Just Tell Me I Can't (26 page)

“That wasn't the agreement,” Moyer tells his agent. The Tides have already left for Toledo; Moyer has been holed up in his Norfolk hotel room, waiting for a call-up that isn't on its way. He's feeling disrespected, used: he's an insurance policy, while Duquette—who wasn't exactly straight with him some seventeen years ago in Boston—tries to map his next move, thinking he can buy time by asking for another start.

Moyer loves the minor league experience because of the purity of the game on the field, but he's getting too old for the cynical machinations that too often define the game in its front offices. “I'm forty-nine years old and I'm waiting by a phone in a hotel room like a rookie,” he tells Karen, who is in Philly for a Moyer Foundation charity event. He could stay and putter around his hotel room, or he could tell Bronner to tell the Orioles to stuff it, rent a car, and be in Philly in six hours—in time to make a different kind of pitch, an exhortation to donate to the cause of helping kids in distress. In other words, he can either be played with or do something good for his soul.

“I'm free!” he texts a friend as he makes his escape from Norfolk. The next day, the story moves across the wire: Jamie Moyer Requests Release from Baltimore Orioles.

By that night, the Blue Jays have called. Two starts for the Triple A Las Vegas 51s await.

Maybe knowing that the curtain is coming down on him is making Moyer feel overly nostalgic, but shortly after walking into the 51s' clubhouse he feels transported back in time once again to a simpler baseball era. He'd grown weary of the big league post-camaraderie atmosphere; those Mariner teams more than a decade ago were the last to feature teammates who worked
and
socialized together. In his last years in Philly, he'd have dinner on the road with the announcers or the team's video coordinator, because the players tended to go their own separate ways. (And when they did get together, they went out to clubs—not exactly Moyer's speed.) By then, the game had become a business, and teammates whom you used to live, argue, drink, and form lifelong bonds with had become merely colleagues and passing acquaintances.

But when Moyer meets up with the 51s in Tacoma, Washington, where he'd be making his first start in the Seattle area since he'd left the Mariners six years prior, he finds a group of young guys who pull for each other even though they know they are competing against one another for a shot at that big career break. They eat together, they come to the ballpark together, they work out together, they play cards together, and they wile away the hours before a game by watching movies together in the clubhouse.

It takes Moyer back to his earlier minor league days, in small towns like Geneva, New York; Pittsfield, Massachusetts; and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he and his teammates would live, two or three to an apartment, where they'd pile into his light blue Pinto station wagon to get to the ballpark, where they'd eat at IHOP, often running into other teammates—because they all shared the same moment in time. They'd corral a booth and drink coffee, refill after refill, while reliving at-bats and cursing out managers and commenting on girls in the stands, until it was time to go to bed so they could do the same damn thing tomorrow.

As at Norfolk, these kids ask questions of this oldster in their midst, looking at his concentration cards like maybe they hold the all too elusive secret, mining his memory for tales about the game's greats. (When Moyer regales a couple of young pitchers about how Bonds had owned him until he got over his fear of coming inside to the slugger, he could see a few faint light switches turn on.) One night, he goes to a nearby sports bar for a burger, where he runs into two teammates, a couple of pitchers from Texas. They invite him to join them, and they all watch a game on the big screen while Moyer tries his best not to remind them of their fathers.

Moyer's first start for Vegas contains a dramatic Mariners past-versus-future story line. He is facing off against pitcher Danny Hultzen, who is twenty-seven years his junior and Seattle's much-heralded top draft choice in 2011. Hultzen had posted a 1.19 Double A ERA and had just been promoted to Triple A, where he had five days earlier been shelled in his first start.

He is no stranger to Moyer. In 2010, Dillon's Cal-Irvine team faced Hultzen, the University of Virginia ace, in the NCAA baseball tournament. Moyer was impressed by Hultzen's arm—the kid could touch 96 miles per hour—but felt his secondary pitches needed some work, which Moyer had volunteered on an ESPN broadcast of the game.

