Just Tell Me I Can't by Jamie Moyer

as though he was in suspended animation, waiting for his life to start. “There I was, a child—having comfort without ever having had challenge; having order without discipline; ritual without responsibility; entertainment without effort,” he’d recall much later, in Persuasion of My Days , one of the three memoirs he would write. “Indulged, protected, feared for and cared for by loving adults.”
    Harvey went to his first game at the Polo Grounds, the Cubs versus the Giants. The eight-year-old was transfixed by the experience, but not like other kids. Moyer, for example, caught the bug early and knew he wanted to do this thing. Not Dorfman. He wasn’t addicted to the game so much as his own curiosity about its players. This child—sequestered, surrounded by fear—found himself touched by, as he put it, the “physical freedom of expression” he was witnessing. He wanted to understand it, to understand them , these men of action. When he wasn’t listening to or fantasizing about baseball, he lost himself in books, the same urge drawing him to the pages of Huckleberry Finn : he was a spectator in search of a way to become a participant.
    Later, Dorfman would earn a reputation for that rarest of qualities: wisdom. Those who knew him still talk about his talent for the pithy quip, the trenchant observation; he had a way of encapsulating an idea in a phrase that would often lead to an instant change in your thinking, a new way of seeing things. This was also handed down; without his father’s homespun aphorisms, Harvey likely wouldn’t have become the man he did.
    Dorfman the psychologist was famous for being intolerant of players casting themselves in the role of victim. That too came from Mac. The elder Dorfman refused to let his son adopt that persona, even if it was warranted. “Suffering is good for you, kid, so long as you survive it,” Mac would tell his son. Other times, Harvey would later recount, his father would point out that if everyone in the world gathered in a circle and put their problems in the center of it, a fellow would feel lucky to get his own back.
    In dealing with professional ballplayers, Harvey sensed early on that they’d come to expect sympathy. They were raised to be “special,” after all, and surrounded themselves with well-meaning people and sycophants who were loath to push them. Harvey had felt the power of tough love growing up. Once, at fifteen, he sullenly withdrew like most teenagers, as he recounted in Each Branch, Each Needle :
    My father stopped me as I was headed out of our apartment. I was a high schooler at the time. “Are you feeling better today?” he asked. I had been breathing pretty well and feeling—physically—as well as I ever had.
    â€œFine,” I said, with confusion written on my face.
    â€œOh, then your rectumitis is improving?”
    I asked him what he was talking about. “What’s rectumitis?”
    â€œIt’s an inflammation of the nerve that runs from your asshole to your eyeball and it gives you a [crappy] outlook on life. I presumed you were suffering from it.”
    No wonder Harvey would go on to exhort scared pupils like Moyer to be aggressive, to zealously defend their “f’ing circle.” At twelve, the tentative, sickly Dorfman had been told by his father, “In life, you’re going to be either the hunter or the prey. Make up your mind which one it’s going to be.”
    Mac Dorfman was not a wealthy man. He was a traveling salesman for Van Heusen, hawking shirts, collars, and ties throughout the metropolitan New York region. And yet his generosity knew no bounds. He died of a blood clot in the brain when Harvey was in college. Shortly thereafter, money to the Dorfmans started flowing in. Turned out, Mac had long made loans to acquaintances who were down on their luck, sometimes to the tune of $2,000. A World War I vet, he was stoic