Control is lost when a player’s feelings and thoughts focus on consequences.
—Harvey Dorfman
Well, that’s not how I would’ve scripted this, Jamie Moyer thinks to himself as his 78-mile-per-hour fastball rockets off the bat of Jordan Schafer, the Houston Astros’ centerfielder and leadoff hitter. Moyer doesn’t even need to turn and follow the flight of the ball into deep rightfield. He knows. Welcome back to the majors.
First batter, 512th home run allowed, adding to the Moyer long ball record. Somehow appropriate. He gets the ball back from his catcher and walks behind the mound, bending down to squeeze the resin bag. He is wearing the stirrup socks that were all the rage when he was a fresh-faced rookie; now, with ash-colored stubble dotting his chin and wisps of gray peeking out from under his cap, the vision of Moyer on the mound in 2012 has a distinct Movietone feel to it.
The next batter, Brian Bixler, walks on a full count. Uh-oh. Much had been made of Moyer’s pursuit of history tonight: he is trying to become the oldest pitcher in history to win a game, and he is doing it against the youngest team in the league. Karen, the kids, Mom, Dad, Jill, and Digger and his fiancée, Linda, are all in the stands. Getting roughed up in the first inning would make for a pretty anticlimactic first start.
But three pitches later, Moyer is walking off the mound relatively unscathed, having once again avoided deep damage. He gets J. D. Martinez to hit into a double play, and then slugger Carlos Lee grounds back to him for an easy out. He then retires the next six Astros he faces, two of them strikeouts.
In the fourth, in what would become a pattern, the Rockies’ defense falters. Bixler hits a ground ball to third baseman Chris Nelson, who had been given the starting job at third base because of his superior glove; he promptly throws the ball well wide of first, and second baseman Marco Scutaro, trying to overcompensate for his teammate’s gaffe, recovers the ball and mimics the play, throwing wildly to second. “They look like a damned Little League team!” Digger fumes in the stands.
Martinez follows by clubbing a home run to leftfield on a 1–1 changeup that Moyer leaves up in the zone. The inning ends with the Astros ahead 3–0, but not before another Scutaro error.
In the fifth, Houston manufactures a run after Marwin Gonzalez tags Moyer with a double in the left-center gap. Pitcher Lucas Harrell, trying to sacrifice, bunts his way on, and then Bixler legs out an infield grounder to Tulowitzki at short. Meantime, the Rockies can’t touch Harrell, who would stymie them over seven innings. Moyer, lifted for a pinch hitter with a line of five innings, five hits, and three earned runs, takes the loss.
But he felt strong and had pitched competitively. After the game, manager Jim Tracy offers a ringing endorsement. “We’re going ahead with Jamie,” he says. “He gave us a competitive effort. Hopefully next time we’ll get him some run support.”
After he talks to the media and showers, Moyer emerges from the visiting team’s clubhouse and his kids—the little ones—come running to him. They all pile into the Moyer-mobile, a van Karen rented to transport the crew from the hotel to the ballpark all weekend.
It’s never quiet in the van—Hutton wants to talk about the game, Grady and Mac are bickering like an old married couple, and Duffy is making sure that Yeni and Kati don’t squirm out of their car seats. Nonetheless, Moyer has a moment of reflection. “It felt right to be out there,” he says. “Comfortable. Like it’s where I’m supposed to be.” History, though, would have to wait.
He hasn’t even broken the record yet, but already Jamie Moyer is tired of answering questions about his age. It seems like every possible cliché has been exhausted. How many ways can you find to write that someone is old?
Behind the superficial story of Moyer’s quest, though, is a fascinating one—but it’s not solely about Moyer. It’s more about the ghost that he’s chasing.
On September 13, 1932, at forty-nine years and seventy days old, Jack Quinn pitched five innings and beat the St. Louis Cardinals, making him 3–6 with a 3.16 ERA and the oldest pitcher in history to win a game. Quinn was the last of the spitballers; when the trick pitch was banned in 1920, he and a handful of other pitchers were grandfathered in and allowed to keep throwing it.