Before the game, as Moyer begins to make his way down the leftfield line from the bullpen to the dugout before the singing of the national anthem, he becomes aware of a stirring in the stands. It starts with some applause in leftfield and it begins to build in intensity; by the time Jamie reaches third base and looks up, over 7,000 fans are standing and cheering for him, one bearing a sign that reads, simply, “Thank You.” He wants to stop and take it all in, but he refrains from breaking stride. Instead, he tips his cap to the crowd and the cheers grow louder.
I wasn't expecting this
, he thinks, feeling the emotions well up.

Moyer starts shakily—could it be due to the unexpected ovation? He gives up a mammoth home run in the first and another in the second. He surrenders three early runs but once again rescues victory from seeming failure, holding Tacoma scoreless thereafter through five, at one point setting down eight in a row, good enough for the win.

“That was awesome to watch and really cool,” Hultzen, who had trouble with his command, says after taking the loss. “Not only to get to play against him, but against a guy you looked up to growing up.”

If the end was near, at least he'd gotten to feel the love of the Seattle fans, and to play for them one last time.

Five nights later, Moyer is cruising, holding Reno scoreless through four innings and leading 3–0. But then Moyer's old nemesis—the fifth inning—decides to make one final appearance. A fly ball to shallow center that should be caught drops among a trio of timid fielders. A potential double-play ball becomes a fielder's choice. Meantime, pitches that worked the low part of the strike zone in earlier innings are suddenly belt high. A double is followed by a homer and Reno leads, 4–3.

It's more of the same in the sixth. Reno starts to pick up Moyer's rhythm. Pitches that hitters were out in front of earlier are now struck on the meat of the bat. Moyer, trying harder, is up in the zone. A double, a suicide squeeze, a pair of RBI singles. Moyer gets out of the inning, but he leaves the game trailing after having pitched six innings, surrendering seven runs in his last two.

On the bench in the dugout, he drinks his water, looks out at the field in front of him, and thinks,
If this is it, I'm cool with that
. Bronner will hear from the Blue Jays tomorrow; they'll tell him that since the All-Star weekend is upon us, they won't need a starter for another week or ten days. So Jamie would be more than welcome to stay on with Vegas until then—but no guarantees.

But in his heart, Moyer doesn't need to hear from Bronner to know that this is it.
He feels it
. He'll call Karen after the game. “I think I'm done,” he'll say. But for now, sitting in the dugout, he wonders if this mystical minor league tour these last weeks hasn't been some type of subconscious goodbye on his part, a way to say thank you to the game, while simultaneously reconnecting to it.

He knows that when he gets older, he'll have to go back to the discs of all his old games to truly remember the on-field exploits; he'll have to watch that ninth-inning punch-out of Bonds that followed a towering Bonds shot just three innings earlier in order to fully relive what he did.

But he won't have to search around the house for the memories that have been swirling around his head these last weeks. The time Harvey Dorfman's brusque voice inserted itself into his consciousness—“
What are you going to do about it?
”—and he was suddenly not so alone anymore. The time Lou Piniella said, “We brought you here to pitch,” not even understanding the momentousness of such a simple statement: Moyer had waited ten years for someone to show him that kind of faith. The bullpen sessions where—aha!—a centimeter difference in the placement of a pinkie finger could be the difference between Bonds going yard or Bonds heading back to the dugout. The female beat reporter who always wore sunglasses, and whom the guys referred to as the “Pecker Checker.” The cramped, late-night bus rides in the minors, with silly, farting teammates.

These are the memories that come now, sitting in what very well could be his last dugout. It's taken Moyer four decades in the game to understand that these are the memories that truly matter, because he and his teammates were young men together, very publicly trying to excel at something that invites error day after day, and their only response to that could be to have fun together, to be bonded by this weird life they'd chosen, and by the work they could never quite master.

