Just Tell Me I Can't (3 page)

Moyer didn't know what was in those books, and he didn't know what to think. He was about to pick up the conversation where he'd broken it off in the car—with a recitation of all that he was doing wrong—when Dorfman lurched forward.

“There are a couple of things you need to know, kid,” Dorfman said. “First, this doesn't work if you're not honest with me. I don't have time for you if you're not going to level with me. And second, none of this goes back to your agent or your club or the media. This is just you and me.”

Just you and me
. The words washed over Moyer. The mound, once a calm escape, had become frightening in its solitariness. On it, he was keenly aware of
them
: the fans, the manager, the teammates. He'd hear them, or he'd imagine what they were thinking about him. When a fan heckled him for his lack of speed, he'd carry on an angry pretend dialogue in his head:
You think this is easy?
When runners got on, he'd wonder what his teammates were thinking, he'd decipher the body language of his catcher—was he against me now too? He sensed—or invented—collective doubt all around him, and it led him to wonder,
Do I belong?
But now here was someone who actually wore a major league uniform saying he was there
with
him.

Moyer returned to his narrative, cataloging all that he can't do on the mound. Can't get ahead of hitters. Can't throw the changeup, once his money pitch. Can't stop furtively glancing into the dugout to see if the skipper is on the phone to the pen. He talked about how the middle twelve inches of the seventeen-inch plate belong to the hitter, but how the umps rarely consistently gave him what he believed to be rightfully his: the outer inches on either side. Finally, Dorfman, who'd been listening with his eyes locked on Moyer's, had heard enough.

“Bullshit.”

Pause. “Excuse me?”

“Bullshit. You have control over that. Over all of it.”

“I do? How?”

“By changing your thought process. You gain control over all of it by acknowledging that you have no control over any of it, the umpire, or the manager, or what other people think, and by taking responsibility for what you can control.”

Moyer wasn't getting it. “Are you aware of how you talk about yourself?” Dorfman asked. “It's all negative. ‘I can't, I can't, I can't.' I've seen your act, kid, and you need to get better. You need to change your thinking. Your process needs to be
positive
. You have to train yourself to hear a negative thought, stop, let it run its course, and then let it go. 'Cause it doesn't mean crap. The only thing that matters is focusing on the task at hand, which is making that pitch. The task at hand.”

It's a page right out of classic Zen meditation—stop, label the distracting thoughts, and return to your breath. Dorfman reminded Moyer of one of baseball's most infamous cases of the yips, when Dodgers second basemen Steve Sax suddenly, inexplicably could no longer make the rudimentary throw from second to first. If, when Sax fielded the ball, he thought to himself,
I'm not going to throw this ball away
, he might have
thought
he was thinking positively. But he was actually focusing his mind on committing an error—in effect, directing his body to do just that. A better thought, Dorfman explained, would be,
I'm going to hit the first baseman with a throw that's chest high
.

To get there, though, the player has to learn to think about what he's thinking. To reformulate his thoughts. Dorfman suggested an exercise. “I want you to rephrase everything you've already told me, taking out all the ‘can't' stuff, all the negativity. Restate it. Go ahead. I challenge you.”

This is going to be hard
, Moyer thought. How do you positively observe that you can't throw your curveball for strikes? He stammered and stuttered, started and stopped. Finally, he came to this: “I'm going to throw a sweeping curveball that catches the inside corner to a righthanded hitter.”

Dorfman seemed pleased. But, he said, just stating that isn't enough. “You need to
see
it,” he said. “You need to visualize the flight of that curveball before you throw it. So you say it, you see it, and then you throw it.”

In this way, Dorfman explained, the mind was as much a muscle as any other on the pitcher's body: “We're training it.”

Moyer's own idol, Steve Carlton, was the master of such training. Carlton considered pitching nothing more than a heightened game of catch between him and his catcher; the batter was merely incidental. On days that he'd pitch, Carlton would lie down on the training table after batting practice and close his eyes. Teammates would laugh, thinking he was napping. In reality, he was imagining his “lanes” in the strike zone—an outer lane and an inner lane. He'd imagine the flight of his ball within those lanes, over and over. The middle of the plate didn't exist in his mind's eye, and nor did any menacing hitters or rabid fans. He was fixated on those lanes. He was focused, as Dorfman would say, on “the task at hand.”

The moral of the Carlton example? “It's not about anyone else,” Dorfman said. “It's all about
you
. You're the one with the ball in your hand. You're the one everyone else reacts to. You're in charge.”

