Just Tell Me I Can't (7 page)

It was perplexing that by midsummer after his senior year of high school, Moyer's once-promising future was still unknown. It looked like he'd be enrolling at Montgomery County Community College and playing next spring for the Mustangs—not exactly the dream Moyer or his hometown had long harbored. But neither Moyer nor his boosters knew then that this would ultimately be the story of Moyer's career—that nothing would come easily. Skip Wilson, the legendary coach for Temple University in Philadelphia, took a ride that summer to Souderton. Under Wilson, Temple had played in the College World Series in 1972 and 1977 and had received four other NCAA bids in the '70s. Now here he was, in the Moyer living room, making his pitch for Jamie to come and play for the Owls. Joan, however, wasn't impressed, not with the College World Series appearances or the NCAA bids. Wilson, you see, had worn shorts and sneakers with no socks—
no socks!
—to her home.

When St. Joseph's head coach, George Bennett, came to visit, he wore socks; Joan liked him right away. And Jamie liked that Bennett was offering the chance to start as freshman, something the more competitive Temple program couldn't guarantee. But there was a catch: “We'll give you a scholarship, but you've got to work as hard for me in the classroom as you do on the baseball field,” Bennett said. Moyer would be a night student his first semester and then upgraded to full-time status if he could carry a 2.5 grade point average. Moyer saw it as a challenge.

When the academic year rolled around, Moyer realized how quickly fortunes can change. Just a couple of months prior, he'd been dreaming of being drafted and of playing minor league baseball by now. Instead, he got a day job working for the Town of Souderton. He'd spend his days mowing ball fields, collecting leaves, and tarring roadways. At quitting time, he'd drive his parents' blue Pinto up the turnpike to Philly for night classes at St. Joe's.

But at least he had a team, a baseball home, and a scholarship. After hearing all the doubts about his game and after not getting drafted, he got his first lesson in the sheer power of perseverance. Years later, after he had become a star for the Seattle Mariners, an attendant named Tom stationed outside the clubhouse door would slip him a piece of paper that read:

The scrap of paper immediately found a place in Jamie's vaunted shaving kit, where he keeps his motivational reminders, for Moyer knew not only how true it was, but how it could just as easily have been penned by the seventeen-year-old Jamie Moyer who, at the eleventh hour, got a baseball scholarship,
and
by the forty-eight-year-old Jamie Moyer who would try and defy the game yet again by coming back from Tommy John surgery.

Like Jamie Moyer, Harvey Dorfman fell in love with baseball at the youngest of ages. Unlike Moyer, though, Dorfman didn't dream so much of playing the sport as of escaping into it. Little Harvey, six years old in 1941, was bedridden in his family's Bronx, New York, apartment with extreme asthma, surrounded by an overprotective mother and two doting older sisters. He took solace in the re-created teletype games that played on his bedside Emerson radio.

As it would be in the Moyer household, the father gave his son the game. Mac and Harvey Dorfman would listen to games on AM radio, Harvey keeping score in a school notebook. When he wasn't gasping for breath, it was as though he was in suspended animation, waiting for his life to start. “There I was, a child—having comfort without ever having had challenge; having order without discipline; ritual without responsibility; entertainment without effort,” he'd recall much later, in
Persuasion of My Days
, one of the three memoirs he would write. “Indulged, protected, feared for and cared for by loving adults.”

Harvey went to his first game at the Polo Grounds, the Cubs versus the Giants. The eight-year-old was transfixed by the experience, but not like other kids. Moyer, for example, caught the bug early and knew he wanted to
do
this thing. Not Dorfman. He wasn't addicted to the game so much as his own curiosity about its players. This child—sequestered, surrounded by fear—found himself touched by, as he put it, the “physical freedom of expression” he was witnessing. He wanted to understand it, to understand
them
, these men of action. When he wasn't listening to or fantasizing about baseball, he lost himself in books, the same urge drawing him to the pages of
Huckleberry Finn
: he was a spectator in search of a way to become a participant.

Later, Dorfman would earn a reputation for that rarest of qualities: wisdom. Those who knew him still talk about his talent for the pithy quip, the trenchant observation; he had a way of encapsulating an idea in a phrase that would often lead to an instant change in your thinking, a new way of seeing things. This was also handed down; without his father's homespun aphorisms, Harvey likely wouldn't have become the man he did.

