Hoping you will do something means you don’t believe you can.
—Harvey Dorfman
He’s been on a steady diet of salads and electrolytes, so on this, the eve of his return to a big league mound for something other than tossing some pain-in-the-ass batting practice, Jamie Moyer is treating himself: a burger and a beer, on a deck overlooking a serene lake in Scottsdale, Arizona.
He takes a gulp and looks both ways before speaking. He’s got to talk softly, because he doesn’t want to broadcast a hint of vulnerability. He leans forward to make his admission: “I’m terrified.”
Of what? His eyes widen at the thought. “That I just can’t do it anymore, after all this.” He sighs. “That this is it. Or that I’m going to be seen as some type of damned novelty act. I am so outta here if I think that’s happening.”
It’s a week into his twenty-fifth spring training with his eighth team, the Colorado Rockies. Everything he does, he senses coaches and trainers and media looking at this gray-haired guy with the wispy stubble of a beard, and they’re searching for signs. How’s his arm? Is he limping? He feels like he’s always being evaluated, whether it’s during pitchers’ fielding practice, or the distance run he opts to take with the rest of the staff, even though he gave up running outside years ago in favor of the HydroWorx 2000, an underwater treadmill.
In the field, clubhouse, or bullpen, coaches approach and, with a concerned look and soothing tone, gently touch his arm. “How you feeling today?”
Moyer issues his standard response: “I’m good, how are you?” as though he were misinterpreting the question for polite chitchat.
They tell him not to push himself, to take it easy. Eat well. “I don’t know about this place,” he tells Karen in their nightly call. He’s staying in the guesthouse of Jeff Fassero, his Seattle teammate in the late ’90s, now a minor league pitching coach. His accommodations contain everything he needs: a bed, a washing machine, and a color TV set that gets the MLB Network. “Everyone is really nice. Almost too nice. The good teams I’ve been on, there’s an edge to them. You don’t want to say a meanness, but at least a hardness. They weren’t so concerned with how everybody is feeling.”
He’s pitched two batting practice sessions. “I stunk,” he says. Nothing new there; Moyer’s never been a good batting practice pitcher. He tries to keep the ball off the fat part of the bat; the batting practice hitter expects all moon balls into the sweet spot. The more Moyer tried to comply, the more he had no idea where the ball was going. In the clubhouse, when asked about his batting practice stint, Moyer quipped, “I kind of look at my whole career as live batting practice.”
Tomorrow, though, comes an intra-squad scrimmage. Teammates Jason Giambi and Todd Helton are managing the two respective squads. Jeremy Guthrie, a newcomer who went 9–17 for the Orioles last season but is an innings eater and is expected to be the staff ace, will be one starter, Moyer the other. He seems more nervous for this than he did for his 2008 World Series start.
When it’s time to leave, Moyer slaps down some bills. “What’s the worst that can happen?” he asks, getting up to go. “I can’t find the plate? I hit a couple of guys? Big deal. I can jump in the car and be home in five hours.”
At first, you think: bravado. Then you realize: it’s just Jamie channeling Harvey, lowering the stakes, minimizing the pressure. It’s what Tug McGraw was getting at years ago when he said, “Ten million years from now, when the sun burns out and the earth is just a frozen iceball hurtling through space, nobody’s going to care whether or not I got this guy out.” If you’re okay not attaining your goal, you’re more likely to get it.
Baseball aficionados fall into two groups: the craftsmen and the poets. Players tend to be the former; they’re often too busy trying to get better at the game—and too distracted by their frustrations in it—to spend a lot of time waxing sentimental about its bigger meaning. The hardest-core fans tend toward the latter; they’re the ones for whom the movie Field of Dreams is more spiritual road map than it is the story of a guy who built a baseball field in his backyard.
But such is baseball’s allure that the two groups are seldom mutually exclusive. Moyer is the consummate craftsman, a pitcher who has thought about the act of throwing a baseball literally every day of his adult life—indeed, for most days of his entire life. Yet for all his professional stoicism, and for all the countless hours of working out, the mental preparations, the tweaks in the bullpen sessions, the sheer number of pitches thrown—58,485, fifth all-time—he is not just a baseball craftsman, especially at this time of year. Moyer, like so many of baseball’s lifers, quietly attends to his craft with the soul of a poet.