To the Moyers, who would often comment on the role the mystical hand of fate has played in their unlikely journey, that Moyer was chasing Quinn had to be more than mere coincidence. Though salient facts about Quinn are still shrouded in mystery, like his real age and ethnicity, what is known is that he was the Jamie Moyer of his time.
Like Moyer, Quinn had played for eight teams. Like Moyer, he flummoxed batters with deft touch, movement, and trickery. Like Moyer, Quinn hailed from working-class Pennsylvania, having been born in Hazelton, just seventy miles from Moyer’s Souderton.
Most of all, like Moyer, Quinn succeeded early because of physical gifts, and later thanks to mental ones. His career was launched, in storybook fashion, while he was watching a semipro game. A foul ball came his way in the stands and he threw it back to the catcher, the ball hitting squarely in the catcher’s glove with a thud. The manager signed him to a contract on the spot, or so the story goes.
But, like Moyer, Quinn learned that early success offered no guarantee for the future, and that how he approached the game could be the tool that would set him apart from other pitchers.
“Nothing bothers me,” Quinn once said. “Why should it? The undertaker will get us all soon enough. There’s no need to meet him more than halfway. A lot of pitchers worry themselves out of the game. They cut their span of successful work by whole seasons. What a foolish thing to do! Pitching, with me, is a serious profession. I realize its importance and I like to pitch. Above all, I want to feel I can do good work.”
Sound familiar? When he hears Quinn’s long-ago quote, Moyer’s eyes widen. “That’s pretty cool,” he says. Only the San Francisco Giants stand in the way of Moyer’s rendezvous with Mr. Quinn and the record book.
As he takes his warm-up pitches in the top of the sixth inning, Moyer is reminded of something he felt just a few hours earlier: winded. It was his first experience with the thin Colorado air. Prior to game time, he had placed his glove on the warning track and proceeded to do his customary ten wind sprints. Only this time, afterward, he couldn’t catch his breath. Even in the bullpen, minutes later, he was emitting small gasps, trying to get his equilibrium back.
Now it is 93 pitches later and he is starting to tire. He has kept the Giants off balance all night. The Rockies trail 2–0, but neither run came by way of hard-hit balls. One came with two outs in the fourth, a soft, seeing-eye grounder up the middle by Melky Cabrera. The other was a third inning pop fly to short center that dropped in for a single.
Otherwise, Moyer had battled Giants starter Madison Bumgarner in a pitching duel that—here’s that age thing again—had the press box buzzing, given that the difference between the starters was the third largest since 1900: twenty-six years, 256 days.
On a 1–1 fastball to open the sixth, Ryan Theriot hits a routine fly ball to centerfielder Dexter Fowler, so routine that Moyer doesn’t even follow its path. He’s on to the next task at hand. Moyer has his back turned to the play when he hears the collective groan rise up from the crowd. He looks up to see Fowler chasing the ball, which had bounded clean out of his glove—the type of error you rarely see a major league outfielder commit.
Fowler, like so many of the game’s new breed, had sought to make a one-handed catch of the ball. Through the years, still unable to shed Jim Moyer’s teachings, Moyer had taken to calling out, “Two hands!” on routine pop-ups and fly balls. His teammates would rib him; didn’t he know they were professionals? If only he’d thought to yell out his dad’s catchphrase tonight.
Now, with Theriot on second, Moyer rests his hands on his knees. He knows he’s starting to tire and he knows that getting out of the inning was just made more difficult by Fowler’s miscue. This is his eleventh inning so far this season and his team has scored zero runs and just committed its fifth error behind him, but he doesn’t think of that. He thinks of Brandon Crawford, whom he fools with a 67-mile-per-hour curveball for a weak ground ball back to the mound. He follows that with a strikeout of Bumgarner.