Dorfman the psychologist was famous for being intolerant of players casting themselves in the role of victim. That too came from Mac. The elder Dorfman refused to let his son adopt that persona, even if it was warranted. “Suffering is good for you, kid, so long as you survive it,” Mac would tell his son. Other times, Harvey would later recount, his father would point out that if everyone in the world gathered in a circle and put their problems in the center of it, a fellow would feel lucky to get his own back.

In dealing with professional ballplayers, Harvey sensed early on that they'd come to expect sympathy. They were raised to be “special,” after all, and surrounded themselves with well-meaning people and sycophants who were loath to push them. Harvey had felt the power of tough love growing up. Once, at fifteen, he sullenly withdrew like most teenagers, as he recounted in
Each Branch, Each Needle
:

No wonder Harvey would go on to exhort scared pupils like Moyer to be aggressive, to zealously defend their “f'ing circle.” At twelve, the tentative, sickly Dorfman had been told by his father, “In life, you're going to be either the hunter or the prey. Make up your mind which one it's going to be.”

Mac Dorfman was not a wealthy man. He was a traveling salesman for Van Heusen, hawking shirts, collars, and ties throughout the metropolitan New York region. And yet his generosity knew no bounds. He died of a blood clot in the brain when Harvey was in college. Shortly thereafter, money to the Dorfmans started flowing in. Turned out, Mac had long made loans to acquaintances who were down on their luck, sometimes to the tune of $2,000. A World War I vet, he was stoic in the way that men of that generation tended to be. Like Jim Moyer, he wasn't given to public displays of affection. Also like Jim Moyer, his love was to be inferred from his teachings—and from the fact that he was always teaching. Every time he dropped a pearl of wisdom on his impressionable son, it was as if he'd thrown his arms around him. “Know what you're doing and you'll be a confident boy,” he told his son. “Know how to deal with what happens to you and you'll be a confident man.” The son later came to tell
his
charges, “Believe it and you will become it.”

When Harvey went off to college at Brockport State in Rochester, he soon called home with stunning news that was worrisome to his mother. He was going to defy medical advice and play goalie for the school's soccer team. “You've got more guts than brains,” his father told him, barely masking his pride. Harvey's adolescent path from spectator to participant was complete. In goal, he'd inhale epinephrine surreptitiously when the ball went down to the field's other end. In 1955, Brockport State would share the national title with Penn State. Later, Dorfman would be inducted into the school's hall of fame.

Harvey would eventually write about this period as the time in which he once and for all rejected comfort and security and started learning how to be mentally tough. “I determined to confront my difficulties—or any adverse situation—with a relentless attitude,” he wrote. “I now know that once a will becomes truly strong, it becomes insistent. That being mentally tough requires us to develop the will to bear discomfort.”

He'd go on to become a beloved English teacher at Burr and Burton Academy, a well-regarded prep school in Vermont. There he'd coach girls' basketball and perfect the approach to athletes he'd use for the rest of his life: the tough love, the wisecracking (“Ladies,” he once said, poking his head into a locker room of barely clad players with his eyes closed after a big win, “all I can say is, you've got a lot of balls!”), the inspirational quotes from great literary works.

He was ahead of his time, going so far as to turn a big, uncoordinated girl named Becky into a type of on-court enforcer. When an opposing player got overly aggressive, he'd approach hulking Becky on the bench: “You see that?”

She'd nod. “Take care of it,” Coach Dorfman would say. Becky would enter the game and come out minutes later, after a succession of hard fouls that were sure to leave bruises.

The true teaching moments came during losses, though. Once, the Bulldogs were getting blown out and Dorfman called a timeout late in the game; his girls couldn't wait to get off the court. “This is why we're here,” he said. “To toughen up. To handle adversity with poise and determination. If you don't cave in—if you don't
quit
—under these conditions, no one in the state of Vermont will be able to handle you.”

The next year, the girls won the state title, with Harvey quoting Aldous Huxley to them whenever they'd hit a rough patch: “Experience isn't what happens to you; it's what you
do
with what happens to you.” Mac Dorfman—and, for that matter, Jim Moyer—couldn't have said it better themselves.