How else to explain the rush of awe he felt when, after eighteen months away from the game, he first set foot on the baseball diamond at Salt River Fields, the Colorado Rockies’ state-of-the-art facility in Scottsdale? It was so green and so familiar; the sound of bat on ball filled the air—the true harbinger of spring, as Bill Veeck once said. Through the years, Moyer often felt this way on day one, humbled that he was but a tiny part of an epic history—the history of a game, but also, corny as it sounds, of a country. But it was particularly poignant now, because a part of him had wondered if he’d ever feel this way again. Day one of spring training 2012 found him meeting new teammates, being handed a uniform, running with his pitching brethren. In a larger sense, it found him feeling like a rookie again, breathlessly wondering what the future holds.
The Colorado Rockies of 2012 are in need of Moyer’s experience. Last year’s version lost 89 games, but it was the way they lost that led general manager Dan O’Dowd to want to change the team’s culture. The 2011 Rockies were young, cocky, and complacent—a toxic combination. Now O’Dowd has stocked up on veterans, seeking to import the type of work ethic and pride that goes into winning baseball. The Rockies very well could open the Cactus League season starting six players born in the 1970s—and one, Moyer, from the ’60s. There’s Jason Giambi, forty-one; Todd Helton, thirty-eight; Casey Blake, thirty-eight; Marco Scutaro, thirty-six; Ramon Hernandez, thirty-five; Wil Nieves, thirty-four; Jeremy Guthrie, thirty-three; and Michael Cuddyer, also thirty-three.
It’s no accident, then, that Moyer is assigned a locker in the clubhouse between pitching prospects Drew Pomeranz and Tyler Chatwood. Pomeranz is a 6´5˝, twenty-three-year-old lefty with a gun for an arm. Chatwood, twenty-two, is 5´11˝ but can hit the mid-90s with his fastball. Some scouts had likened him to a young Roy Oswalt. Manager Jim Tracy, only seven years older than Moyer, pairs Moyer and Pomeranz as long-toss partners. The movement on Moyer’s ball takes Pomeranz aback, but it’s the seriousness with which Moyer approaches his craft that Tracy and O’Dowd are hoping rubs off on the younger pitchers.
But change isn’t coming to the Rockies solely in the form of new personnel. Tracy talks about a new attitude, one based on better team chemistry and “authentic relationships.” To that end, early in camp, each player is given an assignment: to research a teammate—without using the team’s media guide—and stand in the middle of the clubhouse and introduce him to the rest of the squad.
Most of the players simply google the teammate they’ve randomly chosen from a hat, then get up and deliver the predictable: where the subject went to school, what his stats were in the minors, in a hesitant monotone that lasts all of a minute.
Moyer picks Guthrie’s name from the hat. Rather than do a simple Internet search, that night he procures the phone number for Guthrie’s wife and mother and contacts both. The next day, when it’s his turn to speak about Guthrie, Moyer does a five-minute tour de force. “Jeremy was the state chess champion in Oregon,” he tells the Rockies. “But he wasn’t always so well behaved. When he was a little boy, he once strayed from his mother and the police had to find him. He also drove his Big Wheel very fast down hills. He also used to sell candy bars from his locker at school, until the authorities found out about it and shut him down. He was kind of an outlaw.”
Not one of the Rockies put as much preparation into the exercise as Moyer, which was entirely purposeful. “If I’m given an assignment, I’m going to prepare to the fullest,” he says. “That’s something the young guys have to learn.”
Moyer is right to fear becoming a sideshow. That’s what happened to Satchel Paige, who at fifty-nine started a game for the Kansas City Athletics in 1965. Paige, the legendary Negro League player, was signed for one day by A’s owner Charlie Finley as a marketing ploy. Paige pitched three innings; between them, he sat in the bullpen in a rocking chair being tended to by an attractive young woman dressed as a nurse. When he was taken out, the lights dimmed and the crowd serenaded him with the song “The Old Grey Mare.”
Moyer doesn’t want the sentimental treatment. He wants a chance and he wants to be taken seriously. As spring training dawned, he was already getting a sense of just how easily this quest could turn into punch line. When it was announced that the Rockies had invited him to camp, a blog headline blared, “Rockies Offer Jamie Moyer Chance for Career-Ending Injury.” Not a day goes by without someone—announcer, writer, coach, or fan—referencing his age. The media coverage seems intent on unearthing every conceivable factoid in order to underscore the same conclusion: the dude is old.
