Just Tell Me I Can't (4 page)

Still, Karen sensed that something was missing. Every day, when the dishwasher would complete its cycle, her husband would bound off the sofa as if the bullpen phone had just rung with orders to start throwing. It was a comical Sportsworld version of the final scene of
The Hurt Locker
, in which Sergeant First Class William James, played by Jeremy Renner, is back from war and shown going through the motions of domestic life—grocery shopping, tucking in the kids—only to realize he can't live without the action promised by another tour of duty. The film begins with the quote, “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug”; the same could be said of sports, especially at the highest levels of American pop culture. Like Renner's character, world-class athletes like Moyer are addicted to team camaraderie, and to the adrenaline rush of competition. Is that what's driving Moyer to be here, in Florida, at nearly forty-nine, following a year off, following reconstructive arm surgery, contemplating a comeback that none of the game's punditocracy can fathom?

Given Moyer's present-tense mind-set—courtesy of Dorfman—it's not always clear what is driving him. Though the charity work he and Karen do, helping kids in distress, never fails to move him to tears, he has long been stoic when it comes to the game. During a streak when he threw three consecutive no-hitters his junior year of high school, he'd come home and his mother, Joan, would ask, “Did you win?” To which, he'd simply reply, “Yeah.” She had to hear the minor detail that he'd thrown a no-hitter from neighbors.

So it is today. When asked why someone who has achieved so much and earned $83 million over his career would attempt a comeback at such an advanced age, Moyer thinks for a moment and then simply states, “Because I can.” He doesn't spend a lot of time inspecting his own motivations—that's for the know-it-alls in the media to do. Over the next year, as he makes his way back, there will be further insights as to why he refuses to go gently; for now, it's enough to reference another Harveyism: “Believe it and you will become it.” Moyer suspects he can still get batters out. Far from refusing to let go, he's still looking forward.

What is clearer is what's
not
driving him. Moyer doesn't seem interested in posterity; he doesn't even know how many career wins he has (267, thirty-sixth all-time), or how that compares to others who are in the Hall of Fame. (Jim Kaat is not in with 283 wins; Bert Blyleven is, with 287.) Nor does his other career options—like broadcasting—seem to excite him. When he was at ESPN's Bristol, Connecticut, campus last season, he'd think of something Tommy Lasorda used to tell his players, that there are three types of people: those who make things happen, those who watch what happens, and those who wonder what the hell just happened. He was not yet ready to be merely commenting on the action; he still felt the yearning to be in it.

So here he is, away from his close-knit family, holed up in a Clearwater Holiday Inn Express, rousing himself out of bed every day at 6 a.m. to put in three hours of rehab work—arm strengthening with light weights, running in four feet of water on a hydraulic-powered treadmill, countless “Jobe” exercises, named after Dr. Frank Jobe, the legendary sports orthopedic surgeon. One of the keys to Moyer's longevity has been the premium he's placed on working his serratus anterior muscle. That's the ridgelike muscle that runs from the upper eight or nine ribs at the front of the rib cage and attaches to the winglike bone at the back of the shoulder blades. The serratus generally gets ignored in the typical weight room routine, but it's critical to the upward shoulder rotation that is part of the pitching process.

Moyer calls this going to work every day. Its reward is to play long toss or throw a bullpen; if you want Jamie Moyer to come alive, ask what he's working on in his bullpen session. Like the neighboring men back home in Souderton who spent their Saturdays in their muscle Ts with their garage doors up and their bodies hunched over their car's precious engine, Moyer's bullpen sessions are when he tinkers and experiments, playing with new grips or infinitesimally nuanced tweaks to his windup. As much as he loves the competition of pitching against the best hitters in the world—and he's faced an astonishing 8.9 percent of all major league hitters in the entire history of the game—he may love those solitary bullpen sessions more, with their sense of trial and error and discovery.

Moyer is nothing if not a zealot about the notion of pitching as process. Baseball, as he's seen it and as he's lived it, is a game that rewards the steady application of principle; if you do the right, unselfish things—move runners along, pitch to contact, make adjustments based on the evidence before you—the results will come during the course of a long season. Paradoxically, if you're
only
focused on those results, they'll be heartbreakingly elusive.