With a 2–2 count on Angel Pagan, Moyer is one pitch away from getting out of the sixth and erasing Fowler’s mistake. But this is why baseball can be so tantalizingly heartbreaking. He’s now thrown 110 pitches. A two-seamer gets too much of the plate. Pagan lines it to leftfield for an RBI. Cabrera follows with a double to right, the RBI Moyer would later be reminded of when it comes to light that Cabrera has tested positive for testosterone. Moyer’s night is over. Five and two-thirds innings, four runs, only two earned.
After the game, Tracy fixates on the errors. “Jamie did a tremendous job,” he says. “Unfortunately, we had a bad miss in the sixth inning that would have been a clean inning. Cost us two runs and ends up being the difference in the game.…Asking Jamie Moyer to get four outs in an inning, or any of our starting pitching, it’s going to cost you. It always does.”
In the clubhouse, Fowler, an always smiling, easygoing presence, tentatively walks up to Moyer. Moyer knows stuff happens. After all, how many times had he given up walk-off homers, after all? The question is what you do with it. Does failure make you tougher, meaner, and more determined?
“I’m really sorry,” Fowler says. “You pitched a great game—”
Moyer cuts him off. “Forget it,” he says. “You’ll catch the next one.”
There are many reasons why Jamie Moyer has carried on a lifetime love affair with baseball, but the game’s essential mystery may be chief among them. For over forty years, this most cerebral man has tried to master the game—sometimes succeeding—only to find more unanswerable questions following every answer. “It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all your life,” Mickey Mantle wrote in The Quality of Courage. For Moyer, baseball was like a lifelong puzzle that you could come close to finishing, but never quite.
In baseball, Moyer knows, there are answers he’ll never know—no matter how hard sabermetricians and coaches and talking heads look for clues. Why does the Rockies’ defense, in the words of Denver Post beat writer Troy Renck, seem “spooked” playing behind Moyer, committing five errors in his 11 innings? Why has normally sure-handed shortstop Troy Tulowitzki suddenly turned into an error machine?
Then there are the game’s maddening matchups. Why did Moyer for so many years own the Yankees’ Scott Brosius? When Brosius was at bat, Moyer had the feeling he could do anything he wanted. He could jam him inside at will, and when he needed to get him out, he’d throw soft away and watch Brosius slog his way back to the dugout. And why, in turn, did Brosius’s teammate, Bernie Williams, drive every pitch Moyer threw at him off the fat part of the bat, no matter its speed or location?
Sometimes the answers are plain to see. Barry Bonds hit all five of his career homers off Moyer by 1991. Once Moyer started pitching Bonds inside, he let each at-bat play off against Bonds’s jam point. He’d establish the jam point and attack it, pitch after pitch, making Bonds a tad bit slower in getting his arms fully extended once Moyer came back with something across the plate.
But often the reasons behind what happened on the field were more elusive. No matter what he tried against Manny Ramirez or Carlos Delgado—the players who had hit the most home runs off him with ten and eight respectively—it didn’t seem to work: they had his number. He’d prepare as usual—going over the notes from their past battles, searching for a pattern that held the key to success. He’d pay attention to each at-bat, to what their body language was saying to him. But they’d still get their cuts. They just saw the ball out of his hand better than most. Sometimes you just had to throw the ball and hope your defense could make a play behind you.
Moyer was reminded of just how often the laws of mystery applied to baseball when he was preparing for his April 17 start against San Diego, in what would be his third attempt to overtake Jack Quinn. He noticed that Mark Kotsay would be in leftfield and batting second.
In their pregame meeting, Moyer told catcher Wilin Rosario to not even bother discussing Kotsay. “Let’s throw out how I’ve always approached him,” he said, “’cause nothing’s ever worked.”
Kotsay was 19 for 33 lifetime against Moyer, a .576 average. The two hadn’t faced each other since 2006, when Kotsay was in Oakland and Moyer Seattle. But they’d seen each other through the years—Karen is friendly with Mark’s wife, also named Jamie—and when they’d all get together, Moyer would never hesitate to joke about Kotsay’s success against him; maybe if he got him thinking about it, the magic would wear off.