To wit: He qualifies for his AARP card come November. He is older than eight of the game’s managers and sixteen general managers. His team’s best player, Troy Tulowitzki, was all of twenty months old when Moyer made his major league debut, and four of the pitchers he is competing against for a spot in the starting rotation weren’t even born yet.
As for the rotation, Guthrie and twenty-four-year-old Jhoulys Chacin are locks for two of the Rockies’ five starting spots. Chatwood, Pomeranz, twenty-eight-year-old Guillermo Moscoso, twenty-three-year-old Alex White, twenty-seven-year-old Josh Outman, and twenty-five-year-old Juan Nicasio—making a major comeback himself, from a broken neck—are all competing with Moyer for the remaining three slots.
But Moyer doesn’t consider the kids—to Moyer, the father of a twenty-one-year-old, they’re all kids—his competitors. No, his yardstick is his health—can his body hold up? And his true competition is time itself.
He’d been told he’d have a chance to make the rotation, but what did that mean? At forty-nine and not having thrown a big league pitch in nearly eighteen months, how long would the Rockies give him? As he made his way to the mound on a practice field for the intra-squad game, Moyer wondered, Will I be cleaning out my locker in a couple of hours?
Likely part of his anxiety stemmed from the fact that he was going to war short on ammo. He’d decided to not throw the cutter early in spring, because it was coming out flat from his hand. He was convinced he didn’t yet have the arm strength necessary to give the ball its bite, that sudden dipping motion down toward the righthanded hitter’s back ankle. So the pitch he’d come to rely on so heavily late in his career was on the shelf.
Rather than feel ill-prepared, though, Moyer completed his warm-up tosses and felt his inner Harvey kicking in, just like old times. Task. At. Hand. The first hitter was outfielder Eric Young Jr. Moyer held back a smile, for he remembered that nearly two decades ago, Eric Young Sr. had been 0 for 12 against him. Like his father, Junior hit a Moyer changeup lazily into the outfield for an easy out.
In two innings, Moyer threw 42 pitches, 27 for strikes. Not his usual command, but he thought, I’ll take it. Between the nerves and the absence of the cutter, he felt relieved to give up only three hits, one run, and no walks while striking out one. Late in his second inning of work, utility infielder Jordan Pacheco, on the bubble to make the team, fielded a ground ball on the foul side of third base and was about to toss it to some kids in the bleachers.
“Hey!” Moyer barked. “That’s my ball!”
Pacheco froze as his pitcher came off the mound toward him.
“I don’t take your bat away after you foul one off, do I?” Moyer asked, holding his glove up.
“Sorry, sorry,” Pacheco stammered, while both dugouts exploded in nervous laughter.
Afterwards, Moyer apologized to the kid, who had no idea this kindly old gentleman in the clubhouse could be such a hardass between the lines. Manager Tracy and pitching coach Bob Apodaca both congratulated Moyer, remarking that he’d shown a little rust, but the test would be how his body would feel tomorrow. That night, he felt relieved. The next morning, he felt ecstatic, because his arm felt like it could go another few innings already.
On the night before his first start of the spring, Jamie Moyer has a hankering for a cheesesteak, that artery-clogging Philadelphia delicacy. When it comes to gustatory cravings, he is as stubborn as he is on the mound. In some ways, though, finding a credible cheesesteak in the Arizona desert is a taller order than facing Pujols with runners on.
Jeff Fassero comes to the rescue, however. He alerts his boarder to Corleone’s in Scottsdale. “It’s a little place in a strip mall,” Fassero says. “But the guy is from Philly.”
That’s all Moyer needs to hear. We’re off in search of Moyer’s “cheese wit,” Philly shorthand for a steak sandwich with cheese (provolone, in Moyer’s case) and fried onions.
When he walks into Corleone’s, Moyer is transported back to his roots. On the wall is a framed copy of the Philadelphia Daily News front page when the Phillies—his Phillies—won the World Series in 1980. “We Win!” it reads in big bold black letters. It’s the front page Moyer saw Tug McGraw hold aloft during his remarks in the parade celebration, giving voice to years of baseball frustration. “All through baseball history, Philadelphia has had to take a backseat to New York City,” McGraw said. “Well, New York City can take this world championship and stick it, ’cause we’re number one!”