It had been so long since Moyer felt in charge on the mound. He had always wanted to be Steve Carlton, who, miraculously, he'd beaten in his major league debut for the Cubs five years earlier. Growing up in Souderton, Jamie would be in front of the big color TV every fifth day in the living room of that modest house on North Fourth Street, watching Lefty, who always seemed so in control of his emotions and surroundings. He might not have Carlton's heat or his world-class slider, but he could certainly emulate his mastery of the mental game.

It had been two hours. “Go relax in your room, watch TV,” Dorfman told him. Instead, Moyer flopped on the twin bed in the Dorfmans' guest room and flipped open a notebook. He hurriedly scribbled notes, fearing he'd forget what he just learned, even as he was excitedly unsure about precisely
what
he was learning.

Jamie Moyer had never before been fearful on the mound. Even as he dominated in high school and at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, there were doubters, but he'd never let them get to him. In fact, early on, like so many successful athletes, he'd not only hear but catalog the criticisms, compiling a type of internal roster of slights in order to drive his own narrative of retribution. “All I heard growing up was ‘You can't, you can't, you can't,'” he says. “Every time I heard someone doubt me, I'd just use it to push me more.”

Ironic, isn't it, how the doubts caught up to him after five years of failure in the big leagues? He'd had setbacks, of course, but no real crisis of confidence—until now. It was as if the thought of failure hadn't occurred to him in his youth, so he was immune to the fear of it. Dorfman knew that Moyer wasn't alone. Scores of ballplayers confront their first crisis of confidence after they've already made it to the big leagues. He'd seen players who are so crippled by anxiety that they can't perform, or who protect what modicum of self-esteem they have left by not trying hard. Not putting anything on the line is actually the safer course. You wouldn't know it to look at these strapping young ballplayers, but their psyches were often in torment. In the same way that many of us, in our Little League days, would silently hope that the ball wouldn't come our way, Dorfman had found that the best baseball players in the world were similarly paralyzed by such self-fulfilling fear. He'd quote former outfielder Enos Cabell, whose best years were with the Houston Astros in the '70s and '80s: “I don't want to be a star, they get blamed too much.” That's a scared player, Dorfman knew.

Dorfman, on the other hand, was schooled early in fear. Moyer's youth was spent outdoors, playing sports and competing. Dorfman's formative years were spent in bed in a Bronx apartment, a sickly asthmatic whose overprotective mother would fuss over him all day, gripping his clenched fists as young Harvey would sit upright, struggling for one more breath. Dorfman rebelled; he raged against his sickness as well as the comfort and security of his loving home. Growing up surrounded by fear—it was in the air, with the cataloging, each morning, of whether little Harvey had had a good or bad night—he learned how to tell it to get lost. Like any schoolyard bully, fear backed down when you stood up to it.

So it was that the baseball prodigy encountered debilitating fear as he approached thirty, and sought solace and counsel from the aging psychologist who had stared fear down as a sick child. Now Dorfman gave Moyer the three-point plan that he'd spent a lifetime developing. He had Moyer write this down: “1). Awareness (Define the Problem). 2). Forming a Strategy (What Has to Be Done?) 3). Act It Out. (Do It).” And he told him, “To aspire to great achievement is to risk failure. It's a package deal.”

Again and again, Dorfman emphasized to Moyer that, as the pitcher,
he
was in charge—
he
set the tempo. “That mound is your f'ing circle, and you need to have that attitude about it,” Dorfman said. Moyer's eyes widened. Later, in his room, he scribbled down the phrases “My f'ing circle” and “Knock somebody down.”

They talked about the difference between anger and aggression on the mound, about how to identify distractions, take a deep breath, and just let them go. “Timing is important,” Dorfman said. “Our minds are at peak efficiency for about six seconds, and then we have to refocus our attention. If you rush your thinking, you'll have a rushed delivery.” Dorfman schooled Moyer in what he called the “mental windup.” Let distracting, negative thoughts run their course by giving them time to leave your mind, he said. Then come back to your breath and a visual image of the outcome you desire.

They talked about Moyer developing a set routine on days that he pitches—so that his focus narrows to laserlike precision by the time he takes the mound. Until now, Moyer's game-day routine had been angst-ridden. He'd sit in front of his locker, his stomach roiling, obsessing. He was focused on outcome, not process. “You lose control when your feelings and thoughts center on consequence,” Dorfman said. Instead, they mapped out a routine centered on Moyer controlling what he could control, one that built his level of concentration to its peak by game time. It was methodical—from the time that he lifted three-pound weights to when he put on his mesh shirt and stretch undershorts—all designed to mentally lead him to a familiar state of confidence and preparedness.

