Just Tell Me I Can't (9 page)

The stakes were higher in the operating room than on the baseball diamond, of course, but the same principle applies: beginning in Toledo, Moyer was learning how to rescue.

It started when he began mulling over the notion of risk on the mound. Used to be, surrendering an early homer would send Moyer's confidence level on a torturous descent. You never want to give up a home run, but Moyer was now finding that sometimes it wasn't the worst thing. It was preferable to the big inning, where the opposing team litters the field with line drives, the lineup bats around and puts four or five runs on the board. Moyer was heeding Dorfman and changing his thinking when he realized that sometimes “a home run can be a rally killer.”

After a homer, the man who would go on to give up more dingers than any pitcher in history would walk toward the catcher and ump, glove extended, urgently wanting that next ball in his grip. Instead of thinking,
I hope I don't give up another home run
, he'd silently say to his opposition,
Okay. That's it. You're done
. The slate was wiped clean and he was free, as Harvey would say, to “pay attention to the task in front of you, not to the runners behind you.” Besides, giving up a home run but avoiding a big inning, he was finding, can give a pitcher as much momentum as striking out the side. The feeling that you've dodged a bullet, with its implication that this just might be your day, became a confidence booster.

Instead of being something to dread, adversity on the mound was an opportunity: something to overcome. On July 25, Moyer was stricken with a bad stomach flu. “When I went to bed, I wasn't feeling good,” he told the
Toledo Blade
. “When I woke up I was throwing up and had diarrhea.” He allowed at least one runner in every inning but one, winning a hard-fought seven-inning outing. He pitched out of four jams with runners in scoring position, thanks to 12 ground-ball outs and six strikeouts. He was starting to think deeply about the game. “I'd like to be able to get ground balls more consistently,” he said after the gutty performance. “I'd rather have the ground balls, because then you can get the double plays. A strikeout is only one out.”

Instead of cowering at its prospect, Moyer started to welcome moments of potential calamity. When on June 29 his team booted three balls behind him against Pawtucket, he realized he could do the natural thing and fall back on the gift of a ready-made excuse—
my teammates threw the game away!
—or he could embrace the challenge of overcoming the deficit his defense had put him in. He went seven innings, striking out six and spreading out seven hits—all dinky singles—for the win.

With the onset of fall came the certainty of a September call-up to the Tigers. But the phone call from manager Sparky Anderson never came. Instead, the parent club, in another display of baseball conventional wisdom run amok, called up the hard-throwing twenty-two-year-old Scott Aldred, who was 4–6 with a 5.13 ERA. Moyer's season ended. He was a free agent yet again. But more important was that he was finally thinking for himself, instead of blindly buying into the shibboleths of the game. He was once again without a team, but this time he
felt
like a major league pitcher. Now, this time, would any major league teams have interest in him?

I
n 1974, actor Lee Majors appeared on America's TV screens, running in slow motion while a dramatic voice-over intoned, “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was. Better, stronger, faster.” It was the debut of the prime-time drama
The Six Million Dollar Man
, which quickly achieved pop culture icon status. The same year, life started imitating cheesy TV show when, not far from where Majors's slow-motion acrobatics were being filmed, Dr. Frank Jobe performed a radical new procedure on the marred left elbow of Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Tommy John. It was a medical development that would change professional sports.

As pitchers age, the stress on the elbow accumulates. Tendons get inflamed, scar tissue develops. Tommy John was a thirty-one-year-old starting pitcher with a 13–3 record when all the strain culminated in the tearing of his ulnar collateral ligament—a career-ending injury. Or was it? Dr. Jobe was the Dodgers' team physician at the time, and he decided to take a gamble: he'd detach a tendon from John's right forearm (tendons in the hamstring or calf will also do) and implant it in place of the torn ligament. It was a long shot: the graft required removing muscle in order to drill holes into the arm's ulna and humerus bones, running the risk of infection or fracture. There was less than a 10 percent chance of success. John was likely looking at a future that would have him returning to his hometown of Terre Haute, Indiana, where he'd sell cars at his friend's dealership and regale customers with tales of a major league career cut short due to injury. Instead, John pitched fourteen more seasons, winning 164 games after the groundbreaking surgery. Today, some 11 percent of major league pitchers have had Tommy John surgery.

The same year that Lee Majors's character and Tommy John's arm were being rebuilt, a sports medicine prodigy graduated from Middletown High School in New York's Hudson River valley. Just as Jamie Moyer grew up on the baseball tutelage of his father, the man who would ultimately repair his arm came of age at his own father's knee. From the age of ten, David Altchek would follow his orthopedic surgeon father, Martin, on his rounds at Horton Hospital. He spent his high school years removing patients' casts.