Next to the Daily News cover is a framed Pat Burrell number 5 Phillies jersey, signed by Pat the Bat himself. Moyer is standing at the counter, taking in the memorabilia that line the walls and looking at the menu board, when rushing out of the open kitchen comes a wild-eyed, well-built young man.
“I gotta thank you! I just gotta thank you!” Giovanni Caranci is saying, coming out from behind the counter, arm extended for what turns out to be part handshake, part South Philly hug. “I gotta thank you for the World Series!”
Caranci, who relocated to Arizona a few years ago and opened a chain of Philly-themed sandwich and pizza shops, had season tickets to the magical 2008 season. “I think I remember you,” Moyer says. “Didn’t I get you and your son some stuff?”
Caranci is stunned—one day, Moyer tossed some T-shirts from the bullpen to him. They reconnect like old war vets; Caranci wishes Moyer were back with the Phils this season. They talk about this year’s Phillies team. “A lot is going to depend on Roy,” Moyer says of ace pitcher Roy Halladay. “He didn’t look good the other night.”
In fact, Moyer watched Halladay, his friend and fellow Dorfman pupil, and immediately texted him: “Looks like you’re drifting to the plate.”
On this night, though, he can waste little time worrying about Halladay’s mechanics; he spent today looking at his. Tomorrow will be his first start, but four days ago he made his first appearance of the season (not counting the intra-squad exhibition), and he spent this morning looking at video from the outing.
Moyer pitched two innings in relief against San Francisco at Scottsdale Stadium. The Rockies had shelled starter Tim Lincecum for five runs in two innings by the time Moyer came in. His command was much improved; in the fourth inning, his mix of fastball and changeup led to three straight soft groundouts to second base. In the fifth, he gave up a single, the only one he’d surrender. He stepped off the mound and turned to second base umpire Dana DeMuth.
“I was absent last year,” Moyer said. “Can I still bring my hand to my mouth on the mound?”
DeMuth laughed. “Yes, you can.”
“Okay. Just checking.”
In two scoreless innings, he threw only 22 pitches; Giants catcher Chris Stewart was seen muttering to himself on his way back to the dugout after flailing at a two-strike changeup.
“I was terrible,” Giants ace Lincecum said after the game, before being asked to comment on Moyer. “Wow! He’s forty-nine. He’s going back out there.”
While Moyer was happy with his command, something felt off. The cutter still isn’t ready. More importantly, every pitch should ideally come from the same release point, lest the pitcher tip the batter off to the forthcoming pitch, and Moyer was not in the same arm slot on every throw.
In the last decade, watching video had become all the rage in the major leagues. Every team has a video coordinator, and players and coaches spend countless hours “breaking down tape,” deconstructing at-bats and pitching sequences into intricate frame-by-frame parts. During games, hitters will leave the dugout to view their last at-bat, and pitchers will sneak looks between innings.
Moyer is not a video devotee. Part of that is generational—he’s more comfortable with his own hand-scrawled notes from his decades of confrontations on the mound; beyond those, he relies on what, as he puts it, each at-bat is telling him in real time, what he’s gleaning from a hitter’s body language or expression, not unlike a poker player looking to identify and exploit the opposition’s tell.
Which isn’t to say he never watches video—Moyer is too open-minded to dismiss it out of hand. He just doesn’t rely on it as much as other players. He doesn’t trust the centerfield camera angle, so he can never be sure where a pitch actually is, and for Moyer, where the pitch is, its exact placement, is the whole ball game.
He watches himself on video when he’s trying to solve a particular mechanical mystery, but even to his keen eye, the nuanced differences in pitch-by-pitch arm slot positioning evade him. He’s searching for a feeling when he throws, the familiar sensation of muscle memory at work, and he’s found that watching tape of himself in pursuit of that can actually distract him from finding it.
Moyer does watch hitters’ at-bats. He subscribes to a major league service that makes available on his iPad every at-bat in the league. He’ll watch and search for what he calls hitters’ “jam spots,” the farthest location inside that a hitter will offer at and be unable to keep in fair play. Once he has the jam spot, he’ll work it time and again, until the batter proves he can get around on it.
This morning he looked at tape to see if he could discern his arm slot, but instead he noticed something else. “My right hip was leaning too far to the plate on my leg kick,” he says now, taking a bite of his cheesesteak and waving a thumbs-up in the air to the nervous proprietor keeping an eye on him from the kitchen.