B
ehind the wheel of his eggshell-white Lexus, Jamie Moyer fiddled with his car radio. Every song he settled upon seemed to offer an ominous commentary on his once again in-limbo future. On one station, Elton John and George Michael sang “Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me.” On another, some new R&B group named Boyz II Men crooned “End of the Road.”

“There's gotta be some Zeppelin somewhere,” Moyer, a classic rock devotee, muttered to himself as he surfed the dial. He smiled when the nasal twang of Tom Petty came through the speakers:

Gonna stand my ground / Won't be turned around…And I won't back down

That was more like it. Baseball season was already in full swing, only until now he hadn't been a part of it. It had been more than a year since his weekend with Harvey and there had been no panacea, no epiphany. He'd started last season with St. Louis, getting seven starts. That's when, with an 0–5 record, manager Joe Torre told him he was being sent down to Triple A: “We don't win when you pitch.”

At Louisville, an underachieving team, he was 5–10 with a 3.80 ERA. Still, there were moments on the mound where he got out of his own way and got the sense that
this
was what Harvey was talking about in all those phone calls. In golf, they call it “intermittent reinforcement”—despite all the slices and shanks that came before, the feeling of that one solidly struck ball is enough to keep a golfer coming back, day after day. In Louisville, Moyer was up and down, but he had enough ups to keep with it, despite being released at season's end. He didn't feel like any corner had been turned, but he also wasn't ready to quit yet.

At the start of the 1992 season, he found himself in Mesa, Arizona, for spring training with his first team, the Chicago Cubs. He was happy with how he had pitched, but getting cut didn't really come as a surprise. He'd surveyed the field, was aware of the numbers game the big league club would be looking at—how many pitchers and how many spots they had—and knew he faced long odds. As the team readied to break camp, he was called into the Fitch Park office of Bill Hartford, the Cubs' minor league director.

“Jamie, we have to release you at this time,” Hartford said. “The organization doesn't see you helping them as a starter and they don't see you as a relief pitcher at the big league level.”

There was silence. Usually these meetings are perfunctory; when he got released by the Texas Rangers in 1990 (after a two-year record of 6–15 with an ERA just under 5.00), the phone call from general manager Tom Grieve was particularly terse: “We don't see you helping us.” Now, however, Hartford had something else he wanted to say.

“You're almost thirty, Jamie,” Hartford began. “We don't have room for you in the minors as a pitcher, but we think you'd make a good pitching coach, so we'd like to offer you a coaching job.”

“I'm not interested,” Moyer blurted out, almost before the words were out of Hartford's mouth.

Hartford shifted in his chair. Baseball men hate delivering this message; he wasn't just releasing Moyer, he was also telling him that, in the organization's opinion, his playing days were over. “Well, look,” Hartford said. “We have your rights for three days, why don't you go home and think about it and get back to us?”

“My thoughts aren't going to change,” Moyer said.

“Well, just go home and think about it.”

So as the baseball season began, Jamie Moyer was once again a pitcher without a team, one with the most uncertain of futures. He was now twenty-nine years old and had been traded once and released by three teams—the Rangers, the Cardinals, and the Cubs. He was a career 34–54 journeyman, with a 4.56 ERA. Worse, this couldn't have happened at a more inopportune time. Jamie and Karen had bought a $380,000 house in Granger, Indiana, just outside of South Bend. Dillon was about to turn one year old. Plus, he'd made a commitment to his father-in-law, Digger Phelps—who as head basketball coach at Notre Dame had graduated
all
his players—that Jamie would complete his college degree. (He eventually would, at Indiana University.)

But with the news that his son-in-law had been released yet again, Phelps was no longer concerned about Moyer's academic credentials. He knew how hard it is for an elite athlete to face the end. That's why he took it upon himself to make a few phone calls on Jamie's behalf. His friend Art Decio was on the Notre Dame board of trustees and owned the Skyline Corporation, which sold RVs. He'd hire Jamie to be a salesman. “Maybe it's time to be a husband and a father,” Phelps said when he told his son-in-law of the opportunity.

It was an instant replay of the conversation with Hartford. “This is not how it's going to end for me,” Moyer said, cutting off his father-in-law.