They talked about “strong eyes” versus “weak eyes”—the difference between a passive persona on the mound and one who is intently locked in on his catcher, lost in (here's that phrase again) the task at hand. They talked about Moyer's changeup—the pitch he learned at St. Joe's, the pitch that got him to the major leagues, the pitch he now didn't have enough confidence in to throw over the plate.

“Your lack of speed is your weapon,” Dorfman proclaimed. “Be aggressive with it!” A changeup from Jamie Moyer was, in other words, akin to a fastball from Nolan Ryan. Instead of just showcasing it to keep hitters honest, go after them with it—
throw it with conviction!

And then Dorfman said the thing Moyer would say for years, whenever he was asked to define his pitching style: “You're not going to blow guys away,” he said. “You are who you are. Accept who you are. You have to outthink batters. You have to use their egos against them. They come up there thinking they can crush your pitch.
Use that.
”

More breathless notes.

After three days, Dorfman took Moyer to the airport. The pitcher felt exhilarated, but also a bit confused, like he'd gotten a glimpse, but only a glimpse, into a whole new way of thinking. How would he ever figure this thing out by himself? Dorfman sensed his inner tumult. Dropping Moyer off at the terminal, he extended his hand. “I'm only a phone call away, Jamie,” he said.

F
eeling like more of a suspect than a prospect, Jamie Moyer eyes the specimen of athletic prowess before him. Perci Garner is a 6´3˝, 225-pound literal definition of prospect. He's twenty-two years old, broad-shouldered and thick-legged, with a quick, wide smile. His fastball has been clocked at 93 and 94 miles per hour, and has reached 97.

Moyer looks Garner up and down. “I don't know if you're ready for it yet,” he says with mock solemnity. “But are you a reader?”

Garner says he is, so Moyer starts evangelizing. “There's a book called
The Mental ABC's of Pitching
, by a fellow named Harvey Dorfman. He also wrote a book called
The Mental Game of Baseball
. These are the best books about the game of baseball because they deal with this”—Moyer points to his head—“and teach you how to use it. They'll teach Perci how to get out of Perci's way.”

It's the fall of 2011 and they are here, the veteran and the phenom, in the Clearwater, Florida, clubhouse of Bright House Field, the Philadelphia Phillies' spring training complex, for reasons both alike—to work on their respective games—and vastly dissimilar. Garner, drafted in 2010 by the Phillies in the second round out of Ball State University, is here trying to make the transition from thrower to pitcher. Moyer is here, nine months after Tommy John surgery, to find out if he'll ever be a major league pitcher again.

The Phillies, his former team, have offered the use of their facility and trainers for this quixotic exercise. Moyer can't bring himself to call it a comeback, not yet, though those around him know that's exactly what it is. He's taking things one step at a time, as he does on the mound. Like pitching, his rehab is a process. He has thrown long toss without pain, but hasn't tried to really pitch, save one disastrous batting practice session from forty feet on flat ground to a group of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds, including his son Hutton, who were trying out for summer league back in Seattle last spring. There, the ball seemed in open rebellion upon each release; it was merely forty feet, and yet a man who had been able to deliver a baseball within centimeters of a target for decades now had no idea where it was going. One pitch bounced to the plate. Another sailed over the catcher's head. He struck one fifteen-year-old batter in the torso, the kid's eyes morphing in one panic-stricken instant from excitement to terror. Then he did it again. (What a story
that
kid would have to tell!)

Of fifty pitches, six were hittable. Two hit the kid. And forty-three were nowhere near the hitting zone. After five minutes, embarrassed and flustered, Moyer slinked away and went home to crack open a beer and wonder if that was that—if, despite the surgery, he was done. Though his arm had been remade, maybe his
ability
had somehow gotten lost?

He'd heard the stories. How in some 15 percent of Tommy John cases, the thing that is gone, the thing that never comes back, is control. That said, Moyer told himself not to read too much into this debacle. After all, he had never been very good at throwing batting practice, where the goal is to give the hitter something he can hit square on the barrel of the bat, an exercise wholly at odds with Moyer's desire to keep the hitter off balance by preventing him from getting good wood on the ball. Besides, for the last quarter century he'd had a similar feeling every time he first took the mound each spring to face a live batter—that the ball in his hand, far from being an extension of his arm and mind, mocked him in its refusal to go where he was used to putting it. He'd always been able to work through it; he'd always been able to rouse his muscle memory. Eventually, he always became Jamie Moyer again. Could he be that person again at forty-eight, with a surgically repaired arm and, for the first time in memory, a bit of a middle-age paunch?