Now he puts the sandwich down and rises in the middle of Corleone’s, starting his pitching motion from the stretch right next to the condiments stand while other customers look on. He shows what he’s been doing—the right hip is out front, leaning toward home perhaps an inch and a nanosecond ahead of where it should be—compared to the motion he practiced this morning. “So, okay, now this is something I have to work on,” he says. A lefty leading too much with the right hip runs the risk of opening up too soon. That’s when balls get up in the zone and when pitches targeted inside to righthanded batters can catch too much of the plate.
He sits down and returns his attention to the cheesesteak. Tomorrow, he’ll start against the White Sox in a three-inning stint. For now, though, he’s just a Phillies fan, the memorabilia and the food taking him back to another time. “Remember Big Bull Luzinski?” he says, referring to the Phillies team of his youth. “Now there was a tough out.”
Luzinski was preceded in the lineup by the majestically talented Mike Schmidt, though for most of Moyer’s adolescence Schmidt was an underachiever who was a target of the Philly boo-birds. It wasn’t lost on Moyer that Schmidt turned an underachieving career into a Hall of Fame one through work ethic and by figuring out the game.
“Very few in the game worked as hard as I did, and I never got credit for that,” Schmidt said in 1995, sounding as old-school as Moyer. “I’m talking about being consumed by the sport. Players today come to the park, watch some TV, read a newspaper, make a sandwich, have a few laughs, break out the cards, ease into their uniforms, and then it’s time for batting practice. When I got to the park, I started preparing immediately. I was all business.”
It was long before Harvey and the era of the sports shrink, but Schmidt got better because—not in spite of—his cerebral nature. “I went from ducking every time they threw a breaking ball to being the best righthanded breaking ball hitter in the league, because I had the patience and the drive to learn the game,” Schmidt recalled. It’s true—it was arguably Schmidt’s analytical nature, not his natural talent, that turned him into a Hall of Famer. When his career started to wane in the mid-’80s, it was his studied approach to the craft of hitting that resurrected him. He changed his approach, started hitting down on the ball, and began using the whole field instead of trying to pull everything.
“At this level,” Moyer says now, “everyone is talented, or they wouldn’t be here. What separates the best from the rest is this.” He taps his head.
This waltz down memory lane concludes with Moyer’s last bite of his cheesesteak. “You can’t get good cheesesteaks outside of Philly,” he says, noting that a shop in, of all places, Bradenton, Florida, also makes a mean one. He wipes his mouth. “This is a very good one.”
As their son completes his warm-up tosses, Jim and Joan Moyer are a study in contrasts. They have just arrived, along with daughter Jill, on a flight from Philly.
“You didn’t think we’d miss his first start in nearly two years?” Joan says. Her legs bob nervously as she grabs scoopful after scoopful of popcorn. Jim, on the other hand, is placid, holding the game program open in his lap, pen poised to score each play as he’s done for decades. This was what it was like when Jamie pitched for the Phillies, and Jill would drive their parents an hour each way to every home game he pitched. Before that, during his time in Seattle, the Moyers would stay up late to watch on the satellite dish, Jim scoring silently, Joan fidgeting nervously.
Karen and a bunch of the kids are here too. Fourteen-year-old Duffy helps watch “the littles,” Kati and Yeni, while eighteen-year-old Hutton and eight-year-old Mac look forward to going into the clubhouse after their dad pitches.
They won’t have long to wait. On the field, Moyer looks sharp in the first. He retires the side on just seven pitches, all strikes. It’s more of the same in the second, when a two-seam fastball below the zone induces an inning-ending grounder to Tulowitzki at short for a double play. That’s thirteen pitches through two innings today, and four scoreless innings thus far. Karen looks relieved enough to chat with some of the other wives in the stands.
In the third, Moyer gives up his first run of the spring on an RBI base hit by Eduardo Escobar. With a runner on and two outs, up comes White Sox catcher A. J. Pierzynski, a 6´3˝, 240-pound lefty who struck out all of 33 times last season and has never seen a fastball he didn’t want to crush. Moyer starts him with a 72-mile-per-hour changeup that breaks down and in, right over the inside part of the plate. Strike one.