But on this night, it didn’t appear to be happening anytime soon. In the first inning against the 3–9 Padres, Kotsay singled to right on a 2–1 two-seamer that stayed low in the zone. Credit to Kotsay: he just went down and got it. He was shortly thereafter erased on the base paths, as Moyer cruised through the first two innings.
Now, in the third, Moyer decides he’s got to do something—anything—to disrupt Kotsay’s mental rhythm against him. His nemesis comes up with a man on first and one out. Moyer looks in for the sign from Rosario, but steps off the rubber.
“Hey!” he calls out to Kotsay. “Today’s tax day. You declaring me on your taxes?”
Kotsay throws his head back in laughter, and even umpire Joe West chuckles. Moyer has again broken down the fourth wall, much like he did years ago with Justice and—as depicted in Moneyball—with Hatteberg, asking both batters to name their pitch. As Harvey used to say, “Self-consciousness will screw you up.” By speaking directly to the batter, Moyer hopes to jolt awake Kotsay’s sense of self-consciousness, by imposing his voice and presence into the comfortable zone Kotsay has established against him.
After two foul balls on cutters down and away, Moyer throws a two-seamer below the strike zone. Kotsay takes the bait and chops down on it, a routine grounder to Scutaro at second, who promptly turns the double play. Walking off the mound, Moyer throws his hands into the air in mock celebration—he’s gotten him out!—and Kotsay laughs his way back to the Padres dugout.
In the bottom of the third, as if to make up for his miscue in Moyer’s last start, Fowler crushes a two-run home run to right off Padres starter Anthony Bass, the first runs the Rockies have scored for Moyer all season. They add one more in the fourth on an RBI double by Rosario.
Meantime, Moyer has found his groove. After getting Kotsay to ground into the double play in the third, he retires seven of the next eight hitters—until Kotsay (of course) beats out an infield single in the sixth. But a low changeup at 73 miles per hour results in an inning-ending groundout by Chase Headley.
In the seventh, trouble. Moyer walks Jesus Guzman on four pitches. “That’s my responsibility there,” he’ll say later. “There’s no excuse for that.”
After Nick Hundley flies out, Chris Denorfia hits a bloop single. They’re still off balance and not getting good wood on the ball, Moyer tells himself. But then back-to-back Gold Glove winner Tulowitzki boots yet another easy ball, scoring Guzman. It’s Tulowitzki’s sixth error of the season, which is all of eleven games old. After the game, he’ll have tears in his eyes and manager Tracy will give him the following night off to collect himself. Somewhere, Harvey is smiling at this latest example of just how much mind matters, for good or ill.
In the stands, Karen Moyer’s phone lights up. It’s an apoplectic Digger, watching via satellite in Indiana. “This Little League team is blowing it for him again!” he shouts.
After a sacrifice fly by Jason Bartlett to make the score 3–2, Moyer avoids further damage when pinch hitter Jeremy Hermida grounds out to Scutaro. Rockies fans stand en masse when Moyer walks off the field after seven, leaving with the lead, his fastest pitch having topped out at all of 79 miles per hour.
Now it’s up to the bullpen. Karen is still fielding calls from Digger while watching nervously. Flamethrower Rex Brothers hurls a scoreless eighth for Colorado and then the Rockies’ bats come alive in the bottom of the inning, with Michael Cuddyer scoring Tulowitzki and Rosario adding a sacrifice fly. The Rockies have a 5–2 cushion.
As the ninth unfolds, Karen is on her feet, cheering, and the TV cameras follow her every move between pitches. “No one knows how hard he’s worked for this,” she says, still nervous. Reliever Rafael Betancourt gives up a run, but with two down, Yonder Alonso swings and misses for strike three and Karen and Jill and the kids catapult out of their seats. The scoreboard screen blares the fact that Moyer—at forty-nine years, 150 days—is now the oldest pitcher ever to win a major league game and the fans are on their feet, cheering and chanting for the old man.
