend.

It's never quiet in the van—Hutton wants to talk about the game, Grady and Mac are bickering like an old married couple, and Duffy is making sure that Yeni and Kati don't squirm out of their car seats. Nonetheless, Moyer has a moment of reflection. “It felt right to be out there,” he says. “Comfortable. Like it's where I'm supposed to be.” History, though, would have to wait.

He hasn't even broken the record yet, but already Jamie Moyer is tired of answering questions about his age. It seems like every possible cliché has been exhausted.
How many ways can you find to write that someone is old?

Behind the superficial story of Moyer's quest, though,
is
a fascinating one—but it's not solely about Moyer. It's more about the ghost that he's chasing.

On September 13, 1932, at forty-nine years and seventy days old, Jack Quinn pitched five innings and beat the St. Louis Cardinals, making him 3–6 with a 3.16 ERA and the oldest pitcher in history to win a game. Quinn was the last of the spitballers; when the trick pitch was banned in 1920, he and a handful of other pitchers were grandfathered in and allowed to keep throwing it.

To the Moyers, who would often comment on the role the mystical hand of fate has played in their unlikely journey, that Moyer was chasing Quinn had to be more than mere coincidence. Though salient facts about Quinn are still shrouded in mystery, like his real age and ethnicity, what is known is that he was the Jamie Moyer of his time.

Like Moyer, Quinn had played for eight teams. Like Moyer, he flummoxed batters with deft touch, movement, and trickery. Like Moyer, Quinn hailed from working-class Pennsylvania, having been born in Hazelton, just seventy miles from Moyer's Souderton.

Most of all, like Moyer, Quinn succeeded early because of physical gifts, and later thanks to mental ones. His career was launched, in storybook fashion, while he was watching a semipro game. A foul ball came his way in the stands and he threw it back to the catcher, the ball hitting squarely in the catcher's glove with a thud. The manager signed him to a contract on the spot, or so the story goes.

But, like Moyer, Quinn learned that early success offered no guarantee for the future, and that how he approached the game could be the tool that would set him apart from other pitchers.

“Nothing bothers me,” Quinn once said. “Why should it? The undertaker will get us all soon enough. There's no need to meet him more than halfway. A lot of pitchers worry themselves out of the game. They cut their span of successful work by whole seasons. What a foolish thing to do! Pitching, with me, is a serious profession. I realize its importance and I like to pitch. Above all, I want to feel I can do good work.”

Sound familiar? When he hears Quinn's long-ago quote, Moyer's eyes widen. “That's pretty cool,” he says. Only the San Francisco Giants stand in the way of Moyer's rendezvous with Mr. Quinn and the record book.

As he takes his warm-up pitches in the top of the sixth inning, Moyer is reminded of something he felt just a few hours earlier: winded. It was his first experience with the thin Colorado air. Prior to game time, he had placed his glove on the warning track and proceeded to do his customary ten wind sprints. Only this time, afterward, he couldn't catch his breath. Even in the bullpen, minutes later, he was emitting small gasps, trying to get his equilibrium back.

Now it is 93 pitches later and he is starting to tire. He has kept the Giants off balance all night. The Rockies trail 2–0, but neither run came by way of hard-hit balls. One came with two outs in the fourth, a soft, seeing-eye grounder up the middle by Melky Cabrera. The other was a third inning pop fly to short center that dropped in for a single.

Otherwise, Moyer had battled Giants starter Madison Bumgarner in a pitching duel that—here's that age thing again—had the press box buzzing, given that the difference between the starters was the third largest since 1900: twenty-six years, 256 days.

On a 1–1 fastball to open the sixth, Ryan Theriot hits a routine fly ball to centerfielder Dexter Fowler, so routine that Moyer doesn't even follow its path. He's on to the next task at hand. Moyer has his back turned to the play when he hears the collective groan rise up from the crowd. He looks up to see Fowler chasing the ball, which had bounded clean out of his glove—the type of error you rarely see a major league outfielder commit.

Fowler, like so many of the game's new breed, had sought to make a one-handed catch of the ball. Through the years, still unable to shed Jim Moyer's teachings, Moyer had taken to calling out, “Two hands!” on routine pop-ups and fly balls. His teammates would rib him; didn't he know they were professionals? If only he'd thought to yell out his dad's catchphrase tonight.

Now, with Theriot on second, Moyer rests his hands on his knees. He knows he's starting to tire and he knows that getting out of the inning was just made more difficult by Fowler's miscue. This is his eleventh inning so far this season and his team has scored zero runs and just committed its fifth error behind him, but he doesn't think of that. He thinks of Brandon Crawford, whom he fools with a 67-mile-per-hour curveball for a weak ground ball back to the mound. He follows that with a strikeout of Bumgarner.