After getting something soft and in, most hitters will look for something hard and outside. Moyer toys with busting him inside again, but decides to mess with Pierzynski’s rhythm even more. He throws a 65-mile-per-hour looping curveball that starts out heading for Pierzynski’s right hip and quickly drops out of the zone and away from the hitter; Pierzynski lurches for it, swinging well in front and well over it. Strike two.
Pierzynski is something of a hothead, with a reputation as an emotional—some say dirty—player. Now he steps outside of the batter’s box, clearly frustrated. This is the part of the game Moyer loves. Will he? Won’t he? At 0–2, having just seen two slow pitches, Pierzynski is likely looking off-speed again or expecting a waste pitch—something well out of the strike zone in the hope that he’ll chase a bad ball.
Moyer doesn’t like the phrase “waste pitch,” because he considers every pitch to have a purpose. Besides, why give the hitter what he expects, even if it’s well outside of the zone? No, having caught Pierzynski off guard by a slow pitch followed by an even slower one, Moyer now has the batter out of sync. Uncomfortable. Better to keep attacking. He comes back with a two-seam fastball at 79 miles per hour—79 following 65 and 72 is really equivalent to a pitch in the 90s—and it freezes Pierzynski, who takes it on the inside black for a called third strike.
Moyer comes off the field to loud applause, and manager Jim Tracy’s outstretched hand greets him at the top of the dugout steps. Within minutes, Karen’s cell phone rings. “Send Hutton and Mac down,” Moyer says, and they’re off like base runners given the double steal sign.
After the game, Karen and the kids wait outside the clubhouse. Moyer comes out with a stat sheet, showing him credited with the win. Karen smiles. “It’s been a long time since one of those,” she says. Three innings, three hits, one run, two strikeouts. And that’s having thrown only two cutters; one for a ball and the other, up in the zone, for a base hit.
“Today’s a good day,” Moyer says, Kati and Yeni both grabbing a leg. Moyer hasn’t seen the kids in a couple of weeks, and dinner with the brood awaits. As he leads the pack toward the parking lot, he wants to know something. “How was my velocity?” he asks. Seventy-nine, he’s told. He winces, partly because he wants to get a 10-mile-per-hour differential between his fastball and his changeup, instead of the six or seven miles he’s now averaging. But the pained facial expression may also be because he’s got some discomfort in his groin. Probably nothing, he thinks. It’s all good.
Jamie Moyer has been in a conversation with his body as long as he can remember. He’d learned to trust it; trust, after all, is the cornerstone of any such intimate relationship. He’d listened to its aches, pains, tweaks and dings, and, most of all, its weariness. When his legs felt like logs, he knew that it was the midseason blahs—and he knew as sure as he knew anything that it was just something to “gut out.” He recognized “dead arm,” that tranquilized feeling in the dog days when his left arm seemed to have had the life drained from it, as something to slog through. Through it all, Moyer had taken comfort in the knowledge that, as he’d often explain, his body clock knew how to recover just enough to get him to his next start.
Now, just days after his triumph over the White Sox, what he’d thought was a minor tweak of the groin has flared up into full-on pain every time he plants to throw. At first he thought it was something he could once again gut out. He’d come to camp with his own supply of anti-inflammatory pills; knowing how sensitive management would be to having a forty-nine-year-old trying to make the roster—rightfully so—he didn’t want to ask the trainers for anything and thereby reinforce any doubts the front office might have about his physical state.
But now the pain hasn’t subsided, so Moyer makes his way to the trainer’s room. In 2009, his season in Philadelphia ended when he required surgery for a torn groin; the speculation is that this latest episode is the inflammation of some scar tissue from that procedure. The team announces that he’ll miss his next start and undergo treatment. He’ll get a cortisone shot, which will help quiet things. He also calls Liba, and she e-mails him a series of stretching exercises.
A couple of other pitchers are banged up as well. Pomeranz’s next start is postponed due to a strained glute, and Chacin has a blister on his right index finger that limited him to 44 pitches in his last outing. But they’re not forty-nine years old. Moyer worries that any malady, no matter how minor, will scare management off from making a commitment to him.
He knows he has no control over that. So he decides to control what he can, to live in the training room and to do Liba’s exercises. Day by day, the tightness and soreness begin to dissipate.
Finally, eight days after his win over the White Sox, Moyer is given the go-ahead to try it out and pitch a couple of innings against the Diamondbacks’ Triple A squad on a practice field. He gets banged around—four runs on six hits in less than two full innings—so the beat reporters can’t figure out why he’s positively joyous afterwards.
