Just Tell Me I Can't (8 page)

But that discipline required a comfort level Moyer had found elusive early in his career. When things started going badly, he'd come to intimately understand the cliché about not being able to get out of his own way. It was as though there were a hologram of himself standing in front of him, blocking his view of the plate. “Get out of my way!” he wanted to shout at his own image.

When pitchers talk about “comfort,” they're really talking about accessing what has come to be known as “the zone” or “the flow state,” those moments of Zen on the field when mind and body blur into one and the athlete overcomes self-​co
nsciousness
. When he was going good, “pitching was like being in the bubble,” Jim Kaat, who had studied under Carlton's guru Gus Hoefling, once said. “When you're in that bubble, you're in a world of your own. I always knew that even when there were fifty, sixty thousand people screaming in the stands, the most peaceful place in the universe was right on the pitcher's mound.”

The zone is where effortless concentration meets peak athletic performance, and its story is as old as our history. Twenty-five centuries ago, Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu declared that “the perfect runner leaves no track.” In 1976, well before he became known for parenting someone who was famous for having a large rear end, Bruce Jenner was an Olympic decathlete who described feeling like he was “rising above myself, doing things I had no right to do.” Surfer Kelly Slater put it this way: “You find the wave and the wave finds you, and you're so in tune with the ocean that you're both more
and
less aware than normal.”

In baseball, Ted Williams famously claimed there were times he could see the seams of a fastball as it sped toward him. More recently, Jim Clancy, who spent most of his career pitching for the Toronto Blue Jays, would softly strum a guitar in the clubhouse prior to his starts, trying to get in the zone. Tigers reliever Willie Hernandez would cover his eyes with a towel while visualizing himself facing that night's potential batters.

When he got to Toledo, Moyer's job was to utilize many of the tools Harvey had given him to get comfortable. As he said to himself in the car on the way there, “You've been in the classroom for the last year. Now it's time to put it to practical use.” After their first meeting a little over a year earlier, Moyer laminated two five-by-ten cards. On one he scribbled a series of notes and questions to review before every start, to make sure he was in the right problem-solving state of mind prior to taking the mound:

The other card consisted of a grid of numbers arranged randomly from 00 to 99. Before starts, Moyer would find someplace to hide—a broom closet or a corner of the trainer's room—and, without pointing, he'd burrow into the chart, seeking out the numbers in sequential order, searching for 1, then 2, then 3, and onward, an exercise in optimum concentration. When he first started, it took twenty-three minutes to get to 99. Now, on good days, it took nine. Bad days, fifteen.

In Louisville, he would slink away to do this work, embarrassed by his Dorfman-inspired efforts, fearful of being razzed. “Why hide?” Dorfman asked. “Are you committed to this or not?” Part of the reason Detroit took a flyer on Moyer was the hope that he could mentor a couple of young pitchers in Toledo, Scott Aldred and Greg Gohr, who had big league stuff but hadn't put it all together yet. Aldred was a 6´4˝, 195-pound lefty with pop who had been up and down between the Tigers and Toledo. Gohr threw in the low to mid-90s, and hadn't yet made it to the Show. How was Moyer going to teach them anything if he was afraid to be who he was in front of them, a crafty lefty seeking to figure this thing out?

The laminated cards were only part of the daily routine Dorfman had prescribed. Until now, Moyer had obsessed so hard on his next start—visualizing a host of outcomes, including the bad ones, for days—that he often felt exhausted come game time, as though he'd already thrown nine innings. Dorfman slowed him down. Everything between starts was scripted, building to the ultimate mental outlook by the time the umpire called, “Play ball.”

It wasn't superstition; like many players, Moyer could be superstitious, but Harvey had no time for that. No, Dorfman believed that the best way to find the all-elusive zone was to train the mind's muscle memory. “I'll put my spandex pitching shorts on at the same time every day of every start,” Moyer explains. “That's very purposeful. You're trying to re-create the conditions that existed when you previously achieved mental focus. So when those shorts go on, it's like a signal that I'm starting to raise my level of concentration. By the time I finish with the concentration cards, I should be dialed in.”

If Moyer's trek to Toledo was a Hail Mary intended to resurrect his career, he was in the right place. Toledo had a romantic baseball past. Greats ranging from Jim Thorpe to Kirby Puckett to Kirk Gibson had all played for the Mud Hens, to whom the fan base was intensely loyal. Moyer was used to hearing criticism from fans and media alike. But in Toledo, he sensed support. More important, there was a simpler ethos in the air: it was all just about the game. All the distractions that had weighed on him at the major league level—the interviews with the media, the bottom-line machinations of the front office, the adult autograph seekers who would turn around and make money off his signature—all of it seemed to recede. It was easier to get to that comfortable place when you didn't have a host of uncomfortable demands placed in your way.

It helped that upon his arrival in Toledo, Moyer met a young man who was also trying to find himself. Buddy Groom was a twenty-six-year-old lefthanded middle reliever from the one-stoplight Texas town of Red Oak, just south of Dallas. Moyer and Groom had both sensed a certain resigned attitude from their small towns back home: you'd given it your best shot, you'd made it this far; who ever
really
thought that Red Oak or Souderton would produce a baseball great? “We both had the same kind of mind-set,” Groom, who went on to have a fourteen-year career in the big leagues, remembers today. “We kind of bonded, because we both wanted to prove people wrong.”

