Just Tell Me I Can't (10 page)

I
t's a rite of passage: every pupil rebels at some point against a mentor. Moyer's secret act of defiance against Harvey Dorfman came early in the 1993 season, when he surreptitiously wore a garter belt under his uniform.

Perhaps a bit of background is in order. After Moyer's 1992 season in Toledo he was once again looking for a job. One day that off-season, he happened to be in his father-in-law's office at Notre Dame when in walked former major league pitcher Ed Farmer, a huge Notre Dame booster. Farmer was now an advance scout for the Baltimore Orioles, and with him was his boss, general manager Roland Hemond. Farmer's support for all things Fighting Irish led him to the building that day—he'd be addressing Notre Dame coach Pat Murphy's baseball team—and Farmer invited Hemond to tag along because he thought it would be an added bonus for the college kids to hear from a big league executive. With time to kill, they stopped in to say hello to Digger, who wasted no time selling his visiting son-in-law.

“I'm telling you, Moyer is a helluva pitcher, if only someone would just give him the ball,” Digger, who always refers to his son-in-law by his last name, breathlessly lobbied Hemond. Digger, whose boisterous personality fills any room he's in, was in rare form: with his son-in-law sitting there, the coach was in full recruiting mode, as though Hemond was an on-the-fence parent of one of the high school seven-footers he was trying to lure to his program.

“What are you doing now, Jamie?” Hemond asked, put on the spot by Phelps's relentlessness.

“Looking for a job,” Moyer replied.

“Let me see what I can do,” Hemond said.

Within days, Hemond received a report on Moyer from his top scout, Gordon Goldsberry. “He's a bright guy,” Goldsberry said. “His biggest problem is tempo. He's not going to blow the ball by anyone. He has to outthink hitters. But he takes too much time between pitches, which gives hitters too much time to think.” That said, Goldsberry concluded that bad tempo was a correctable problem. “He's probably worth taking a chance on.”

That March, Hemond invited Moyer to the Orioles' minor league spring training camp, where Moyer pitched well. He was signed to a $200,000 contract and assigned to the Orioles' Triple A affiliate in Rochester, New York. Karen, expecting the couple's second child, packed boxes once again, and the family rented an apartment in dreary Rochester, where Jamie and Karen promptly witnessed a mugging at gunpoint on the street.

Whatever was happening outside the stadium, it soon became clear that for Moyer, something on the mound had clicked: he was no longer a minor league pitcher. In eight starts, he compiled a 6–0 record, with a 1.67 ERA and a terrific WHIP (walks plus hits per innings pitched) of 1.019. Hemond attended a game in Rochester one frigid night, where he watched Moyer carve up the Richmond Braves and its can't-miss prospects Chipper Jones and Javier Lopez. In late May, the call finally came. Jamie was going back to the Show.

But there's a big gulf between Triple A and the majors. The Orioles, a team recently emerged from bankruptcy, were in their second year at their much-hyped new downtown stadium, Camden Yards. Moyer was bursting with confidence in Rochester, but, confronted by the pressure of yet one more last chance and surrounded by superstars like Cal Ripken Jr. and pitchers Mike Mussina and Ben McDonald, he quickly found the mound at Camden Yards an uncomfortable place. In his first ten days back in the majors, he lost all three of his starts, culminating in a shellacking at the hands of the California Angels on May 30, in which Moyer gave up seven earned runs and couldn't get out of the second inning.

Here we go again
, he thought. With an 0–3 record and 5.74 ERA, how long would it be before manager Johnny Oates gave him a one-way ticket back to Rochester?

Yet Hemond, a three-time winner of baseball's Executive of the Year award, knew the degree to which conventional wisdom conspired against someone like Moyer. He knew that crafty pitchers had to overcome a stereotype—that their fortunes were dictated more by luck than skill, that it was only a matter of time until major league bats caught up with their junk. But Hemond had seen enough to know that cerebral pitchers possessed a skill themselves, albeit one that was a challenge to discern compared to fireballers. They used misdirection and trickery to get batters out. Moyer, Hemond thought, could be one of the those guys, like Eddie Lopat, who got by on guile and smarts. Lopat, nicknamed “Junk Man,” pitched for the Yankees in the '40s and '50s, and Hemond remembered how he used to frustrate hitters. Like Lopat, Moyer wasn't embarrassed by his lack of speed. Like Lopat, he worked with the tools he had and held his own.

