Free Just Tell Me I Can't by Jamie Moyer

his life.
    Jamie was part of that plan, though Jim never pushed Jamie toward the game. He didn’t have to. The Moyers have a photo of Jamie at sixteen months, hitting a wiffle ball with a plastic bat in the backyard, making solid contact. It helped that Jamie was a natural athlete, able to pick up and master any sport. As he got older, a legend surrounding Jamie Moyer started to take hold in Souderton. As a fourteen-year-old, he was a star quarterback, before giving up the game upon entering high school so as not to risk injury that would sideline him from baseball. On the basketball court, he was the quickest player, the most adept dribbler. His golf swing was pristine.
    But everyone knew baseball always came first. One day in the junior high gymnasium, Moyer was throwing and a crowd gathered. “One of the teachers was there and I remember him calling other teachers over and telling them, ‘Look at this, look at how this ball moves,’” recalls Tim Bishop, who starred with Moyer on the Souderton Area High and American Legion baseball teams, and went on to play pro ball before becoming the Baltimore Orioles’ strength and conditioning coach, where he was reunited with Moyer in the 1990s. Back in that junior high gym, Bishop and the others saw a ball that moved almost cartoonishly: breaking wildly, fluttering in midair. “We were from a small town. No one had seen anything like that before.”
    Nor had Souderton seen Moyer’s type of dominance before. By the time he got to high school, he was a wiry six-footer with—ironically—a speedier fastball than anybody in the Bux-Mont League was used to and a big, sweeping curve that, thanks to all those driveway sessions with Jim, he could throw for strikes. In fact, in a bit of hyperbole that would later come to seem even more ironic, local writers often referred to Moyer’s fastball as “blazing”; Bishop and others suggest that it may have been 84 miles per hour, a good ten miles per hour faster than the high school norm. He won 22 of 25 games in his high school career and averaged nearly two strikeouts an inning. His ERA was 0.59.
    In his junior year, en route to a 10–0 record, Moyer threw three consecutive no-hitters. The stands were packed not to see the games, but to see whether the opposing team could even make contact against the phenom. In his senior year, Moyer not only hit .375, but also went 8–1 with a 0.54 ERA. Major league scouts sent letters, including one from Martinez Jackson, Reggie’s father, who was a tailor in Philadelphia and a scout for the California Angels. Jackson would visit Souderton often. “My boss has heard about you, Jay,” Jackson wrote to Jamie. “He’s anxious to see you in action.”
    By then, baseball wasn’t just Moyer’s passion; it was his obsession. Never a good student, he did just enough to get by in school. And he wasn’t much into girls, either. When she learned her son had a date for the prom, Joan Moyer was shocked. Scooter Myers remembers Moyer having a beer now and then, but mostly he was fixated on baseball like it already was his profession. When it had rained all night before a big game, the local paper reported that Moyer was on the field at 7:30 a.m., trying to dry it off himself. That kind of commitment has never really left him, even as a pro. Moyer is always the first out of the dugout, sprinting to the mound each inning. Bishop and other Souderton teammates have seen that throughout the years, and they smile, recognizing a Jim Moyer dictum in action.
    â€œJamie tried everything to get better,” remembers Bishop. “He knew about cuff and scapula stabilization exercises, doing these crazy arm motions, before any of us. I remember going to some massage guy on his recommendation. In Souderton in 1980, guys didn’t get massages, but Jamie was always learning, always looking for the next thing.”
    In 1980,