Just Tell Me I Can't (6 page)

“Twenty-three.”

“I wish I had your body at twenty-three,” Moyer says.

Garner, hearing this from someone who has won 267 big league games, breaks into that smile. “Really?”

There's a pause. “Yeah,” Moyer says. “But I'll stick with my mind at forty-eight.”

A
t 6 p.m., the Moyer Dry Cleaning van would turn onto North Fourth Street from Reliance Road, and there he'd be. Little Jamie, ball and glove in hand, parked on the front step of the modest two-story house the Moyers had built in the late '60s. He'd already have played a couple of hours of wiffle ball after school with Scooter Myers, from a block away, on Summit Street. Scooter was four years younger than Jamie, but the two were like brothers: Moyer and Myers.

Sometimes Scooter would stay for dinner, but most times he'd go home when that van would make that turn. Because that's when Jim Moyer, after a day of picking up and delivering dry cleaning, would go inside and fetch his beat-up old catcher's mitt and crouch down against his garage door, while Jamie took to his pretend mound at the driveway's end, some forty feet away. And son would commence to throw to father. Jim's glove was small, with no webbing and no thumb. But it had a loud sweet spot, and Jim knew how to catch his son's ball right on it, so that a loud
thwack
would ring out.

Eventually, as he got bigger, Jamie would be throwing from the middle of the street and the nonplussed drivers of passing cars would make sure to swerve in order to avoid the pitching prodigy; they knew it was just the Moyer kid, throwing again. Such was life in Souderton, the small, working-class town just an hour outside of Philadelphia.

Jamie was always throwing. And when he wasn't throwing, he always seemed to be
about
to throw. He'd carry a ball with him wherever he went, tossing it to himself, or just holding it, getting a feel for it in his left hand. A baseball, after all, is an amalgam of cowhide, rubber, and hand-stitching; even today, Moyer likes to spend hours holding baseballs, because each one has a distinct feel. One may feel bigger in his hand, the next smaller. Another might seem to have bulging seams, the next hardly any at all.

Jim Moyer coached Jamie in Little League through American Legion ball, and he would catch his son in that driveway every night, calling out balls and strikes. He knew that—especially at the Little League level—the game was about getting the ball over the plate. So he'd call every pitch as if there were live hitters at bat; after twenty-seven punch-outs, the two would go around back to play the fielding drill pepper, with the elder Moyer hitting brisk grounders for his son to scoop up until inevitably one would crash off Jamie's shin and he'd run crying into the house, where Joan would be preparing supper. After dinner, especially on nights that Jamie's idol, Steve Carlton, pitched, the Moyer family—including older sister Jill, who was a musical prodigy—would sit before the big color TV in the living room and Jamie would be transfixed by the lefty on the screen.

In 1972, Steve Carlton was having arguably the most dominant pitching season of the modern era. He'd win a miraculous 46 percent of his team's games that year, going 27–10 for a horrible team that would win only 59 times. Carlton's ERA was 1.97; in games he didn't pitch, the team gave up nearly twice as many earned runs.

But it was less about the results than the aura of Carlton that captivated Moyer so deeply. To the nine-year-old Moyer, the big number 32 on his TV screen represented everything that intrigued him about throwing a baseball; here was a larger-than-life mystery, an enigma who didn't speak to the press and had a mercenary sense of purpose on the mound. And just like Jamie, Carlton was a lefty.

Dissecting his hero every fifth night, Moyer started to get a sense of just how complicated pitching was. He'd watch and try and solve the puzzle: What made a pitch move like that? Why throw a slider there, on that count? His apprenticeship had begun. Studying Carlton, Moyer saw a fierce competitor who was always looking for an edge. Carlton, in fact, was well ahead of the times in his mental approach to the game. His guru—
his
Harvey, if you will—was Gus Hoefling, the Phillies' strength and flexibility coach, who was a lifelong student of the martial arts. Hoefling introduced Carlton to kung fu—and to meditation. In the dank basement of Veterans Stadium, where the Phillies played, Hoefling set up a soundproofed, softly lit “mood room,” where Carlton would recline, rest, and listen to relaxation tapes prior to his starts.

