It’s a youth baseball tradition older than even Jamie Moyer: Passing the hat.
The dollar bills and change collected from the crowd raise a little extra money to buy equipment, pay the umpires or for whatever.
Moyer, the former big league pitcher whose career ended a decade ago when he was 49, remembers the whatever part.
His father, Jim, was his coach in summer baseball while he was growing up in Bucks County, and he used any money that was left over at the end of the season to buy tickets to go see the Reading Phillies.
“He would say, ‘Anybody that wants to go to a Reading Phillies game, meet in my front yard on this day, and we’ll get in cars, and we’ll go up to the Reading Phillies,’ ” Moyer recalled last week before being one of the featured speakers at the 60th annual Reading Hot Stovers Banquet at the DoubleTree by Hilton hotel in Reading. “So we did that every year. We loved it.”
The 59-year-old Moyer briefly reminisced about those long-ago days, when he would run up to the concession stand to get a hot dog and fries and didn’t have to wait in a line. Or how he would make his way down the right field line to get an up-close look at professional baseball.
“For me, the love was to go down to the bullpen,” said Moyer, who pitched for the Phillies from 2006-10. “There was just a chain-link separating me from the pitcher, sitting on a wooden bench. You could kind of maybe eavesdrop on a conversation. Or if a guy was getting loose, I’m like, ‘Whoa, look at these guys. They throw hard.’
“And little did I know that some of the players that I was watching, a guy by the name of Ryne Sandberg or a guy by the name of Keith Moreland, would be teammates when I made it to the big leagues for the Cubs.”
Moyer’s baseball experiences tied to Berks County weren’t limited to what was then known as Municipal Stadium.
The left-hander faced the Boyertown Legion program while playing for Souderton, calling the Bears “a nemesis.” He then went to Saint Joseph’s, where he ended up being roommates with Glenn Gamler, a former Boyertown standout, and was teammates with two other former Bears in John Ludy and Tim Koch.
Following his days at Saint Joe’s, Moyer was drafted by Chicago in the sixth round of the 1984 draft. He made his major league debut two years later, beating the Phillies and Steve Carlton 7-5 at Wrigley Field as part of a Cubs lineup that included Sandberg and Moreland.
It was all part of a fascinating baseball journey of ups and downs that didn’t end until the soft-tossing Moyer retired in 2012 after compiling a 269-209 record in 25 seasons — and giving up a major league-record 522 homers.
He is the oldest pitcher in major league history to win a game and the oldest player to knock in a run, doing both for the Colorado Rockies.
Those are feats it had to be hard for the personable Moyer to imagine as he struggled in his early big league days.
He didn’t enjoy prolonged success until after he had been released three times, including following a second stint with the Cubs, and was with his sixth big league organization, the Baltimore Orioles.
He won 20 games in a season for the first time as a 38-year-old with the Seattle Mariners in 2001. He earned his first and only All-Star selection in 2003. He was 40.
“The success seemed to come later, which I think was probably better for me,” Moyer said. “Because I had dealt with some of the ugliness and mentally had to deal with it. And it made me stronger.”
Moyer talked about some of his experiences in those earlier years laying the foundation for his later success.
He was teammates with Nolan Ryan in Texas and witnessed one of his no-hitters, his 300th victory and his 5,000th strikeout. He saw how humble Ryan was through it all.
Moyer was with the Orioles in 1995 when Cal Ripken broke Lou Gehrig’s record consecutive games streak. He saw how Ripken dealt with the attention and with the autograph-seeking fans.
It all left an impression.
“I can go back to probably every manager I played for and tell you something that I’ve learned that was healthy, or maybe not so healthy, or an experience I had with teammates on the field,” Moyer said. “To me, that’s what molds you, that’s what creates who you’re becoming, because we’re constantly evolving. And it never stops. Because when it stops, we stop.”
Moyer was ready to call a stop to his career in 2006. He said he was in a situation in Seattle “where it just didn’t feel like people cared.”
Just days later, he said, on Aug. 19, he was traded to the Phillies.
The deal reenergized Moyer and it ultimately led to the crowning moment of his career — being part of the Phillies’ 2008 World Series championship team.
“I mean, who would have thunk?” Moyer said. “I would have never thought. I dreamt it my whole life.”
The coolest thing to Moyer — a father of eight — was that he was able to live his dream with two of his sons, Dillon, then 17, and Hutton, then 15.
When the Phillies had clinched their earlier playoff series victories that year at Milwaukee and at Los Angeles against the Dodgers, Moyer had been able to get his sons in uniform and out to the field to celebrate.
Even now, more than 13 years later, Moyer lowered his voice when telling the story of sneaking them into the dugout that night at Citizens Bank Park when the Phillies beat the Tampa Bay Rays in Game 5, as if he didn’t want anyone to find out his secret.
As he had for the two earlier clinching wins, he had told his sons to head to the clubhouse in the seventh inning if the Phillies were ahead. If they were still up after eight, he told them to put on the uniforms and “wait for Dad.”
“ ‘Stay right there, don’t mess around or fool around, don’t make a scene,’ ” Moyer said he told them.
When the ninth rolled around, Moyer led Dillon and Hutton down the tunnel. He instructed them not to lift their heads and to follow him.
“I sat ’em at the end of the dugout,” Moyer said. “So when we clinched they were on the field with me, which is really special. I mean that in itself is something that is priceless. I was able to share that with my boys.
“As Brad Lidge is facing Eric Hinske for the third out, which we didn’t know, it was strike one, strike two, strike three. I’m like standing at the end of the dugout and my boys were there, grinning from ear to ear. I had tears rolling down my face. And I’m thinking to myself, ‘What do I do? Do I hug my boys? Do I run on the field?’ I ran on the field. But it was like, ‘Is this really happening?’ I mean, it was just like an out-of-body experience.”
These days, Moyer said he is just being a dad. He lives in Washington, not far from Portland, Ore., with his three dogs. And with plenty of fond memories.
“My career has taken me to so many different places,” he said. “I feel and felt so fortunate to play with the players that I’ve played with and have some of the experiences that I’ve been able to have. I’ve been around some pretty special things.”