Another partial—but only partial—explanation of why he's here is his lifelong passion for proving his doubters wrong, an utterly common motivation among elite athletes. There was, for instance, the high school basketball coach who told him he'd talked to Bill White, the former broadcaster and president of the National League, whose son played for a rival Pennsylvania school. The word came back: despite his three no-hitters his junior year, Moyer was a good high school pitcher who didn't throw hard enough to have a future in the game. There were the back-to-back releases from the Rangers and Cardinals organizations, respectively, in the early '90s. “We don't win when you pitch,” Joe Torre, St. Louis's manager at the time, explained to the 0–5 Moyer, whose initial thought was,
That's quite obvious
.

And there was, shortly thereafter, his own father-in-law, legendary college basketball coach Digger Phelps, suggesting he could call a good friend who sold RVs—maybe there was a sales position available. Moyer had immense respect for Phelps; at the same time, he told himself that his father-in-law knew basketball, not baseball. He reminded himself that in
his
sport, lefties mature late. When Digger made the RV offer, rather than feeling discouraged, Moyer was energized.
Okay, you're another one of those people who doesn't believe
, he said to himself.

It's a sports story as old as our sports, really: the athlete who turns the doubts of others into an internal I'll-show-you narrative. It's Michael Jordan, years later, summoning the pain of being cut from his high school team to fuel an otherworldly drive. It's Mike Schmidt, jump-starting a Hall of Fame career by replaying in his head the boos of his hometown fans, in order to prove them wrong. And it's Moyer, a losing pitcher cut multiple times, resolving in his early thirties that if his career were to flame out, he wouldn't go down without a fight. “This isn't how it's going to end for me,” he told Digger.

But coming back now, at nearly forty-nine, requires something deeper than responding to critics. It demands a reservoir of energy—much of it mental—that is all too uncommon among athletes in their twilight years. Steve Mix, who played thirteen seasons in the NBA and retired at age thirty-five, says he knew when it was time to go. “I was playing for Los Angeles and I saw a rebound come off the rim and I thought to myself, ‘I can get that,'” he recalls. “And then I thought, ‘Aw, screw it. I'll get the next one.'”

Mix is more the norm. Oftentimes the aging athlete still has the physical skills to succeed, but, having nothing left to prove, he lacks the intensity of his youth. “A lot of times, the competitive fire in guys goes out,” says former manager Tony La Russa. “Jamie's fitness level is amazing, but more impressive than that is his mental commitment. His fire is still burning bright. That's what I shake my head at.”

Moyer feels he owes it to himself to explore whether he can still get guys half his age out. He still tears up when he thinks about those words he uttered to Charlie Manuel on that 2010 night in St. Louis: “I can't throw.” It's the difference between giving something up voluntarily—and having it ripped from your grip. If he's going to go out, Moyer wants it to be on
his
terms.

Before leaving for Florida, Moyer spoke to Pat Gillick, his general manager during the peak years in Seattle and in Philly. Gillick stressed something that Moyer's career had always shown, that there's a difference between command and control on the mound. Having control means throwing strikes and not walking guys. Having command means “living on the black”: working the count by consistently attacking the black corners of the plate, which are not only tough pitches to hit, but also tough pitches for umpires to call balls. Pitchers call it “hitting your spots,” and it's often the difference between hitter's counts (2–0, 2–1, 3–0, 3–1) and pitcher's counts (0–1, 0–2, 1–2, 2–2). That difference can make all the difference: in 2009, major league hitters hit .391 when ahead 2–1 in the count and just .171 when behind 1–2. That's the difference of one pitch; baseball truly is a game of quarter-inches.

Moyer has always had good control, but it has long been his command that has set him apart. Gillick reassured Moyer that he could pitch
well
into his fifties—provided he still had it. “If you can still hit your spots, you'll be fine for years to come,” Gillick said.

Tomorrow, Moyer will face his first major step in this very deliberate process. There will be no fanfare, and hardly any witnesses, yet thirty pitches—mostly four-seam fastballs with a handful of two-seamers thrown in—might be all that's keeping Jamie Moyer from being a former big league pitcher.