In the clubhouse, Rockies’ PR man Jay Alves tells Moyer the Hall of Fame has called—would he donate his cap and glove? Moyer smiles. “The cap is no problem,” he says. But asking a ballplayer to part with his glove—that could be heresy. Moyer doesn’t use just any glove; his is oversized, the better to disguise his pitches. But he relents: “I’ll give them the glove, but not tonight,” he says. “It’ll take me a couple of weeks to break in a new one.”
When the glove does make it to Cooperstown, it will join a ball from 1929 signed by Jack Quinn, then a forty-six-year-old pitcher for the world champion Philadelphia Athletics. But before that can happen, the press is waiting. After Tracy declares the evening “a historic night for one tremendous human being,” Moyer is asked for the secret to his longevity. “I don’t have any secrets,” he says. “I try to work hard. I try to dedicate myself to what I’m doing. Be responsible for what I’m doing. Be accountable for who I am and what I do and what I bring to the ballpark. And I try to have some fun with it.”
He’s asked about Quinn, whom he admits he’d never heard of until this chase began. “I kind of wish I was a baseball historian, and I am a little embarrassed that I don’t know more about it,” he says. “To have my name mentioned with the greats of the past is special.” Upon hearing this, the Hall of Fame announces that it is inviting Moyer to be part of its ten-week internship program, in which students from across the country trek to Cooperstown to study the game. “Maybe in the off-season,” Moyer jokes.
While he’s holding court in the postgame interview room, Moyer can feel his phone vibrating in his pocket. There are hundreds of congratulatory texts coming in. “Congrats old man,” writes Roy Halladay. “Pretty special accomplishment and I’m sure a special night! Keep it going, look forward to seeing you soon.”
Raul Ibanez, his teammate in both Seattle and Philly: “Congratulations! You continue to be an inspiration to everyone, especially me. I am proud and honored to know you and be able to call you my friend. You are and always will be the man.”
Unnoticed in all the hype surrounding Moyer’s record-breaking win are a couple of equally stunning facts. The victory, his 268th, moves him into a tie for thirty-fourth on the all-time list with Jim Palmer. And though his record is 1–2, his 2.55 ERA leads his team.
But once the writers have gone upstairs to file their stories, Moyer doesn’t have time to think about all that. It’s time to party. It is, after all, Kati’s sixth birthday, so the whole crew heads back to the airy house the Moyers are renting in Denver’s Cherry Creek neighborhood for ice cream and cake. Kati blows out her candles and then the Moyer kids watch SportsCenter, the lead story of which is their father’s win for the ages.
“Thanks for giving me an ending to the book,” I say, after the little ones have gone to bed.
“What do you mean, an ending?” Moyer asks.
“Well, I figure making history like this, it’s pretty climactic,” I explain.
Moyer shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says with a wry smile. “I plan on winning a lot more games.”
By the end of April, despite the defensive breakdowns and inconsistent hitting, the Rockies are flirting with .500 and Moyer has been the team’s best pitcher. He follows his record-setting win over the Padres with a six-inning no-decision against the Pirates, in which he allows just one earned run. That is followed by a five inning no-decision against the Mets, in which he is hit harder than in his previous starts, but he works out of trouble time and again and keeps his team in the game.
Meantime, some in the Denver media start referring to Moyer as the team’s ace—as much a commentary on the Rockies’ subpar starting pitching as on Moyer’s surprising results. The sabermetricians weigh in, seeming to second the notion. Rob Neyer, who apprenticed under Bill James, writes, “I didn’t think he could still pitch. Not well enough, anyway. But yes, he (arguably) has been the Rockies’ best starting pitcher this season.”