With a 2–2 count on Angel Pagan, Moyer is one pitch away from getting out of the sixth and erasing Fowler's mistake. But this is why baseball can be so tantalizingly heartbreaking. He's now thrown 110 pitches. A two-seamer gets too much of the plate. Pagan lines it to leftfield for an RBI. Cabrera follows with a double to right, the RBI Moyer would later be reminded of when it comes to light that Cabrera has tested positive for testosterone. Moyer's night is over. Five and two-thirds innings, four runs, only two earned.

After the game, Tracy fixates on the errors. “Jamie did a tremendous job,” he says. “Unfortunately, we had a bad miss in the sixth inning that would have been a clean inning. Cost us two runs and ends up being the difference in the game.…Asking Jamie Moyer to get four outs in an inning, or any of our starting pitching, it's going to cost you. It always does.”

In the clubhouse, Fowler, an always smiling, easygoing presence, tentatively walks up to Moyer. Moyer knows stuff happens. After all, how many times had he given up walk-off homers, after all? The question is what you do with it. Does failure make you tougher, meaner, and more determined?

“I'm really sorry,” Fowler says. “You pitched a great game—”

Moyer cuts him off. “Forget it,” he says. “You'll catch the next one.”

There are many reasons why Jamie Moyer has carried on a lifetime love affair with baseball, but the game's essential mystery may be chief among them. For over forty years, this most cerebral man has tried to master the game—sometimes succeeding—only to find more unanswerable questions following every answer. “It's unbelievable how much you don't know about the game you've been playing all your life,” Mickey Mantle wrote in
The Quality of Courage
. For Moyer, baseball was like a lifelong puzzle that you could come close to finishing, but never quite.

In baseball, Moyer knows, there are answers he'll never know—no matter how hard sabermetricians and coaches and talking heads look for clues. Why does the Rockies' defense, in the words of
Denver Post
beat writer Troy Renck, seem “spooked” playing behind Moyer, committing five errors in his 11 innings? Why has normally sure-handed shortstop Troy Tulowitzki suddenly turned into an error machine?

Then there are the game's maddening matchups. Why did Moyer for so many years own the Yankees' Scott Brosius? When Brosius was at bat, Moyer had the feeling he could do anything he wanted. He could jam him inside at will, and when he needed to get him out, he'd throw soft away and watch Brosius slog his way back to the dugout. And why, in turn, did Brosius's teammate, Bernie Williams, drive every pitch Moyer threw at him off the fat part of the bat, no matter its speed or location?

Sometimes the answers are plain to see. Barry Bonds hit all five of his career homers off Moyer by 1991. Once Moyer started pitching Bonds inside, he let each at-bat play off against Bonds's jam point. He'd establish the jam point and attack it, pitch after pitch, making Bonds a tad bit slower in getting his arms fully extended once Moyer came back with something across the plate.

But often the reasons behind what happened on the field were more elusive. No matter what he tried against Manny Ramirez or Carlos Delgado—the players who had hit the most home runs off him with ten and eight respectively—it didn't seem to work: they had his number. He'd prepare as usual—going over the notes from their past battles, searching for a pattern that held the key to success. He'd pay attention to each at-bat, to what their body language was saying to him. But they'd still get their cuts. They just saw the ball out of his hand better than most. Sometimes you just had to throw the ball and hope your defense could make a play behind you.

Moyer was reminded of just how often the laws of mystery applied to baseball when he was preparing for his April 17 start against San Diego, in what would be his third attempt to overtake Jack Quinn. He noticed that Mark Kotsay would be in leftfield and batting second.

In their pregame meeting, Moyer told catcher Wilin Rosario to not even bother discussing Kotsay. “Let's throw out how I've always approached him,” he said, “'cause nothing's ever worked.”

Kotsay was 19 for 33 lifetime against Moyer, a .576 average. The two hadn't faced each other since 2006, when Kotsay was in Oakland and Moyer Seattle. But they'd seen each other through the years—Karen is friendly with Mark's wife, also named Jamie—and when they'd all get together, Moyer would never hesitate to joke about Kotsay's success against him; maybe if he got him
thinking
about it, the magic would wear off.

But on this night, it didn't appear to be happening anytime soon. In the first inning against the 3–9 Padres, Kotsay singled to right on a 2–1 two-seamer that stayed low in the zone. Credit to Kotsay: he just went down and got it. He was shortly thereafter erased on the base paths, as Moyer cruised through the first two innings.

Now, in the third, Moyer decides he's got to do something—anything—to disrupt Kotsay's mental rhythm against him. His nemesis comes up with a man on first and one out. Moyer looks in for the sign from Rosario, but steps off the rubber.

“Hey!” he calls out to Kotsay. “Today's tax day. You declaring me on your taxes?”

Kotsay throws his head back in laughter, and even umpire Joe West chuckles. Moyer has again broken down the fourth wall, much like he did years ago with Justice and—as depicted in
Moneyball
—with Hatteberg, asking both batters to name their pitch. As Harvey used to say, “Self-consciousness will screw you up.” By speaking directly to the batter, Moyer hopes to jolt awake Kotsay's sense of self-consciousness, by imposing his voice and presence into the comfortable zone Kotsay has established against him.