A few months ago I wrote an article at Dugout Central that tried to recognize Jamie Moyer’s position as one of the best major league pitchers since the mid-’90s and gain some new appreciation for him from those who’d previously reflexively dismissed him as an adequate junkballer or worse.
I don’t know if I succeeded, but Moyer’s impressive game three outing against the Rays in the World Series at least ensured that people wouldn’t see him as the millstone around the Phillies’ neck this past postseason.
When I wrote my article, I hoped that Moyer would go on to win the World Series and let more people know what he’d accomplished over the past dozen or so years, and what he was still capable of doing.
I’d been at Safeco Field in 2005 for one of his last outstanding performances for the Mariners, a 5-0 defeat of the Mets in which he pitched seven innings. My most vivid memory of the game, though, is watching him walk in from the bullpen with Pat Borders, his batterymate, as the two prepared to start the game.
I’d heard somewhere that Borders and Moyer each had something like six kids, and I was struck by how these two 40-somethings, who’d made their Major League debuts well before the ‘90s began, and who I’d first seen on baseball cards sometime around 1988, were still hanging on in a young man’s game.
It’s always seemed to me that if Moyer had an impressive fastball and the strikeouts that go with one, both sabermetrics analysts and more ordinary fans would acclaim him. Instead, he lacks even the knuckleball or spitball that made the Niekros and Gaylord Perry famous. Jamie doesn’t have the strikeouts or the personality or the idiosyncrasies that might have won him fame: he’s just a really good and highly durable pitcher.
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