Over at FanGraphs.com, Bradley Woodrum writes, “Not only has the near-half-century man earned a spot on the Rockies rotation, he is pitching like their ace.” Woodrum points out that Moyer’s ERA is beating both his FIP and SIERA (skill-interactive earned run average) numbers—the two stats that take fielding and luck out of the pitcher performance equation by focusing on those things a pitcher controls: strikeout, walk, ground-ball, and fly-ball rates, for example. “The last time Moyer had an ERA above his FIP, people could still greet their family at the airport gate,” writes Woodrum. “So whether it’s good fielding on his part or just some other-worldly, quasi-voodoo trick, Moyer beats his FIP, his xFIP, and his SIERA. He beats them so consistently, in fact, that we can probably estimate his ERA this year by just subtracting his standard margin from the more stable predictors like SIERA. In other words, if we subtract 0.40 from his 4.56 SIERA, we get a 4.16 ERA, which absolutely boggles the soul and mind when we consider not only Moyer’s age, but his role as a starter (no one his age has ever been an MLB starter), and his home park.”
With all this talk of his astounding month—Moyer ends April with a record of 1–2 with a 3.14 ERA—there is one person unconvinced of the hype: Jamie Moyer himself. He appreciates statistics like FIP and SIERA because they account for some of the variables that are not in his control, but in general he subscribes to what Harvey used to say about baseball’s overreliance on complicated formulas: statistics can be used “in the same manner a drunken man uses lampposts: for support, rather than illumination.”
Even as the sabermetricians marvel at the numbers he is putting up, Moyer senses that something is not quite right. There is the small matter of his groin, which has never fully recovered since spring training. It doesn’t affect him on the mound, but it is an ongoing, nagging irritant. There is the bigger matter of his velocity, or lack thereof. His fastball is averaging just shy of 77 miles per hour, four miles slower than in 2010 and six miles slower than in 2002. The combination of pinpoint location at alternating speeds is Moyer’s whole game. If the speed differential between his fastball and changeup is now going to be five—instead of ten—miles per hour, it means there is less margin for error in terms of his location.
And that, so far, is the biggest trouble spot. Even when struggling early in his career, Moyer had always been able to hit his spots with stunning repeatability, as Dom Johnson would say. He still has better control and command than most, but now when he misses with a pitch, he misses bigger than usual. There are times when a pitch called for low and inside ends up high and out.
Moyer knows that one of the last things to return after Tommy John surgery is full command. But he feels this isn’t a physical issue so much as a mechanical one. It doesn’t feel like he has yet consistently found his arm slot, that same release point for every pitch, over and over again. While he works on finding it in his bullpen sessions, he wonders how long he will have to find it. Clearly, this Rockies team, with its horrid defense, irregular hitting, and batting-practice pitching, is not going to compete for anything this season. The question is—how long will they stick with a forty-nine-year-old starter?
In early May, the Atlanta Braves come to Coors Field, and Moyer is seeming to continue his early-season mastery. Moyer cruises through five with an 8–3 lead.
But trouble awaits in the sixth. Atlanta’s Matt Diaz and Jason Heyward crush back-to-back home runs off Moyer, and when Tyler Pastornicky follows with a single to right, Tracy slowly walks to the mound and pulls his starter. Moyer leaves with an 8–5 lead, but reliever Esmil Rogers can’t hold it. Moyer gets another no-decision and the Rockies lose, 13–9.
Five nights later, Moyer is in Los Angeles, where the lineup contains stark reminders of his longevity. After all, he faced Dodgers manager Don Mattingly two decades ago, not to mention the fathers of current Dodgers Tony Gwynn Jr. and Scott Van Slyke.
Through three innings, Moyer has given up two hits and one run on a Mark Ellis homer. He seems to have better stuff tonight—which may be a function of venue. At Coors Field, he’s finding, his two-seamer doesn’t sink and his cutter doesn’t move quite as much as on the road. Tonight he gets ahead of five of the first seven hitters he faces.
Sitting behind home plate is super-agent Scott Boras, Harvey’s old friend and boss. “Remarkable, just remarkable,” Boras comments, watching Moyer. “I used to tell Harvey, when Jamie was representing himself, to tell him I could make him a lot more money. He should have done a lot better than he did through the years.” (Of course, Harvey never said anything to Jamie. “He wouldn’t,” Moyer says. “Harvey would have never put business into our relationship.”)
