The Ageless Jamie Moyer
The Oldest Pitcher in Baseball seems to Keep Getting Better
As the champagne flowed amidst cheers and hugs in the Philadelphia Phillies clubhouse after they clinched a second straight National League East division title last Saturday, there was one player who may have been the happiest of all. Jamie Moyer, the Phillies’ starting pitcher, who’d just thrown six innings and given up one run, had just picked up his 16th win of the year. Not bad for a guy who turns 46 years old next month. That’s right: Jamie Moyer is pushing 46 years old, an age at which most Major League ballplayers have been retired for the better part of a decade. Not Moyer. He has gotten better with age, literally.
Moyer's Early Career Struggles
In his first decade in the big leagues (from 1986 through 1995), Moyer was 59-76 with an earned run average of 4.52. His struggles led teams to demote Moyer to the minors for substantial time in 1992 and 1993. By 1996, however, Moyer was back in the big leagues with the Seattle Mariners (after a mideaseason trade from the Red Sox), and that season, he finally broke through, going 13-3. It was the beginning of a new Jamie Moyer.
Moyer Turns the Corner as a Middle-Aged Ballplayer
Since that season, a year that began when Moyer was 33 years old, the lefty's record is 187-109, and his ERA is a full half point lower. Moyer's first fifteen win season came in 1997, when he was 34. He won twenty games for the first time at 38, making him the oldest first time twenty game winner in baseball history (his record was broken by Mike Mussina of the New York Yankees in 2008).
Two years later, when he was 40, Moyer had the best year of his career, winning 21 games and making the only All-Star team of his career. Moyer struggled during his last two seasons in Seattle, and was traded to his hometown Phillies on August 19, 2006. The return to his hometown has agreed with Moyer, whose record with Philadelphia in a little more than two seasons is 35-21.
This season, at the age 45, he was 16-7 with an ERA of 3.71. Away from hitter-friendly Citizens Bank Park, Moyer was a remarkable 10-3 with a 2.92 ERA. At one point, he made 14 straight starts without surrendering more than three runs, the longest such streak by a Phillies pitcher in 40 years.
While Moyer probably won't win the Cy Young Award (that will go to Brandon Webb, Tim Lincecum or maybe C.C. Sabathia), he will surely place in the top five or six.
Moyer's Style and His Future
How does he do it? How does Jamie Moyer keep going? Well, most importantly, Moyer doesn't rely on power to get hitters out. Instead, he relies on finesse, placement and change of speed, mixing in a devastating changeup and knee-buckling curveball to offset his modest 83 MPH fastball. The strategy is obviously working.
On his future, Moyer has said: I have always said that my hope is that when the time comes for me to leave, it will be my decision." But he doesn't seem to eager to go anytime soon. Earlier in the season, Moyer said, "if I can play for two more years, it would be four decades and I think that would be cool."
With the way he pitched this year, it's not inconceivable that Moyer could pitch until he is the age of his uniform number: 50.
It could happen.
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