The groin feels much better, that’s why. That is the real test. As for the results, Moyer felt too strong, having not pitched in over a week. When he’s not a little fatigued, his ball tends to elevate. By the second inning, he was rediscovering his rhythm and the lower part of the zone, and he punched out the last two batters he faced.
“I think it was a step forward,” he says to the press.
Manager Jim Tracy seems to agree. “What I’m looking for over the course of the next couple of weeks is the question, ‘How does he bounce back?’” Tracy says. “More important, as we get in a position of stretching him out, how does his body respond from one outing to the next?”
Meantime, the other pitchers vying for a spot in the rotation haven’t used Moyer’s downtime to pull away. Chatwood has a start in which he records only 14 outs on 61 pitches. Pomeranz comes back from the glute injury and gives up three runs on six hits in four innings against the Angels’ Triple A team. Righthander Guillermo Moscoso gives up five runs on seven hits in three innings against the Padres. Moyer is scheduled to start against the Giants on Thursday night, March 23. Karen flies in. A good start will help to ease any fears about his body’s ability to recover and likely make him a frontrunner for the rotation. A bad start probably means retirement finally looms.
He sees the text when he wakes up. I’ve been immersed in Harvey Dorfman research, and I’ve sent Moyer a Dorfman quote: “To aspire to great achievement is to risk failure.” He reads it over and over again. Karen walks into the bedroom; her husband, on the verge of tears, looks up at her.
“What is it?”
He holds out the phone. “It’s like I just heard from Harvey,” Moyer says wistfully, suddenly reminded of the impact Harvey had, and continues to have, on his life, even though Dorfman is gone.
Later, at the ballpark, Moyer has a very comfortable bullpen session. His mechanics are free and easy, his mind strangely clear and calm. The first batter of the game, Angel Pagan, smokes a sinker to centerfield, where Dexter Fowler, retreating, snares it. It turns out it will be the one and only time a Giant will get solid wood on the ball.
Four days ago, Moyer wondered if the pain in his groin would permit him to return to this spot. And he worried that even if it did, the setback would have spooked Rockies management. Now here he is, easily mowing down the Giants lineup. But that’s baseball. And that’s Moyer’s career. Every time onlookers think he’s done—every time he wonders if he’s done—there seems to be a surprise waiting. Part of the answer to the question “Why does he do it?” has to do with the game’s wonderfully unscripted nature. You just never know.
Moyer pitches four perfect innings. Twelve up, twelve down, including four strikeouts. Only twice does he go to three-ball counts. Of 45 pitches, 30 are strikes. The Denver Post calls it a “mini-masterpiece.” He added the cutter tonight, and, true to Harvey’s quote, he was extra aggressive with the changeup.
The media wants to know if his performance stakes his claim to a starting spot. “You’ll have to ask the guy down the hall [manager Tracy] about that,” he replies.
The pack dutifully goes to Tracy, who is effusive. “As I have said many times this spring, he looks like Jamie Moyer,” he says. “It certainly doesn’t look like he missed any time last year.”
Before meeting Karen outside the clubhouse, Moyer texts me: “I achieved & took the risk tonight. I love these quotes. Keep ’em coming. Ur motivating me even more.”
It isn’t exactly Moyermania, but the story of his comeback has become national news. After the win over the Giants, The Today Show calls. Moyer gets to the ballpark at 5 a.m. so Matt Lauer can interview him via satellite. The New York Times comes in and MLB Tonight sends a camera crew for a feature.
The White Sox are also back for one more shot at him. Moyer battles through four innings, after lobbying Tracy to send him out for the fourth. He accumulates his highest pitch count of the spring: 92, 53 for strikes. He gives up three runs, striking out four, and keeps his team in the ball game. He is 2–0 with a staff-leading 2.77 ERA through 13 innings.
After the game, Moyer heads back to Fassero’s guesthouse. He is stretching out on the floor when the MLB Network feature on him airs. There’s footage of him running in the outfield, playing long toss, fielding bunts.
“Is that what I look like?” he mutters to himself, a surprised lilt to his voice. “Holy crap. That guy looks pretty stiff.”