Moyer retires both Ellis and Matt Kemp to open the fourth inning. Andre Ethier hits a two-out double to right center, bringing up Bobby Abreu. Moyer starts the veteran lefty with two perfect cutters on the outside corner: 0–2. A fastball follows, high and tight. That sets up another cutter, again on the outside corner. But home plate umpire Ed Rapuano doesn’t ring up the batter. Moyer comes back with the same pitch—again, he doesn’t get the call. Now, with the count full, he has a decision: in tight or stay away? He opts to stay away—if Abreu takes again, in a battle between veterans, he’s bound to get the third borderline call—but Abreu is sitting on the location. He sticks his bat out for an RBI single the opposite way, over Tulowitzki’s outstretched glove. After Juan Uribe flies out to end the inning, Moyer berates himself on the walk back to the dugout for letting Abreu outthink him. A good hitting veteran like Abreu is going to make an adjustment if all you do is stay away, he thinks. Why not keep him honest?
In the fifth, trailing 2–0, Moyer gives up three runs, all with two outs, the big blow a two-run double by Ellis. Moyer is done after five, having struck out seven Dodgers but giving up five runs. The loss drops his record to 1–3 and raises his ERA to 4.66.
Still, Moyer senses some progress has been made. His arm slot felt better, which might also explain the better movement on the ball, as evidenced by the high number of strikeouts. “But again it was the flippin’ fifth inning,” he says two mornings later in a San Francisco diner. (On the street, a passerby does a double take and mutters, “I love you, Jamie!” Moyer thanks him before observing, “You gotta love San Francisco.”)
On the plane from Los Angeles, Moyer listened to the book-on-tape version of Dorfman’s The Mental ABC’s of Pitching. Given his troubles in the fifth inning of late, he listened to the chapter entitled “The Big Inning.” Dorfman captures the sinking feeling of helplessness a pitcher gets when everything starts to slide downhill. “The first order of business for ‘stopping the big inning’ is for the pitcher to stop himself,” Dorfman writes. “To gather himself—get off the mound, collect his thoughts, recognize the situation and have a plan before toeing the rubber again.…Pitchers do not ‘stop the bleeding’ if they do not stop themselves. The tendency of pitchers in trouble is to speed up. They want to get out of the inning quickly, to get off the mound, to get into the dugout—now! The greater a pitcher’s sense of urgency, the more he rushes his mind and muscles. Self-control leaves him. The inning ‘wins’; the pitcher loses.…We get outs by paying attention to the task in front of us, not the runners behind us.”
Moyer asked twenty-four-year-old pitcher Alex White to join him in listening to the Dorfman chapter. White faced the Dodgers the night after Moyer and, like him, was knocked out of the game in the fifth inning. The two dissected White’s thinking on the mound.
“I was kind of pitching around Tony Gwynn,” White said.
“Why pitch around Gwynn? He’s the leadoff hitter. He’s not going to hurt you with a home run, but he might hurt you with his legs. If you walk him, there’s no defense for a walk.”
“I thought I could get Ellis out,” White said. “I thought I could get a double-play ball.”
“See, to me, you didn’t give yourself enough credit and you gave the hitter too much credit,” Moyer said. “Instead of letting the situation dictate to you—‘Oh my gosh, I gotta do this, I gotta do that, I gotta get that double play ball’—what Harvey is saying is you dictate to the situation. Take a step back and analyze what’s going on.”
The two talked pitching into the night. White might just as well have been speaking for Moyer when he observed that there always seems to be one moment in every game that will determine how your outing is going to go. It’s the tipping point: get past it, and you’re likely to cruise on your way to a good night. If, for example, Moyer had gotten that called third strike against Abreu in the fourth against the Dodgers, he might have had a vastly different result.