Tomorrow, he'll pitch off a mound for the first time in ten months, since the night in the Dominican Republic in the fall of 2010 when, trying to come back from the injury initially sustained on that steaming St. Louis night in July 2010, he blew out his arm. He'd been befuddling the Dominican hitters when he threw a cutter down and in to a righthanded batter. It snapped his ulnar collateral ligament
and
his flexor pronator clean off his elbow, the black-and-purple bruise developing quickly, like the exposure of a Polaroid photograph.

He mentions Dorfman's book to Garner because yesterday the two men played catch. To Moyer, a game of catch is never just a game of catch. He learned at an early age that catch
is
work—not some idle act between batting practice at-bats. Long toss, in particular, is a rite of spring. Typically, a pitcher and his throwing partner will begin at twenty feet apart, softly throwing to one another. As the players limber up, they move back in roughly ten-foot increments, topping out at somewhere around a hundred feet. As Moyer and Garner warmed up, Garner's ball sizzling through the air and thudding into Moyer's glove, Moyer noticed that
both
of Garner's feet faced him. “Do you always play catch like that?” he asked, approaching the pupil. “You don't pitch like that, so why would you play catch like that?”

Moyer moved Garner so his back foot was perpendicular to the target, just like it is on the pitching rubber. Garner's ball rocketed through the air, but seldom did two consecutive throws arrive at precisely the same spot. Some throws sailed overhead, some hit the ground short of Moyer. After a particularly wild and high bullet, Garner chastised himself under his breath: “C'mon, you're playing with a big leaguer!”

Finally, Moyer stopped. “The big question for you is, ‘How am I gonna teach myself good muscle memory?'” he said. “You play golf?”

“Trying to,” Garner said, smiling broadly again.

“Well, you can figure it out, then,” Moyer said. “Golf is all about tempo. If my body is ahead of my hands, I'm not going to hit the ball right. If my body is behind my hands, I'm not going to hit the ball right. But if my body and my hands are working together, I'm going to hit the ball right. When you're playing long toss, you've gotta
feel
when you make a good throw, visualize where your arm slot is, and recall that feeling time after time. Because I guarantee you there are times during a season where you're gonna lose your arm slot. So the repetition now helps you find it then. Think about throwing the ball
through
me. Take your fingers and reach into my belly button. You want to get extension. It doesn't have to be hard, just create carry to the ball, and backspin.”

The two went back to throwing, quietly basking in the sounds of catch, with Moyer occasionally breaking the silence with “Better!” or “Arm slot!” or “Through me!”

Today, Moyer introduces his accidental pupil to a game, one he grew up playing. The two stand some sixty feet from one another, roughly the distance between pitcher and catcher; one positions his glove as a target for the other. If the receiver has to move his glove to catch the other's throw, it's a point against the thrower. First one to 21 loses. Game after game, Garner's glove doesn't move. When he offers a low target, Moyer whistles. “You don't want to go there,” he says. “That's where I live.”

Here now, with each throw, it's becoming clear to Moyer that—the summer tryout disaster notwithstanding—he can still make accurate throws. And with each admonition from Moyer to “have an awareness of your body” and to “reach through me,” Garner's throws get more accurate.

Still, the kid loses 21–8 and 21–6, and is frustrated. Moyer can see it. “Listen, if you learn one thing about the game every time you come to work, you'd be a pretty good player, right?” he says. “One thing—about the game, or about pitching, or about hitters, or about base runners. To me, that's our goal. Even at my age, that's the goal. Learn one thing a day, and learn it well. That gives you a chance to get better, because any problem can be solved. Any setback is temporary, and you can learn from it, if you do the work.”

If you spend any amount of time with Moyer when he is in baseball mode, you start to hear his Inner Harvey come out. He has spent so long inculcating Dorfman's lessons that he doesn't even hear them as Harvey's when they leave his mouth. So it is now: thumbing through my copy of Dorfman's book, I find it. “Any problem is solvable. Any setback is temporary and instructive.” In Moyer's own copy of the book, it's one of the underlined phrases.

Afterwards, back in the empty clubhouse, Garner admits to Moyer that he's nervous playing catch with him. Moyer tells the wide-eyed hurler, “You're creating that. All physical acts start with a thought.” He tells his newfound protégé that it's okay to be nervous or afraid—so long as you attack that fear and make it work for you. And you do that, as Harvey used to say, by changing your thinking, by acknowledging that the pressure you feel is self-made. And if you've created the pressure, you can discard it. Again, it's Harvey speaking: “A physical performance is the outcome of a thought,” or “It's hard to see the picture when you're inside the frame.”