Rollie DeArmas has the look of a lifer, one of those career baseball men who, though their names aren't widely known, are the keepers of the game. DeArmas is sixty years old and has spent much of his playing career in the minors. Since the late '70s, he's primarily been a minor league manager and coach, including a stint with the Phillies as their minor league catching instructor in 2005–6, when a Spanish-speaking converted second baseman named Carlos Ruiz was still learning the position.

When DeArmas got a call from one of the Phillies trainers to come by today and catch Jamie Moyer, he didn't know what to expect. Wasn't this guy retired? Now, crouching behind home plate, his eyebrows rise in surprise when the first fastball hisses in. For all the jokes about Moyer's lack of velocity, up close, a baseball traveling at roughly 80 miles per hour still seems fast. But it's not the speed that surprises DeArmas—it's the location. Right over the black part of the plate, down and in to a righthanded batter.

On the mound, Moyer is wearing a red Phillies cap and workout shirt. He is pitching out of the stretch, with a free and easy delivery that's notable for its lack of grunts or violent, Lincecum-like gyrations. His mechanics seem effortless. To the untrained eye, it would seem that he might be barely trying.

Pitch number two hits the same spot. He's in a rhythm now. Pitches three through six all catch the same corner.

“How am I doing, Rollie?” Moyer asks.

“Outstanding!” DeArmas yells back. “Just like 2008!” Moyer led the world champion Phillies with 16 wins that year, to go with a 3.71 ERA.

Around pitch twelve, a fastball is up and over the plate. “Damn!” Moyer calls out upon its release, before it's even smacked DeArmas's glove. But then he's back on the edge, or just barely off it until pitch fifteen, when he signals DeArmas to the other corner. He's just as accurate on that side, the ball hitting DeArmas's glove either over the black or an inch inside to a lefty batter. Before quitting, he throws some two-seamers; they look like a straight fastball, only to drop at the last possible instant before reaching DeArmas. All in all, he's thrown thirty-five pitches, and for at least thirty of them, DeArmas didn't have to move the target.

Baseball lifers are not prone to bluster. They've been on too many all-night bus rides, in so many rinky-dink parks, seen so many phenoms that never pan out, to get too excited about a single throwing session, no matter how promising. Yet as they prepare to leave the field, DeArmas's face is frozen in a wide smile as he shakes Moyer's hand. “Outstanding!” he exclaims.

Moyer walks the empty hallway leading to the trainer's room, where he'll have his shoulder and arm loosened and worked on before doing another half hour on an elliptical machine. He whistles as he walks, tossing the ball to himself, kidlike, as he goes. As he's on the trainer's table, his shoulder being stretched, DeArmas comes bounding in, still buzzing.

“I am in total shock!” the coach says. “I didn't expect you to throw
that
good.”

“How was the sink, Rollie?” Moyer asks.

“The sink was outstanding, unbelievable. And the velocity—it was
better
than in '08.”

“Yeah, well, I'm brand-new now,” Moyer says, laughing at DeArmas's excitement. As a lifer himself, Moyer will play it closer to type. He's encouraged by his command today, but he knows there is a long way to go. He had his fastballs today. Now on to the next challenge: over the next three weeks he'll reintroduce each one of his pitches, until he has command of his full repertoire.

Moyer essentially throws four pitches. He thought he'd have no problem rediscovering the four-seamer, but he's extra pleased that the sink of his two-seamer impressed Rollie. It's the grip that causes that action on the ball. The seams are on a baseball for a reason; when you hold a ball along them, with your fingers actually resting on them, you create backspin, which makes the ball suddenly drop.

Next will come the changeup, which Moyer first learned from a teammate in college. The first time he tried throwing it, a series of pitches went sailing over the backstop. The challenge is to maintain the same arm speed as the fastball, otherwise the hitter will pick up on the decreased speed before the pitcher even releases the ball. So how is it that Moyer's changeup is typically ten miles per hour slower than his fastball? Grip, again: he holds the ball with the three nondominant fingers of his left hand. But his index finger and thumb aren't pushing behind the pitch, thereby reducing its force and increasing its deception.