Groom would go on to find himself as a bona fide big league pitcher in the mid-'90s after turning all his worries about his success—or lack thereof—over to the Lord. He'd post seven consecutive seasons of at least seventy relief appearances for the Oakland A's and Baltimore Orioles. Moyer would find himself through his devotion to Harvey Ball, digging ever deeper into the mental side of the game. Two vastly dissimilar approaches—with the same result.

It was Groom's example on the field that helped Moyer turn things around. Early in the season, Mud Hens pitching coach Ralph Treuel pulled Moyer aside. “You have a better fastball than you think, but you can't just live away with it and your changeup, because hitters are going to lean away and sit on the outside pitch,” Treuel, now the minor league pitching coordinator for the Boston Red Sox, said.

Moyer knew Treuel was right, just as he knew Dick Pole had been. He was doing his best to be aggressive, but all the mental training in the world wouldn't give him the tool he most desperately needed: a pitch that could run into the righthanded batter. To date, he'd effectively been granting to righties permission to cheat “middle-away”—meaning any pitch directed to the middle of the plate, the outside corner, or just off the outer corner—because they didn't have to worry that he'd jam them inside. Groom, Moyer noticed, didn't have these problems. His friend was keeping righthanded hitters off balance because his cutter was keeping them honest.

As he would years later, when he first saw his idol Steve Carlton's slider up close, Moyer asked his new friend if he could teach him the pitch. This version differed greatly from the one that Moyer would throw in his forties. Groom's cutter was gripped on the side of the ball, with the middle finger hooking over the left seam and the index finger and thumb on the outside of the ball instead of underneath it. That made the middle finger dominant and created a cutting action that made a seeming fastball suddenly break into a righthander. (The C
arlton
pitch Moyer would throw nearly two decades later would have a more dominant grip, causing it to simultaneously break down and in to the righthanded batter.)

Moyer made his Mud Hens debut with an inning of scoreless relief in a game that wasn't close. A few days later, shorthanded, manager Joe Sparks needed a spot starter against the Richmond Braves. Moyer got the call, and the win, giving up one run on four hits in five innings. From then on, he was the team's most consistent starter. He'd end up going 10–8 with a 2.86 ERA.

Developing the new pitch was critical to Moyer's success, but so was exorcising the constant fear that came with pitching inside. The conventional wisdom is that for non–power pitchers, pitching inside carries a high amount of risk, because a hitter will see the pitch coming toward him more clearly and get a better rip at it. If a batter is looking for something middle-in, and if the pitch isn't located
just
right, the ball stands a good chance of being catapulted into the outfield seats. Toledo was where Moyer first started to question this conventional wisdom, and where he first started considering the notion of acceptable risk on the mound.

As Moyer started to jam more and more righties, he started to notice their frustration:
How come I can't get around on such a slow pitch?
He'd see them shaking their heads or tossing their bats away in disgust after yet one more pop-up. This was what Harvey was talking about when he first broached the idea of using their aggression against them. The more he thought about it, the more Jamie began to think it didn't make sense to consider pitching inside as particularly dangerous; on the contrary, conceding the inside of the plate seemed to be the true danger. He and Groom would watch ESPN nightly, where the parade of home run clips usually consisted of batters with their arms fully extended, crushing balls that were either out over the plate or on the outside part of the plate. Batters were being allowed to cheat owing to the fear and conservatism of pitchers.

“If I told you to chop a piece of wood, but you'd be bringing the ax down right by your foot, you'd be anxious about hitting your leg,” Moyer explains. “As opposed to chopping the same piece of wood out in front of your body, with your arms extended. That's a much more comfortable way to chop wood.”

This was one of Moyer's Eureka moments: pitching wasn't just about
him
getting comfortable, it was also about making the batter
un
comfortable. Many years later, he'd sit in the dugout with another teammate, Phillies ace-in-training Cole Hamels, and pass along the message it took him so long to find. “C'mon, let's count the number of uncomfortable at-bats,” he'd say, and they'd catalog the number of times an opposing batter was forced to do something he didn't want to do—barely foul off an inside cutter, hit the deck to avoid high and tight heat, lunge at something off-speed away. More often than not, they'd see comfortable swings instead of the frustration Moyer learned to bring out in batters in Toledo.

That said, coming inside with 80-mile-per hour stuff is hardly risk-free. Make a mistake and you are more likely to pay a heavier price inside than out. “So change your thinking,” Harvey would say:
accept your mistakes
. Baseball, Moyer was finally starting to realize, is a sport that's all about failure. The best hitters come up short 70 percent of the time, and it's the only game that, as part of its official statistics, actually recognizes and categorizes
errors
. So why not own your mistakes? Why not learn to risk, but risk smartly?

Moyer started accepting his mistakes, and moving on. Against Tidewater on July 9, he gave up early solo homers to Terry Hansen and Mitch Lyden, but rather than start pressing, he settled down and pitched a complete game, scattering six other hits. None other than his own father-in-law noticed it. He saw how Moyer would get tagged with a long ball early, but then shrug it off and end up pitching five or six scoreless innings after being on the ropes. “The kid's a survivor,” Phelps told his friend George Steinbrenner, trying to—once again—get his son-in-law a big league job.

According to the surgeon and writer Atul Gawande, research in the medical field shows that complication rates after surgery are not that disparate from hospital to hospital. What sets surgeons and hospitals apart is their ability to “rescue after failure”—to prevent a failure from morphing into a catastrophe. The best surgeons, Gawande wrote in the
New Yorker
, “didn't fail less. They rescued more.”