Later, over beers at Clearwater's Tilted Kilt sports bar, I ask Moyer if he was aware that he'd been quoting Harvey to the kid. Though Moyer is a hard-bitten old-school baseball man who guards his emotions on the mound, he is quick to sentiment off it. Now he takes a pull on his beer and his eyes mist over at the mention of his friend, who passed away earlier in the year. In keeping with who Harvey was, there was no public funeral or memorial service. Moyer was at home, recovering from Tommy John surgery, when Roy Halladay called, having just heard the news.

“Was he even in the hospital?” Moyer asked.

“I don't know. No one knows,” Halladay replied.

Shortly thereafter, Brad Lidge was on the line: was there any information? There wasn't. But there was, for days, a series of commiserating phone calls among big league players, all in search of information, all trying to figure out how to say goodbye to their mentor. He never wanted it to be about him.

Moyer moped around the house, angry that he hadn't had a chance to bid a proper farewell and tell Harvey what he'd meant to him. At the same time, he knew Harvey wouldn't have been one for grandiose exit scenes. Harvey's players had long known he was sick, but that's about all they knew. In the late '90s, after having worked for the A's, the Florida Marlins, and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, Dorfman went to work counseling the clients of agent Scott Boras. Boras would send ballplayers to see Dorfman because Harvey could no longer travel.

For years after their initial weekend meeting in Prescott (Harvey and Anita had since moved to Brevard, North Carolina), Moyer would call Dorfman at least every month and unburden himself. Dorfman would dissect his language—“Whaddya mean, you
can't
?”—and not let Moyer lapse into scapegoating. In the latter stages of his career, Moyer had internalized so much of Dorfman's wisdom that he no longer
needed
to call, which Dorfman had long predicted. “You already know the answers,” he'd say. “It's just a question of changing your thinking.” Still, Moyer would call just to check on Harvey's health and ask after Anita. Even in his late forties, a funny thing would happen to Moyer when Dorfman would answer the phone: upon hearing that scratchy and cough-laden voice, a warm wave of comfort would wash over him. More than once, Moyer jokingly wondered to Karen whether Harvey had hypnotized him years ago.

Moyer didn't know that Dorfman had had a serious congenital respiratory issue, having battled severe asthma his whole life. He just knew to call his friend in the mornings because by afternoon Harvey could barely speak through his coughing fits. Still, when asked about his health, Dorfman would deadpan, “My streak goes on.”

“What streak is that, Harv?”

“Consecutive days alive.”

Now, back in the bar, Moyer takes his eyes from the Marlins game on the big screen before us. “I'm enjoying talking to Perci about this stuff,” he says. “But it's also a way for Harvey to be talking to me. I may be coaching Perci, but Harvey's coaching me, too.”

It is a strange dynamic, a situation faced by every elite athlete at some point or another. You have millions of people watching you succeed or fail at the most tender of ages, and then, when others your age are still looking forward professionally, you're faced with the end of a career.

What's next? What
could
be next? What could rival the excitement, the challenge, the competition? After being the best athlete in the world, Michael Jordan searched compulsively for something to replace the thrill of playing basketball professionally. He even got into motorcycle thrill racing on the deserted streets of Chicago at 3 a.m., so addicted was he to recapturing the adrenaline rush of his youth. His friend Charles Barkley, who retired from the NBA at thirty-seven (“Now I'm just what America needs—another unemployed black man”), says he initially looked forward to playing golf every day. “At some point, I said to my wife, ‘Hey, how long have I been retired?'” he says. “She said, ‘About six weeks.' I said, ‘Uh-oh.”

After the cheering stops, most athletes stare into an existential abyss.
What now?
Moyer knows ballplayers who have hung up their cleats and turned to alcohol or substance abuse, spurred by a sudden, pounding sense of loss. The very way they've always defined themselves, after all, was no more.

But Moyer, in his year and a half away from the game, wasn't in mourning. Back home in Rancho Santa Fe, just outside San Diego, he fell into a comfortable, stable routine. The Moyers—Jamie, wife Karen, and their eight kids, including two Guatemalan adoptees, who range in age from twenty to five—live amid a sort of baseball diaspora. Retired players Vince Coleman, Trevor Hoffman, and Mike Sweeney all live nearby. In fact, Sweeney coached eight-year-old Mac Moyer—who brought gas against eleven- and twelve-year-olds. (Phils manager Charlie Manuel likes to joke that Mac
already
throws harder than his old man.) Moyer found himself enjoying playing Mr. Mom and being a talking head analyst on ESPN, appearances that met with good reviews.