“He kept his reaction inside, he didn't come back and challenge me,” Phelps remembers today. “But obviously, he thought, ‘Well, I'll prove him wrong.' Certain guys are that way. Don't get me wrong—I might not know baseball. But I can read athletes. And Jamie's a fighter.”

Was Phelps playing some mind game with his son-in-law, trying to catalyze a breakthrough moment? Today, he'll only smile sheepishly at the thought. Likely, he was legitimately concerned for the security of his daughter and grandson,
and
he was testing the mettle of his son-in-law. Phelps is nothing if not practical, a trait his daughter did not always exhibit. Karen, who had been working part-time at a local department store to help make ends meet, was a romantic, and she was taken with her husband's never-say-quit attitude.

The couple was a study in opposites. They met when Moyer was on the Cubs and Karen, who had ambitious career plans in broadcasting, was an intern for WGN-TV. Cubs announcers Harry Carey and Steve Stone set the two up. She was polished and sophisticated, a wine drinker who had already traveled the globe at twenty-two; he wore cowboy boots with white jeans and took his meals at IHOP. Over the years, she made Jamie more worldly (he now owns a 2,000-bottle wine collection), while his work ethic rubbed off on her.

When they married in 1988, Karen didn't know she was in for a lengthy, nomadic adventure. Ultimately, she would pack boxes and move more than eighty times throughout her husband's career. After he was let go by the Cubs in late March 1992, what she saw as his inspiring refusal to give up even unleashed a burst of creativity in her; she started painting life-sized cartoon figures on the walls of Dillon's bedroom, Big Bird and Mickey Mouse peering down on the infant, while Jamie went off to work out with the Clay High School baseball team every day. When he'd get back home, he'd ask if his agent, Jim Bronner, had called. They both knew the clock was ticking: they had agreed to put the house up for sale on June 1 if he hadn't found a job by then.

Bronner was having a tough time, though. There was a lead in Japan, but even that went cold. Finally, in late May, Bronner had a bite: the Tigers' Triple A affiliate in Toledo needed a “mop-up man.” That was the phrase: “mop-up man.” Moyer wouldn't pitch much, and when he did, it probably wouldn't be meaningful innings. But at least he wouldn't be selling RVs or merely giving pointers on the field to other players only a few years his junior when he knew he could still get guys out. At least he'd still be in a uniform and on a mound, and he'd be doing what he'd done since he was eight years old. He signed for the remainder of the season. His salary: $12,000.

So here he was, rolling down the Ohio Turnpike, Tom Petty's lyrics getting him fired up, as he made his way to his last, best chance. It would be easy to think of this as his riskiest move to date, having turned down real paychecks in order to chase this unlikely dream for a mere pittance. But Moyer flicked off the radio and sat himself down for a talk, a talk that was an extension of the phone conversation he'd had with Harvey just days before.

“Think of this as an opportunity and have fun with it!” Harvey had said. He'd told Moyer of an old
New Yorker
cartoon. In it, an adult behind an outfield chain-link fence asks the boy centerfielder for the score. “Sixty-four to nothing, them,” the boy responds.

“Oh, that's too bad,” the adult says.

“Don't worry about it, mister. We ain't even been up yet,” the boy replies.

Try to tap into that boy's sense of optimism and fun, Harvey said, “Like Willie Stargell said, ‘The ump says play ball—not
work
ball!”

Then Harvey posed a hypothetical: You're at a diner. The food you've ordered is brought to you cold. What do you do? Do you send it back or eat it anyway?

Moyer thought it over, mindful of Harvey's first rule: you can't feed him any bull. “I'd probably eat it,” Moyer admitted.

“That's why you're not on a big league roster right now, kid,” Dorfman said. We think of our athletes as tough, cocky even. But Harvey knew otherwise. He'd seen too many kids with talent fail because they were too invested in being nice guys. A gentleman is sensitive to the needs of others, Dorfman said, and that's precisely the instinct Moyer needed to shed in baseball. “You need to be
insensitive
,” he told Moyer. “Insensitive to the crowd, the media, the manager, the opposing dugout. You need to be confrontational.” In sports, nice-guyism was fatal. Dorfman reminded Moyer of what former big leaguer Enos Cabell had once said: “I don't want to be a star, they get blamed too much.” There's safety in being unassuming and well thought of. To succeed, you need to be something of a narcissist. You need to send the food back.