Moyer laughs when, on air, MLB Network analyst Mitch Williams, who is two years younger than Moyer but has been out of baseball since 1997, marvels at Moyer’s comeback. “I like Mitch,” Moyer says. “We have a history.” It’s a dubious history from Williams’s perspective: in 1988, Moyer and Rafael Palmeiro were traded by the Cubs to Texas for Williams, thereby giving up 544 future home runs and 239 future wins from Moyer in exchange for 52 saves and five wins from Williams.
Meantime, the phone won’t stop ringing. Rockies PR reminds him of an ESPN radio call-in tomorrow morning, where they’ll play audio of his father-in-law’s maniacal laugh for him.
Dillon calls to talk over his at-bats at Cal-Irvine. “Just concentrate on hitting the fastball,” his father says. “Don’t worry about anything but making solid contact with the fastball.”
Jill returns her brother’s earlier call. Jim and Joan are visiting with Karen in San Diego, and Jim got dehydrated and was taken to the hospital for fluids. “At some point, we’re going to have to talk about Mom and Dad coming out and living with us,” Moyer says.
As he absentmindedly flicks channels while on the phone, Moyer’s eyes widen when he sees that one of his favorite movies is on. When he’s done talking to Jill, he turns up the volume. “I must have seen this twelve times,” he says.
It’s called Despicable Me, and it’s animated. “Wait till I tell Yeni, Kati, Mac, and Grady I watched this,” he says.
It’s a safe bet that few other major leaguers are spending this evening talking to a college-aged son about hitting, a sibling about how to handle the aging of their parents, and watching—and loving—an animated children’s film on cable.
“I’ve never been in this position before, Jamie,” general manager Dan O’Dowd begins. Moyer has called him to find out where his head is at—if the Rockies aren’t going to make him part of the rotation, he wants to be released in time to hook on with another team.
“I’ve never had to make a decision on a forty-nine-year-old before,” O’Dowd says. “This is totally new territory.”
“Well, I was forty-nine when you brought me here,” Moyer says.
“You’ve done great, which is why I’m really struggling with this,” O’Dowd says. “We’re thinking of signing you to a forty-five-day contract, to see how this goes, how your body holds up.”
“That wasn’t the deal,” Moyer says. The deal was a one-year contract for $1.1 million if he makes the team.
They agree to meet in person the next morning. A flurry of phone calls ensues, Moyer to Karen, Moyer to his agent, Jim Bronner. It’s going to be a stressful night. Meantime, Tracy is telling the media horde that Moyer in the rotation “feels like the right thing to do,” but that the front office was still deliberating over the pitcher’s ability to recover every five days. Tracy goes so far as to speculate that Moyer would start the second game of the season, at Houston. That way, he’d be sandwiched between Guthrie and Nicasio in the rotation, two hard throwers and two innings eaters.
The next morning, prepared to ask for his outright release rather than accept a provisional forty-five-day contract, Moyer finds a contrite O’Dowd. “I prayed on this all night,” O’Dowd, a spiritual man, says. “You’ve done everything we’ve asked. You made this team. It’s the right thing to do. If for some reason it doesn’t work out, I want you to know that we’ll find something for you in the organization.”
They shake hands. Moyer is a big leaguer again, though it’s something of a bittersweet feeling. O’Dowd means well, but hearing him talk about it not working out is like a dagger, an announcement of the team’s lack of confidence in him. It reminds him of when Don Zimmer came out to the mound that time in the ’80s. “Get this guy out or you’re going back to the minors,” he said. Zimmer may have been aiming for tough love, but the message Moyer took from him was, I’m not on your side. Now, over two decades later, Moyer has made the team, but he hears a similar—even if unintended—vote of no confidence.
In the clubhouse, Moyer approaches Tracy.
“I want to thank you for this opportunity,” he says.
“No need to thank me,” Tracy says. “You earned this. This isn’t some handout, which is what I’m going to say to the press.”
On March 30, Tracy announces that forty-nine-year-old Jamie Moyer has made the team and will start the second game of the season against Houston. It’s the twentieth anniversary of Moyer’s release from the Chicago Cubs, when the offer to become a pitching coach was made.
Now it’s two decades later and Moyer has one more start in the Cactus League, going five innings and giving up one earned run against Seattle. He finishes the spring with a 2.50 ERA in 18 innings. But, in a harbinger of things to come, the Rockies boot two ground balls behind him, leading to two runs and the loss.
Karen makes arrangements to look at rentals in Denver. Jamie Moyer starts thinking about the Astros’ lineup.