Or so Hemond hoped. He'd seen how nerve-racking it could be to watch Moyer. Hemond remembers that he and his wife met another Orioles executive and his wife for dinner and a game that season. At dinner, the executive's wife asked who was pitching. “Moyer,” Hemond said. The other couple frowned. “We're leaving,” they said, explaining that they couldn't stomach watching Moyer: he just looked too damn easy to hit. Today, Hemond laughs at the memory. “I always relished that,” he says.

But Moyer didn't know of Hemond's patience. He felt he had to turn his fortunes around quickly, and he'd try anything to get a win. Enter the garter belt.

Scooter Myers was the old childhood friend in Souderton who, growing up, had been like a little brother to Moyer. Through the years, they'd remained close. When he was still in high school, Scooter would trek down to St. Joseph's University in Philly to visit Moyer, where he was first introduced to beer and college girls. When Jamie got drafted, the two kept in touch by writing letters.

So when Scooter saw that his man was in a slump, he knew he had to act. He got inspiration from an unlikely church of psychic salvation: his favorite movie,
Bull Durham
, the Kevin Costner send-up of minor league baseball. Scooter had seen the movie so often that he'd work lines from it into casual conversation. When Jamie would answer his phone, he'd hear Scooter's voice on the other end with his usual greeting, the one he still hears to this day every time Scooter calls—“What's up, Meat?”—echoing Crash Davis's moniker for Nuke LaLoosh in the film.

For the six people in America who haven't seen the movie: in
Bull Durham
, the Susan Sarandon character, Annie, has LaLoosh wear a garter belt underneath his uniform in order to reorient his head and get him pitching out of the proper “hemisphere” of his brain. Scooter thought Jamie needed some of the same medicine. So he sent a pinkish garter belt to Moyer. “You gotta wear it,” Scooter said, daring his conservative friend. “Try something different!”

I can't believe I'm doing this
, Moyer thought to himself as he deviated from his pregame routine in order to stealthily put the garter belt on under his uniform in a clubhouse bathroom stall. Harvey, if he'd known, would have been livid. He disdained the degree to which superstition ruled the game. Like Moyer, he'd seen slumping players empty the contents of their locker onto the field and set them aflame, and he'd had players who insisted on wearing the same ratty T-shirt when on a winning streak. In their phone conversations, Harvey railed against such magical thinking. He was trying to get players to take honest looks at themselves, to examine the root causes of their struggles—and to learn how to fix things themselves. “Attributing success or failure to powers outside of you is another way of denying responsibility,” he told Moyer. “Don't be absurd. Trust your talent and preparation.”

But trusting his talent and preparation didn't appear to be working. At this point, Moyer was willing to try anything. And besides, was the message from Harvey that dissimilar from Annie's? When she tells Nuke to “breathe through your eyelids like the Lava Lizards of the Galapagos Islands,” was it all that different from Harvey's emphasis on focusing on your breathing as a relaxation technique on the mound? As for the garter, Annie is trying to get Nuke into the right frame of mind, and maybe by wearing the lacy underthing—by running the risk of making an ass out of himself
before
taking the mound—she is reducing the pressure and eradicating his fear. Same goal, different tactic.

And so it was that on June 10, 1993, Jamie Moyer, dressed in a tasteful pink garter belt—nothing too provocative—beat the Boston Red Sox, giving up one run on a solo shot to Mo Vaughn, in five and two-thirds innings. It was his first major league victory in three years. After the game, he called Scooter, who howled into the phone when his friend told him he'd worn the garter.

“Meat, you're full of it!” Scooter cried. To this day, he doesn't believe Moyer really went through with it. To this day, Moyer still carries the garter belt with him, in his shaving kit.

From the beginning of their relationship, there were many similarities between Jamie Moyer and Harvey Dorfman. Both were products of their respective fathers, both were staunch family men, both believed, on some level, that baseball was more than a game, that it provided object life lessons and guiding principles. Both also hated the Yankees; in Harvey's case, it was because his father—who always pulled for the underdog—would reply “whoever is playing the Yankees today” when asked for his favorite team. “I adopted his disdain for them,” Harvey would later write in
Persuasion of My Days
. In Jamie's case, it was because, when he got to the big leagues, he felt like Steinbrenner's crew had too much power, that the team dictated league policy. Like Harvey, Moyer was contemptuous of bullies.