Now, on Route 80, Moyer spoke to himself out loud, because he needed to hear himself say the words. Harvey had been talking to him for over a year about embracing who he was. And about knocking guys down.

And it wasn't only Harvey; pitching coaches had long told him to establish the inside part of the plate. Dick Pole was the first; he was Moyer's pitching coach with the Cubs, first in Double A Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and then later with the big league club. Pole was brash and intimidating; some pitchers thought he was mean-spirited. Moyer, though, welcomed Pole's challenges; the coach's bellowing ways were just a sign of how committed he was to getting the best out of his charges. To this day, Moyer has Pole, whom Greg Maddux also credits as a major influence, on speed dial. Back then, Pole's message to Maddux and Moyer was the same:
Get inside. Be aggressive
.

Intellectually, Moyer knew Pole and other coaches were right, but he still hadn't been able to consistently get there, he still hadn't been able to just go for it and risk throwing into what he feared to be the wheelhouses of so many power hitters. So this was it, his last chance to get it done. His last chance to have the courage to be different.

“You're going to go there and be Jamie Moyer,” he said. “You're going to hit some guys. If that means they pick the ball up and say, ‘You dropped something,' that's fine. You're not going to give hitters too much credit. You're not going to be passive. You're going to throw what you want to throw, when you want to throw it. If you want to throw four changeups in a row, you'll throw four changeups in a row. No matter what anyone says. If you want to throw a 3–2 hook, you'll throw a 3–2 hook. No matter what the catcher calls.”

Moyer had spent so long worrying about what others thought of him. Now, with his back against the wall, going over everything he had learned from Harvey, he was starting to feel liberated. Baseball, he was starting to realize, was full of rules born of conventional wisdom. He was going to disregard the rules. If he was going to go out, at least he'd go out
his
way. This was going to be fun. He turned the radio back on.

When you hear a major league pitcher talking about being “comfortable” on the mound, there's a tendency to dismiss it as mere jockspeak, another boilerplate cliché. But pitchers know what pitchers mean when they mention comfort level. They know the surreal feeling of being out there on that mound, with memories and thoughts and outside stimuli seeming to fly at you in waves. Getting comfortable in that frenetic mental milieu is, Moyer was learning, what pitching was truly about. Later, he'd conclude that it was the one thing the sabermetric revolution overlooked.

He'd become one of the game's ultimate Moneyball pitchers—as Michael Lewis would chronicle in his best-selling book, in a scene where a handful of Oakland A's hitters try to prepare before facing Moyer by watching video of him. Indeed, when the trend toward advanced analytics inspired by the likes of Bill James started to take hold, Moyer thought it contributed mightily to a greater understanding of the game and added important statistical touchstones to the sport. But there was one caveat: the movement's abiding allegiance to rationality can run counter to the experience of actually being on the mound. Success there is as much mystical and emotional as rational.

The great relief pitcher Tug McGraw wrote in his 1974 autobiography
Screwball
of his stream-of-consciousness thoughts on the mound. It was like a kaleidoscope in his mind's eye, a blur of images whizzing past: “I began flashing on when I was a kid in Vallejo…and said to myself: Look, this mound looks just like the one in Wilson Park,” McGraw wrote. “Wilson Park is the place where we grew up playing ball in Vallejo twenty, maybe twenty five, years back.…Sometimes I look at my dad when he's in the stands in San Francisco and many things flash back. But most of the guys don't talk about that kind of thing because it sounds so corny.”

McGraw immersed himself in his distracting thoughts before narrowing his focus to just him and the batter. Sometimes, the images went away. Other times, they intruded on the task at hand. Moyer can relate; thoughts and memories come in waves. There are times when he'll hear a heckler and
want
to respond. It's as if the spectator has been plucked from the stands and is sitting right beside him. Later in his career, he'd silently thank that fan—if he could hear him, he knew it was a reminder that his focus wasn't intent enough. So he'd breathe deeply, find something to look at—a beer sign or a fan's shirt or an empty seat, anything to bore into—and he'd discard the distracting urge to call the heckler an idiot before returning his attention to the only thing that matters: his game of catch with his catcher.