At the end of the classic
Ball Four
, Jim Bouton writes that “you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out it was the other way around all the time.” Moyer begs to differ. It's not about the ball, just like it's not about your physique or your speed or your gun of an arm. It's about what you think and what you believe. He faced 8.9 percent of the game's batters, gave up more home runs than anyone in history, won more games than all but thirty-three pitchers before him, and it was all accomplished despite a cavalcade of doubters, right up until the very end. No, it wasn't the ball that held him; it was his own oceanic curiosity that clutched him, his own insatiable need to get better. It was the challenge of doing the hardest of things the absolutely best way you could while people screamed at you that you were destined to fail.

Now, taking off a baseball uniform likely for the final time—who would have thought that it would have been a Las Vegas 51s jersey?—Jamie Moyer knows that when he thinks back on this long and singular career, it won't be a specific memory that comes to him. It will instead be a feeling. It will be the feeling he had on that fall night in Philly while he dug up the World Series pitching rubber; it will be the feeling he had in Seattle when he won his twentieth game during that magical 2001 season; it will be the feeling he had in his driveway so many years ago, with his father crouched down against the garage door, that shrunken glove awaiting each pitch.

And it will be the feeling he had just four weeks ago in Buffalo, after he threw five shutout innings for the Tides and, looking out at the breathtaking sight of a baseball field, he tried to find the right word to capture his lifelong love affair with the child's game that has dominated his thoughts for close to fifty years. “Priceless,” he said, as he looked at that field. “Priceless.”

E
verybody
needs closure,” Karen Moyer says. As the driving force behind the nation's largest collection of child bereavement camps, she should know. She has seen the positive effects of closure firsthand every summer.

Walking away from the game in July was a loss of sorts for her husband, though it was hardly as traumatic as the loss Karen is used to counseling. Still, it was the likely end of something big—likely because Jamie hadn't decided that he was absolutely, positively retired yet. But Karen knows that if it is the end, it needs to be marked appropriately, and so she does what Karen does: she goes all-out and throws a “Moyer Foundation Roast & Toast” to honor “Number 50 Turning 50.”

Nearly two hundred guests flock to Las Vegas's MGM Grand for a dinner, fund-raiser, and good-natured roast of Moyer, who sits on the stage—often with Mac or Grady perched on his lap—and takes abuse from a who's who of the baseball world.

Chase Utley regales the crowd with tales of the lengths Moyer would go in order to pitch. “A trainer would tape his whole body, making sure that the legs were taped to the hips, so nothing fell apart,” Utley says. “And then the trainer would take handfuls of Icy Hot and rub down both arms and shoulders. All to just pitch
one
game.”

In the live auction, Cliff Lee outbids all bidders for a framed collection of Moyer-signed milestone baseballs, to the tune of $20,000. A video from former Yankee slugger Bernie Williams delights the crowd. “When I heard about this evening, I really thought I should be there with you,” says Williams, who hit .389 with eight home runs—the third most—in his career against Moyer. “Not really to pay tribute to all you've done, but to thank you for all you did for my career.…I really owned you. There's no way around it. You were the guy who did more for my career than anyone else in baseball.” He closes by conceding that Moyer “will go down in history as one of the better magicians this game has ever known.”

Rick Sutcliffe talks about the first time he saw Moyer throw in spring training with the Cubs in the '80s. The kid struck out a batter with a beautiful 3–2 changeup. “I went up to him and said, ‘That was a great changeup,'” Sutcliffe recalls. “And he said, ‘That was my fastball.' I thought, ‘I don't need to get to know this guy. He won't be around long.'”

Gregory Chaya and his older brother Chris fly in for the event. Gregory, in his twenties now and still cancer-free, is thin and shy. When Moyer and he embrace, Gregory nuzzles his face into Moyer's neck. Also in attendance are Michele and Jerry Metcalf, Erin's parents. They've brought a collage of all the photos taken through the years of them and Erin with Jamie.