Moyer would pore over the articles in the Philadelphia newspapers that touched on Carlton's unique preparations. He'd go to bed filled with baseball dreams and wake up to the giant Carlton poster on the back of his bedroom door. One time, a teacher told the Moyers that their son had refused to do a homework assignment. Jamie had decided he'd never need to know the material. “I'm going to play professional baseball,” he declared.

Baseball is the sport that fathers hand down to their sons, to be handed down to theirs. And in Jim Moyer, Jamie had the ultimate mentor. The elder Moyer was a fast-pitch softball pitcher until he turned fifty, and then spent weekends umpiring semipro games. He also coached his son and the neighborhood kids up through American Legion ball. The dry cleaning business may have been Jim's job, but baseball was his passion. And always by his side was little Jamie. After a game, there he'd be, begging his dad to let him bang the mud off his cleats. When the elder Moyer didn't have a game, he'd take the whole family down to the field off Reliance Road, back behind Moyer Oil and Storage—no relation—and neighbors would laugh as Joan, Jill, and Jamie shagged fly balls.
Those Moyers
.

Jim, born and raised in Souderton, had been a pro player himself whose dreams of diamond glory just barely came up short. In 1950, the legendary NBA ref and baseball scout Jocko Collins saw Moyer play. Though he was barely 5´7˝ and 145 pounds, the shortstop seemed to be all over the field, playing with an awareness of the game far beyond his years.

“You wanna play ball, don't ya?” Collins asked Moyer.

“Yessir, I sure do,” Jim said.

Collins, at the time a Phillies scout, signed Moyer for $150 per month. He played for the Phillies affiliate in Carbondale, Pennsylvania, and earned an invite to spring training in Fort Lauderdale. The last week of camp, one of the coaches took him aside. “I like the way you play, but the team has $5,000 on that kid over there,” the coach said. “You're out of here.”

Two years later, the St. Louis Cardinals gave Jim a chance and signed him. Once again, he survived the first couple rounds of cuts at the Cards' Albany, Georgia, camp, before he again became a casualty of baseball's unforgiving system. And that was it. Back home, Jim bought the dry cleaning business from his dad and set about raising a family—while figuring out a way to remain connected to the game for the rest of his life.

Jamie was part of that plan, though Jim never pushed Jamie toward the game. He didn't have to. The Moyers have a photo of Jamie at sixteen months, hitting a wiffle ball with a plastic bat in the backyard, making solid contact. It helped that Jamie was a natural athlete, able to pick up and master any sport. As he got older, a legend surrounding Jamie Moyer started to take hold in Souderton. As a fourteen-year-old, he was a star quarterback, before giving up the game upon entering high school so as not to risk injury that would sideline him from baseball. On the basketball court, he was the quickest player, the most adept dribbler. His golf swing was pristine.

But everyone knew baseball always came first. One day in the junior high gymnasium, Moyer was throwing and a crowd gathered. “One of the teachers was there and I remember him calling other teachers over and telling them, ‘Look at this, look at how this ball moves,'” recalls Tim Bishop, who starred with Moyer on the Souderton Area High and American Legion baseball teams, and went on to play pro ball before becoming the Baltimore Orioles' strength and conditioning coach, where he was reunited with Moyer in the 1990s. Back in that junior high gym, Bishop and the others saw a ball that moved almost cartoonishly: breaking wildly, fluttering in midair. “We were from a small town. No one had seen anything like that before.”

Nor had Souderton seen Moyer's type of dominance before. By the time he got to high school, he was a wiry six-footer with—ironically—a speedier fastball than anybody in the Bux-Mont League was used to and a big, sweeping curve that, thanks to all those driveway sessions with Jim, he could throw for strikes. In fact, in a bit of hyperbole that would later come to seem even more ironic, local writers often referred to Moyer's fastball as “blazing”; Bishop and others suggest that it may have been 84 miles per hour, a good ten miles per hour faster than the high school norm. He won 22 of 25 games in his high school career and averaged nearly two strikeouts an inning. His ERA was 0.59.

In his junior year, en route to a 10–0 record, Moyer threw three consecutive no-hitters. The stands were packed not to see the games, but to see whether the opposing team could even make contact against the phenom. In his senior year, Moyer not only hit .375, but also went 8–1 with a 0.54 ERA. Major league scouts sent letters, including one from Martinez Jackson, Reggie's father, who was a tailor in Philadelphia and a scout for the California Angels. Jackson would visit Souderton often. “My boss has heard about you, Jay,” Jackson wrote to Jamie. “He's anxious to see you in action.”