But perhaps their most salient similarity was their mutual enchantment with baseball's abiding mysteries. Both men decided early on to try and figure out the game, to ask questions and question answers, to somehow understand the strange turns baseball provided. By the time their paths had crossed, both had been humbled by the ever-surprising, unscripted nature of the game. “I've been doing it my whole life, and pitching is still a mystery to me,” Moyer says. “Which is why I love it.”

The 1993 version of Jamie Moyer was one of those mysteries. Who would have thought that after eight years of bouncing between the majors and minors, after being given up on by three teams, after countless shellings at the hands of overeager bats, Moyer would become a bona fide major league starter at age thirty-one, just as, only three years later, he'd take another startling leap and become an elite star? On one level, Moyer's success in 1993—he'd end up going 12–9 with a 3.43 ERA for the third-place Orioles—defied rationality; it flew in the face of the game's conventional wisdom, which holds that by the time a player has put in the years of service Moyer had, he is what he is.

Why now? Why did Moyer break through, when so many others whom he played with had failed? Manager Johnny Oates had confidence in him, which helped. But Dorfman didn't believe there was any single answer. He sure as hell didn't think that Moyer's 1993 season had anything to do with that damned garter belt. Or with the fact that he started eating the same meal before each start. (Karen, who had been putting together a celebrity cookbook for charity, one night cooked Joe Montana's shrimp and pasta recipe before one of Jamie's starts; after he won, Montana's dish became their every-fifth-day meal. “You and your shrimp and pasta,” Harvey wailed when Jamie came clean.)

No, it more likely had something to do with the same instinct that led Moyer to Dorfman in the first place, his sense of wide-eyed exploration. Like the game itself, Moyer's career rewarded process. In his memoirs, Dorfman describes himself as a “seeker”; the same can be said about Moyer. No course of treatment—whether in the trainer's room or in Harvey's office, just as no new grip or pitch, is too out there for him. He is and has always been in an ongoing state of becoming.

In his striving eagerness to learn, Moyer started to set himself apart. Just as in Toledo, when he started thinking about risk and rescue, in Baltimore he committed to digging deep in search of lessons in his losses. After the garter belt game, he'd have to wait a while. He was 4–0 in his next five starts, with a stellar 2.45 ERA. He was to start the Orioles' final home game of the season's first half against the White Sox—just before Camden Yards hosted the All-Star Game, which would be accompanied by an Old-Timers' Game and a celebrity home run contest.

Moyer came into the start riding high, with a 5–3 record and a 3.13 ERA, having just thrown a complete-game four-hit shutout against Kansas City. But something felt off in the clubhouse before the game. Far more media buzzed around, as the national baseball press had descended for the weekend festivities. Sitting at his locker, every time Moyer looked up, he'd see another recognizable face. He chatted with Reggie Jackson about Reggie's dad, who had scouted Moyer out of high school for the California Angels, and about their upbringings in the exurbs of Philadelphia. Then Bob Gibson sauntered by—how could you not introduce yourself to Bob Gibson? And there was actor Tom Selleck—Magnum P.I.!—who would be playing in the celebrity home run contest.

At one point, it occurred to Moyer that he'd better find Tim amid all the tumult so he could prepare. Tim was his old high school teammate, Tim Bishop, who was now the Orioles' strength and conditioning coach. Upon reuniting, they had instantly fallen back into their friendship. Moyer was still skittish about broadcasting his pregame mental exercises—the visualization, the laminated concentration grid, the series of self-talk questions. So he'd taken to seeking out Tim, who would set him up in his office with the door shut, or in a utility closet, where he could narrow his focus by game time.

Only on this day, Moyer never got to Tim. He tried running through the grid at his locker, but there was too much noise, too many cameras and conversations. He felt like his train of thought had been derailed. And then came his big mistake:
I'll find it when I get out there
, he thought. Yet when he set foot on the mound, he sensed it wouldn't be quite so easy. He'd so widely deviated from his pregame routine that he felt naked on the mound. “Warming up, it felt like I was out there without my glove on,” he'd recall some nineteen years later, having frozen the feeling in time.