Harvey Dorfman counts Jamie Moyer, Raul Ibanez and Chan Ho Park among his clients.
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Sam Donnellon: Psychologist helps Phillies, athletes think positive even when things are going well
CHAN HO PARK has called him twice over the last few weeks. Jamie Moyer might call him soon; maybe he already will have by the time you read this. Raul Ibanez called him during spring training, but lately hasn't felt the need, what with 10 home runs and 26 runs batted in already in his first season as a Phillie.
If he did though, Harvey Dorfman would not be shocked.
"Here's the nature of a call when a guy's doing great," says the famous and flippant sports psychologist, now 74. "They're starting to have thoughts: 'How long can this last?'
"Isn't that incredible? They can't even enjoy
doing well. They're anticipating that the bottom's going to fall out. But that's the human condition. We all think. For better and for worse."
Dorfman's talent, the one that has drawn jockeys, opera singers, paraplegic skiers and hundreds upon hundreds of baseball players toward him, is to get people to think for the better. His books, most notably "The Mental ABC's of Pitching" and "The Mental Game of Baseball," have become dog-eared textbooks for players like Moyer, who in turn has pointed players from Ibanez to the struggling young Kyle Kendrick toward Harvey's couch.
"Jamie is my agent," Dorfman says with a chuckle over the telephone yesterday. "When he was with Seattle, I had the whole frigin' pitching staff."
Back then he also added Ibanez, then a streaky, often self-doubting and distracted player. Today, Ibanez is a model of consistency, routine and preparation, staples of Dorfman's approach.
"I'll talk forever about the guy," Ibanez says. "But it boils down to two words: The best."
What evokes such devotion? Moyer, a disciple since the early 1990s, said it goes way beyond the words Dorfman has put down on paper.
"I thought I understood what I had read," says the 46-year-old pitcher, amid the worst start of his 24-season career, "and then I went to see him."
Dorfman describes his books this way: "You fire a musket and you hope the shot hits somebody." He would much rather engage in a hand-to-hand approach.
"When you deal with an individual you can ready, aim, fire," he says. "You know what the target is. You know what the issue it. And you formulate a strategy."
For Park, that strategy was to simplify the complexities of being a national icon while still a teenager. At 20, Park's arrival in Dodgers camp was the second-biggest spring-training story of 1994, just behind Michael Jordan trying baseball. An army of media from his native South Korea charted his every pitch. Tommy Lasorda showered superlatives on him, compared him to Koufax, Drysdale, all the Dodger greats.
And there was one other thing.
"The culture," says Park. "The language was tough. And sometimes it affects the game. But what [Dorfman] emphasized to me early was that on the mound, the language doesn't matter."
Today at age 35, a model of ease and comfort even on his worst days, Park says of Dorfman, "He is my mentor. He is like, my, my . . . god."
"There are three elements: approach, result, response. That's what I teach. Your mental approach, attitude, focus, that's all part of your approach. Result: You have no control over that. Response: That is the key. If I have a good approach but I get a bad result and now that I respond poorly like that guy with the strikes. My next approach is going to be horse[bleep]. Approach and response is entirely in your control, I tell them. The result is not."
I mentioned Moyer's last outing, when he cruised through the first three innings with pinpoint accuracy before losing his touch in the fourth inning. Still, he made his pitch against James Loney, inducing what seemed to be a harmless high fly to rightfield.
Loney dropped his head and jogged toward first. Jayson Werth seemed to be settling in at the warning track to make a catch.
And then the ball landed in the seats, a good 10 yards to the left of where Werth thought it would drop. And just like that, a 1-1 tie had become a 4-1 Dodgers lead.
"I watched it," Dorfman says. "And I died, of course. That's what you do when you're pulling for your guys."
Moyer proved last October just how well he has embraced Dorfman's axioms. After being hammered in his NLCS start against Los Angeles, he took the mound in the World Series for a rain-delayed pivotal Game 3 sick as a dog. A stomach virus had kept him up the night before and had him vomiting all day. He required an IV to regain some strength while waiting out the rain.
He pitched into the seventh inning, left the game with the Phillies leading, 4-2, en route to a 5-4 victory.
Said Moyer this winter, "The thing I've learned to do during my professional career, and especially over the last 10 years, is this: Whatever is going on in the media, whatever is going on under my own roof, in the clubhouse, in the stadium - when I'm on that mound, I'm in my office. I'm in my cubicle. I am able to shut it all out. Whether I am getting knocked around in the first inning, or getting three quick outs, I am in a bubble in the middle of the ocean. And it stays that way almost until I'm back in the clubhouse. When I go on the field, it can't come with me, any of that. It's like I'm in a cage."
That's straight from Dorfman. Talking to Ibanez, talking to Park, talking to any veteran who has spent time in Harvey's office and on the phone with him, and it sounds similar. Boiled down, it's about fear and courage, about that human condition that defines us all. Dennis Eckersley, Dorfman says, was the worst case of that extremism he ever saw.
And living, statistical proof that it can be conquered spectacularly.
"The thing I've realized as I've matured is that you can pull the word 'baseball' out of it and put in 'life' instead," says Moyer. "Or 'soccer.' Or 'hockey.' 'Tennis.' 'Golf.'
"It pertains to everything we do." *
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