After college at Columbia (where he played tennis) and medical school at Cornell, Altchek became an orthopedic surgeon in his own right at New York's Hospital for Special Surgery. That's where he invented something called the “Docking Procedure” for use in Tommy John surgeries—a less invasive way of getting to the bone. Altchek's method didn't require drilling as many holes or detaching any muscle. Suddenly the success rate of Tommy John surgery vastly improved.

But Altchek wasn't done yet. In recent years, he had noticed that more and more pitchers, particularly the older ones, were tearing their muscle tendon, known as the flexor pronator, in addition to the ulnar ligament. Typical Tommy John surgery had focused too much on reconstructing the ligament and hadn't devoted enough attention to repairing the torn tendon.

Outside of Dr. Jobe, a holy trinity of sports surgeons had gained notoriety in the last decade, their names appearing in sports pages almost as often as those of the athletes themselves. There was Dr. Lewis Yocum in Los Angeles, Dr. James Andrews in Alabama, and Altchek. Cases like Moyer's, where both the ligament and tendon had torn cleanly off the elbow's bone, were quickly becoming the province of Altchek. After that first injury while pitching for the Phillies in St. Louis in July 2010, Moyer went to Los Angeles for a consultation with Yocum, whom he already knew. When Yocum saw the extent of both tears, he referred the case to Altchek.

Now it has been a year since Altchek performed Moyer's surgery, and a mere two months since Moyer's return to the mound in Florida. Spring training starts in three months; within weeks, scouts from major league clubs will be coming to the tiny town of Poway, California, where they will approach an unassuming ranch house belonging to Dom Johnson, a kind of pitching whisperer, who has a mound and backstop in his backyard, and they'll determine if Jamie Moyer is ready to be a major league pitcher again. That is, if Altchek doesn't issue a verdict today that beats them to it.

Uh-oh. Is that a frown? David Altchek doesn't typically frown. The fiftysomething sports medicine all-star is known for his ebullient bedside manner. When Moyer first came to see him a year ago, not only did Altchek not laugh his new patient out of the examining room when the then forty-eight-year-old Moyer broached the subject of pitching in the major leagues again, but he encouraged Moyer's comeback dream. “Any other respectable, normal doctor might have had second thoughts, but I'm always overly optimistic,” Altchek would later recall. “I had a strong feeling we could fix it. What I didn't know is how he'd heal.”

Now, with his neatly coiffed coal-black hair that calls to mind a
GQ
model—he appeared in a Ralph Lauren ad campaign a decade ago—Altchek is turning Moyer's arm every which way and looking uncharacteristically grim. Or at least perplexed. He feels Moyer's other arm, the right one. Back now to the left. He has Moyer flex and stretch. He pokes around some more.

“Wow,” he says, looking up at a wide-eyed Moyer. “Your body is reacting in ways I'm afraid we don't really understand.”

There's a pause. Ever stoic, Moyer is expressionless. “What do you mean?”

Now Altchek smiles, for he's about to talk in a decidedly unclinical way. “I mean you're some kind of mutant,” he says. “As players age, their cells need more time to recover. When I feel around here”—Altchek starts massaging the back of Moyer's elbow, where the reconstruction took place—“it feels soft, elastic, and normal. It's like we never did anything. It's bizarre. You're some kind of healing freak.”

Moyer is relieved to hear this, but he has questions, of course. Few athletes have been as in charge of their own rehab as Moyer. Even before this surgery, he had been the least passive athlete in the clubhouse trainer's room. Through the years, he'd taken to half-jokingly telling his teams' trainers, “
I'll
decide,” when discussing his course of treatment, an attitude he picked up from his Seattle teammate Jay Buhner, a clubhouse leader who was a veteran of countless sports injuries. In the Mariners' clubhouse, there was a diagram of a skeletal structure annotated with all of Buhner's conditions; Jay had had no choice but to take charge of his care, lest he be a mere passenger in his own career.

Back home in San Diego, Moyer had been working out with a physical therapist recommended by his friend Trevor Hoffman, Yousef Ghandour. Ghandour had a way of making Moyer feel like he was a full partner in the rehab process. When Moyer threw recently in Dom Johnson's backyard, Ghandour noticed something.

“He said, ‘At about pitch thirty-six or thirty-seven, I noticed that your hand speed slowed down,'” Moyer tells Altchek now.

“Does that surprise you?” Altchek says. “Being a freak of nature—which you are—doesn't help you as much with endurance. The painful part of physical gifts is, you know, you still have to build up your endurance.”

“Well, my therapist said, at the end of my throwing session, it looked like I found it—”

“Ah, yes,” Altchek says. “That's the phenomenon we don't understand that well—the famous ‘second wind.'”

“Well, can I do strenuous elbow work now?”