By then, baseball wasn't just Moyer's passion; it was his obsession. Never a good student, he did just enough to get by in school. And he wasn't much into girls, either. When she learned her son had a date for the prom, Joan Moyer was shocked. Scooter Myers remembers Moyer having a beer now and then, but mostly he was fixated on baseball like it already
was
his profession. When it had rained all night before a big game, the local paper reported that Moyer was on the field at 7:30 a.m., trying to dry it off himself. That kind of commitment has never really left him, even as a pro. Moyer is always the first out of the dugout, sprinting to the mound each inning. Bishop and other Souderton teammates have seen that throughout the years, and they smile, recognizing a Jim Moyer dictum in action.

“Jamie tried everything to get better,” remembers Bishop. “He knew about cuff and scapula stabilization exercises, doing these crazy arm motions, before any of us. I remember going to some massage guy on his recommendation. In Souderton in 1980, guys didn't get massages, but Jamie was always learning, always looking for the next thing.”

In 1980, Moyer's senior year, the Souderton Area High School team posted a 15–6 record. Yet that summer, virtually the same group of players went undefeated—18–0, with Jamie going 11–0—in American Legion ball. The difference? Jim Moyer.

On game days, the kids would show up at the Moyer house on North Fourth Street, hours before they were to leave, and sit in the Moyer front yard under the big tree. Jim wouldn't even be home yet. As she saw the boys gathering outside, Joan would bring them lemonade and have Jim's uniform ready for him to slip into when he pulled up. The kids couldn't wait for the games, because Coach Moyer made playing the game fun, while still stressing fundamentals. Though soft-spoken, the elder Moyer was no pushover. If you missed a game because you went to a dance or were in a play, it would probably take you a while to crack the lineup again. At the start of each season, he'd lead his players around the bases, peppering his never-ending commentary with the details that could make the difference between winning and losing.

“Look,” he'd say, taking a lead off first base, before quickly hopping a foot or two back toward the outfield. “If you're not stealing, you can take a step back once the pitcher is in his motion toward home plate and give yourself a better angle to round second and get to third on a base hit.”

Instead of the drudgery of mandatory wind sprints, Coach Moyer would line the boys up at second and hit fly balls for them to chase and catch. “That was our running,” Jamie remembers. “Only we didn't know it then.”

The town was wildly supportive of Jamie, but there were plenty of question marks. He heard the doubters—and never failed to take note of the doubts. Early in his senior year, during basketball season, he and teammates Tom Shutt and Scott Bishop were invited to the Bucky Dent baseball camp in Boca Raton, Florida. It would have meant missing some basketball games, which hoops coach Jarinko was none too happy about. That's when, no doubt trying to discourage his point guard from taking the time off, the basketball coach told Moyer of the conversation he'd had with former big leaguer Bill White. “He says you're good, but you don't throw hard enough to be in the majors,” the coach said. That sealed it: he'd go to the camp. And he'd add his coach and White to the list of the nonbelievers. He'd show them.

Yet despite his dominant numbers, Moyer's name didn't get called in that summer's Major League Baseball draft. The town expected him to be drafted. “Jamie has done nothing but get people out all his life,” Jim Moyer said in the local paper. “He's shown that he's never had trouble doing that at any level.”

The baseball scout, though, doesn't look at results so much as potential. And Jamie Moyer, at seventeen, was rail thin and threw comparatively slow. “The two things that go against him are size and speed,” one scout was quoted at the time. “He could be a prospect when he's 21, 22 years old. But he's got to get a little faster. That comes from development, physical growth, maybe squeezing a rubber ball to build up strength.”

Setbacks were becoming nothing new for Moyer. That summer, shortly after the draft, major league scouts held a tryout in nearby Pottstown to determine who, among all American Legion players, had pro potential. Moyer faced three batters and set them down on nine pitches. When the names of those who would move on to the tryout's next phase were posted, there it was: Jamie Moyer, Pennridge. Wait: Pennridge? That was another high school, in another league. And that team, it turned out,
also
had a kid named Jamie Moyer, who was mistakenly chosen in a bad mix-up. Jamie Moyer—the one from Souderton, who was as can't-miss a prospect as the region had recently produced—didn't make the cut owing to a mistake by the tryout organizers.