Five nights later, back in Colorado, Moyer notches his second win of the young season. He goes six and a third innings, giving up just one run in a 6–1 win. But it’s not his pitching that makes headlines. In the fourth, leading 3–0, Moyer bats with two outs and runners on second and third against twenty-two-year-old lefty Patrick Corbin. He squibs a 2–2 fastball off the end of his bat on the ground between Corbin and first baseman Paul Goldschmidt. Goldschmidt fields the ball and lunges for the hustling Moyer—who would later call his sojourn down the first base line a “slow crawl”—to no avail. Fowler, on second, never hesitates; the infield hit drives in two runs and Moyer has set a new record: the oldest player ever to drive in a run.
Moyer’s influence on his teammates was borne out by Fowler’s hustle on the play. “I was shocked that Moyer beat it out,” Fowler would say after the game. “The guy was hustling.…He’s a bulldog. The guy never quits.”
The Rockies are 15–21, and Moyer is now 2–3 and his ERA 4.20, still tops among his team’s starters.
They say that no matter how experienced the fighter, the knockout in a boxing match comes as a sudden, shocking surprise. Even if you see it and you’re bracing for that ultimate punch, you never fully expect the end to come when it does.
Jamie Moyer is more pugilistic than most major league pitchers, having taken more than his share of punches through the years, always to rise again. After the Arizona win, right when he’s thinking he may have turned some kind of corner, he feels the sting of a powerful one-two combination.
First comes an outing in Miami, where Giancarlo Stanton hits a mammoth grand slam against him in the fourth inning, after Moyer had carried a 4–0 lead through three. He ends up giving up six runs and taking the loss. Five days later, in Cincinnati, as at Miami, every pitch seems to be up in the zone. The Reds tee off, crushing four home runs in his five innings. The two losses are part of an epic Colorado slide. After beating Arizona, the Rockies win only two of their next ten games.
Moyer has a feeling about what’s coming. It’s only ten days since the encouraging signs in Los Angeles and at home against Arizona, but in the high-stakes realm of professional baseball, whole fates can be determined in such a short time span. Particularly if you’re a forty-nine-year-old pitcher on a bad team that shows no signs of getting better.
When Moyer is called into general manager Dan O’Dowd’s office, Jim Tracy is there, choked up. They say the most complimentary things about his work ethic, his class, his effort. But they’re a bad team that won’t contend and they have young arms to develop. Moyer thanks them from the bottom of his heart for the opportunity.
He cleans out his locker while Tracy makes the announcement. “He was up against the odds of late,” the manager says. “There is no difference in the man, there’s no difference in his will to compete. There is a difference in that the 82- or 83-mile-per-hour that he had as a fastball had started to come back and get closer to where some of his off-speed pitches were. There’s very little variance between his pitches.”
When Moyer takes the podium, he’s smiling. He thanks O’Dowd, says that Tracy “stuck his neck out for me,” and—as Harvey would have had him do—he takes responsibility. “Unfortunately, I didn’t hold up my end of the bargain,” he says. “That’s what happens in this business.”
Ever the glass-half-full type, Moyer drinks a beer on his way to the airport and focuses on the positive. “I get to sleep in my own bed tonight,” he says. “And I get to go to Hutton’s high school graduation. That’ll be pretty cool.” After that, Hutton’s high school—Cathedral Catholic in suburban San Diego—will play in a playoff game that, were he still employed, Jamie would have kept tabs on via text messages from Karen. Instead, he’ll be able to see his second-born play playoff baseball.
Within minutes, many of the stories that start to move on the wire include the words “Career Likely Over” in their headlines. Of course, that’s what they wrote when the Rangers released him in 1990. That’s what the smart money thought when Joe Torre sent him packing in 1991. That’s what even his closest friends and relatives thought when the Cubs cut him out of spring training in 1992. That’s what the Seattle media assumed when he was traded to Philly in 2006 for two no-name minor leaguers. That’s what Ruben Amaro Jr. said when he blew out the elbow in 2010. But surely, now that he had made history, and now that his comeback was history, surely this would be it. Jamie Moyer would finally be a former professional baseball player. Right?
As he approaches the airport, one other positive of this latest roundhouse suddenly dawns on him. “This could give me some time to get with Dom, have a few bullpens, and work on some things,” he says.