Lou Piniella and Charlie Manuel make video presentations. The Phillie Phanatic holds up a sign that reads, “I Miss You.” Afterward, a clearly moved Moyer is stunned. “Wow,” he says. “This was clearly a Karen Moyer production. My wife didn't miss a thing. To have so many ex-teammates show up, it's just really special.”

He pauses. “She even thought to pay respect to people who were important in my life but who are no longer here,” he says. “Like [former Baltimore manager] Johnny Oates. And Harvey? Did you see the photo of Harvey?”

Back home in Rancho Santa Fe, it's a typical Wednesday. The smart board on the kitchen counter details the day's activities:

The clan will gather tonight—with Hutton, now a freshman at Pepperdine University, on Skype—for dinner to mark Yeni's “Gotcha Day,” the anniversary of her adoption. She'll lead the family in grace while everyone holds hands, closing with, “And special attention to me for my Gotcha Day.”

But first Moyer goes on a succession of errands, picking up a kid here, taking a kid there. Then he goes for a walk on the beach, even though, ever since he stopped playing some five months ago, his feet have ached to no end. He has played catch with Dillon and Hutton a couple of times, only to wake up the next morning more sore than he's ever been in his life.

Dillon and Hutton keep asking hopefully whether he'll make yet another comeback. It's a question he wrestles with. Unlike so many who call it quits, he's still mentally able. But the body is breaking down before the spirit. He doesn't think his health would carry him through an entire season.

“If this is the end, I'm pretty good with that,” Moyer says while strolling the beach. “I like flipping the TV on, looking at highlights at night, and then flipping it off and walking away.”

Then again, while watching TV one night, it is not at all clear that his playing days are done. Just before spring training 2013, he watches his one-time teammate Tim Wakefield teaching the knuckleball to a lineup of former NFL quarterbacks on MLB Network's
The Knuckler
.
I can do that
, Moyer thinks.
How cool would it be to reinvent myself at fifty years old as a knuckleballer?
He goes so far as to throw the pitch out back with Mac. And he checks his address book and there's a number for Charlie Hough, who he played with in Texas—one of the great knuckleballers. Maybe a road trip is in order: visits to Hough and Wakefield. Just to see. He's intrigued by the prospect of another quest and the challenge of learning something new.

But Moyer's time is not spent exclusively fantasizing about becoming the next Phil Niekro. After a lifetime of obsessing about one thing, he's finally a different kind of free agent. Since coming home in July 2012, he has mostly been a dad. Finally, he has lunch with Dom and then with Yousef. He lays out his very nascent vision for the Jamie Moyer Pitching Academy and talks to them about putting the old band back together again. Yousef takes it upon himself to put together a business plan.

If it happens, it will mark the evolution of Jamie Moyer into something approximating the professional reincarnation of
Harvey
Dorfman. Who else is more qualified to teach pitching than the craft's ultimate student?

Dorfman has generations of disciples, and there were likely players he was closer to and spoke to more often than Moyer. But there has never been one who so fully embodied the Dorfman ethic. Moyer went to Dorfman a frightened journeyman who was paralyzed by the fear of failure, and he became…well, he became the living apotheosis of Dorfman's definition of mental toughness on page 179 in
The Mental Game of Baseball
:

“We reject, rather than accept, pressure,” Dorfman wrote. “We control pain, rather than be controlled by it. We grow, rather than shrink, through adversity. We become further motivated, rather than defeated, by failure.”

For both Moyer and his mentor, it has always been about the work. Moyer shuns the spotlight just as Dorfman did. After all, it is customary at roasts for the subject to get the last word, to commandeer the microphone and exact some revenge. But at the Vegas event that would have been out of character for Moyer, just as it would have been for Dorfman. Instead, he took the mike and did as Harvey would have had him do. He refocused everyone on the task at hand. “I hope everyone has learned something about the foundation and about our passion, which is helping kids in distress,” he said. And then his family joined him onstage and the crowd sang “Happy Birthday” to the fifty-year-old pitcher, who very purposefully has refused to announce his retirement. Because, really, who knows?