“So now that you're out of the year, you can do elbow work, you just have to listen to it,” Altchek says. “We have a lot of guys fail this. The flexor pronator is really slow to heal and what has screwed us is not the ligament, but the flexor pronator in the first year. So that's why we take a very cautious approach. So if you start to get any tendonitis, you have to back off.”

“So pronations, supinations, manual resistance?”

“I'm totally good with that,” Altchek says. “We're out of the danger zone.”

As Moyer has aged, he's learned that recovery time is just as important as the time he's spent working out. He won't go hard every day, like he might have in his more macho (but, not coincidentally, less successful) youth. Now Altchek tells him the same principle applies in rehab. “Recovery is underestimated in our athletic world,” he says. “We're always like, ‘More is better, more is better.' Sometimes going slow or even doing nothing is best.”

Altchek remembers something he's been meaning to ask. “You still using the steel balls?”

When last they met, Moyer told Altchek of his history with a couple of roughly one-inch steel bearing balls. Back in college, Moyer's coach, George Bennett, took him on a pilgrimage to Veterans Stadium, where he met Gus Hoefling and—gulp—Steve Carlton. The meeting with Carlton was perfunctory, except for the fact that Moyer noticed the presence of a couple of steel balls that, Hoefling explained, could help with a pitcher's dexterity. Ever since, Moyer has kept a pair in his locker. Every day, when opening mail or doing paperwork in the clubhouse, he'll absentmindedly conduct his own improvised dexterity drill, first rolling the balls around his fingers with his palm up, trying to keep them together. Then he'll flip his palm over, facing downward, and roll them without letting them drop. In the Philly clubhouse, Moyer turned young pitcher Cole Hamels on to the same drill.

When Moyer confirms that he's still using the bearing balls, Altchek shakes his head. “Do you even realize how brilliant that is?” he says. “The muscles in your forearm control the fingers, so you're really extending your workout of the forearm into the hand and fingers. I would have never thought of that. I'm telling all of my patients to do it—courtesy of Jamie Moyer.”

Moyer laughs. Altchek is a man of science, and there's no clear scientific explanation for Moyer's weird healing talents. But he can make some guesses. Moyer's dedication to rehab is as good as Altchek has seen, but what sets Moyer apart is that, in effect, he's been preparing for this challenge his whole professional career. While with the Texas Rangers in 1989, he suffered a lat strain—an injury to the latissimus dorsi muscle, which stretches from the upper back to underneath the armpit. That off-season, he rehabbed the injury with a physical therapist in a program that worked his arm, shoulder, and core with light weights. By the time spring training rolled around, he had never felt stronger. “Why not do this
every
off-season?” he asked himself. From then on, even though he was no longer injured, he'd embark upon a prophylactic rehab regimen every off-season, strengthening key body parts—including the all-important serratus muscles—and steeling his body for the trauma to come. Years of preventive rehab may not only have staved off his injury until after he'd pitched 4,000 innings, it may also be stimulating a faster-than-normal recovery.

But there is another, less scientific key to Moyer's healing powers. In Dorfman's
The Mental Game of Baseball
, his guru prescribes an imaginative cure to pain—literally. “Begin to imagine and experience your injured part mending and becoming whole,” Dorfman writes. “Experience it becoming stronger and healthier every day. Then imagine yourself performing exactly as you want to perform, well bodied and whole, without pain or weakness.”

At Karen's prodding—“close your eyes and feel it healing,” she'd implore her husband after his workouts—Moyer would visualize himself healthy and feeling stronger every day.

“Whatever you're doing, keep it up,” Altchek says now, still shaking his head in wonder. Before officially releasing his patient, Altchek has two parting thoughts. The first, with a sardonic smile: “You really ought to think about donating your body to science.” The second, shaking Moyer's hand: “See ya on
SportsCenter
.”

Bounding out of the Hospital for Special Surgery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Jamie Moyer has been given the green light to defy all the smart money once again and make it back to a big league mound. For a year, all he's wanted is the chance to write his own ending to his career, as opposed to having an injury close the door for him.

Tonight, on the West Side, the Moyer Foundation will throw a gala celebration and fund-raiser, hosted by NBC's Stone Phillips. A few hundred well-heeled guests, including former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, who lost his father when he was fourteen, will see video footage from Camp Erin, the nation's largest network of child bereavement camps, including one in each Major League Baseball city. They'll see kids who have lost loved ones, comforted by and bonding with other kids who have suffered loss. They'll hear from Karen and Jamie, whose throat will catch when he talks about how humbled he's been by the impact Camp Erin has had.

That's later. For now, as he's walking down Fifth Avenue, a car passes by and the driver leans on his horn. “Good luck, Moyer!” he shouts, roaring by. Moyer laughs. It feels like this comeback is really about to happen. “What an amazing journey you're on,” I say to him.

“
Everyone's
journey is amazing,” Jamie Moyer says. The next step on
his
journey is to get back to the big leagues. Again.