Just Tell Me I Can't by Jamie Moyer Page B

Zeppelin somewhere,” Moyer, a classic rock devotee, muttered to himself as he surfed the dial. He smiled when the nasal twang of Tom Petty came through the speakers:
    Gonna stand my ground / Won’t be turned around…And I won’t back down
    That was more like it. Baseball season was already in full swing, only until now he hadn’t been a part of it. It had been more than a year since his weekend with Harvey and there had been no panacea, no epiphany. He’d started last season with St. Louis, getting seven starts. That’s when, with an 0–5 record, manager Joe Torre told him he was being sent down to Triple A: “We don’t win when you pitch.”
    At Louisville, an underachieving team, he was 5–10 with a 3.80 ERA. Still, there were moments on the mound where he got out of his own way and got the sense that this was what Harvey was talking about in all those phone calls. In golf, they call it “intermittent reinforcement”—despite all the slices and shanks that came before, the feeling of that one solidly struck ball is enough to keep a golfer coming back, day after day. In Louisville, Moyer was up and down, but he had enough ups to keep with it, despite being released at season’s end. He didn’t feel like any corner had been turned, but he also wasn’t ready to quit yet.
    At the start of the 1992 season, he found himself in Mesa, Arizona, for spring training with his first team, the Chicago Cubs. He was happy with how he had pitched, but getting cut didn’t really come as a surprise. He’d surveyed the field, was aware of the numbers game the big league club would be looking at—how many pitchers and how many spots they had—and knew he faced long odds. As the team readied to break camp, he was called into the Fitch Park office of Bill Hartford, the Cubs’ minor league director.
    â€œJamie, we have to release you at this time,” Hartford said. “The organization doesn’t see you helping them as a starter and they don’t see you as a relief pitcher at the big league level.”
    There was silence. Usually these meetings are perfunctory; when he got released by the Texas Rangers in 1990 (after a two-year record of 6–15 with an ERA just under 5.00), the phone call from general manager Tom Grieve was particularly terse: “We don’t see you helping us.” Now, however, Hartford had something else he wanted to say.
    â€œYou’re almost thirty, Jamie,” Hartford began. “We don’t have room for you in the minors as a pitcher, but we think you’d make a good pitching coach, so we’d like to offer you a coaching job.”
    â€œI’m not interested,” Moyer blurted out, almost before the words were out of Hartford’s mouth.
    Hartford shifted in his chair. Baseball men hate delivering this message; he wasn’t just releasing Moyer, he was also telling him that, in the organization’s opinion, his playing days were over. “Well, look,” Hartford said. “We have your rights for three days, why don’t you go home and think about it and get back to us?”
    â€œMy thoughts aren’t going to change,” Moyer said.
    â€œWell, just go home and think about it.”
    So as the baseball season began, Jamie Moyer was once again a pitcher without a team, one with the most uncertain of futures. He was now twenty-nine years old and had been traded once and released by three teams—the Rangers, the Cardinals, and the Cubs. He was a career 34–54 journeyman, with a 4.56 ERA. Worse, this couldn’t have happened at a more inopportune time. Jamie and Karen had bought a $380,000 house in Granger, Indiana, just outside of South Bend. Dillon was about to turn one year old. Plus, he’d made a commitment to his father-in-law, Digger Phelps—who as head basketball coach at Notre Dame had graduated all his players—that Jamie would complete