CAMP HILL, Pa. — On Sept. 28 at Rogers Centre in Toronto, in the seventh inning of a game against the Blue Jays, on the eighth pitch of his fourth at-bat of his 151st game, the Yankees’ Aaron Judge hit a two-run home run. The ball traveled 394 feet, landing beyond the left-field wall. The home run was Judge’s 61st, tying the American League single-season record, which had been held by Roger Maris for 61 years and which Judge broke seven days later.
This is a story about the man who threw that pitch, and about things that can be seen and things that cannot.
Just freaking out
Standing on his left leg as if he had paused mid-windup, Tim Mayza caught with his left hand a dense rubber ball that Scott Swanson tossed to him, turned to face a black, padded wall, and fired the ball at a bull’s-eye sketched there in white chalk. Then he did it again. “Picking small targets helps,” Mayza said. “You have to have that narrow focus. If I can’t do it here, how can I do it with runners on and the game on the line?”
It was a late morning in late November, a typical offseason workout day for him at FullReps, a baseball training center, operated by Swanson, in a bare-bones industrial park here 5 miles west of Harrisburg, 94 miles west of Pennsburg, Mayza’s hometown. The workout’s purpose was to provide stimulation and variation to Mayza’s usual movements on the mound, to make him a better pitcher than he has been. And these last two years, he has generally been an excellent one: a 13-3 record, a 3.28 earned-run average, 101 strikeouts in 101⅔ innings as the Blue Jays’ primary left-handed reliever.
Even through the arm injury that threatened his career, even as he approaches his 31st birthday next month, the physical aspect of his maintenance and development has always been the easy part for him.
It was never easier than when he was playing three varsity sports at Upper Perkiomen High School. He had soccer to occupy him every fall, and he was the basketball team’s most valuable player his senior year, but baseball was his special thing, the sport of his future. Of course it was. He was a teenaged lefty with a fastball that hovered around 85 mph. Plus, “he was a hell of a hitter,” said Upper Perk head coach Frank Mercon, who was an assistant under Ernie Quattrani at the time. “He hit one of the farthest balls I’ve ever seen.” Yes, he was going places, even if he was his toughest critic, even if father, Jerry, believed that Tim sometimes held himself back by putting so much pressure on himself to be perfect.
Once, in a Little League championship game when Tim was 9, the opposing team loaded the bases. Playing first base, the sun beginning to set, Tim fielded a ground ball. His throw home was a little low, and the catcher couldn’t see it clearly in the twilight. The ball caromed off the catcher’s mitt. The runner scored. And Tim “just kind of freaked out,” said Jerry, a native of Mayfair. “He would mentally take himself out of games. It got in the way of his athleticism.”
Even when it didn’t, his introspection and anxiousness marred what should have been pure, joyful moments. He carried a perfect game into the last inning of a game his senior year, only to have one of his teammates commit an error. Still a no-hitter. Still a great performance. Still not good enough. “He was always very hard on himself,” Quattrani said.
Jon Shehan, Millersville University’s coach, caught a look at Mayza in an American Legion game and coaxed him to Lancaster County to play Division II ball. Didn’t take much. It would be close to home. Mayza’s family could watch him pitch. But there was another benefit, as it turned out: Shehan set aside 15 minutes each practice for his players to explore their thoughts and emotions. He’d have the team’s pitchers read The Mental ABCs of Pitching by the sports psychologist Harvey Dorfman — Dorfman, who died in 2011, mentored dozens of major leaguers, Roy Halladay among them — and listen to lectures by the mental performance coach Brian Cain. In 2013, his junior season, Mayza went 11-3 in 14 starts with a 1.55 ERA. Scouts started showing up in the stands, pointing their radar guns at him and seeing 94 flash in red on digital screens, handing him questionnaires to fill out. That June, the Blue Jays picked him in the 13th round of the Major League Baseball Draft.
“Wasn’t even on the radar that I could have gotten drafted,” he said.
At single A in 2013 and ‘14, he might as well have been tossing batting practice; he allowed 79 hits and 45 earned runs in 55⅔ innings. Jerry had always admired his son’s ability to evaluate himself, to figure out what he needed to do to get better and do it. But what was there to learn from having hitters hammer him every day?
“The early years were very difficult,” Jerry said. “We would stay up to midnight, 1 a.m., whenever he’d get home from his minor-league game, and we’d basically let him vent over the phone. It would get to the point where I’d say, ‘Hey, this conversation’s not getting you anywhere. We should probably hang up.’ ”
Improvement arrived in increments: a hard two-seam fastball he could now control, a slider as a second pitch, strong seasons followed by rough ones. But in his 11 appearances for triple-A Buffalo in 2017, the International League couldn’t touch him. So the Blue Jays called him up that August, and whatever pressure he’d felt before was nothing compared to the invisible boulder he now placed on his back.
Think of his role, so narrow and specialized: the situational lefty. Enter a game, often at its most important moment, often with men on base and the outcome in the balance. He had one job: Get this batter out, and he was a success. Walk him, hit him, throw one bad pitch that he grounds through the hole or lines into the right-center-field gap or launches over the fence, and he was a failure. Whenever he returned to his Toronto apartment after a bad game, his wife, Darian, would try to comfort him, but their conversations devolved into one-sided rants in which Tim would shout her down.
I know you’re trying to help me, but you don’t understand what just happened out there. You weren’t out on that mound, knowing what it felt like to let the team down. Those were my runs that I gave up. That loss was on me.
No one else saw what his struggles were doing to him. Finally, one day in 2018, he picked up his phone.
The call that changed everything
The arm injury … well, yes, everyone saw that. Sept. 13, 2019, top of the 10th in a tie game against the Yankees, Didi Gregorious up, a 3-2 fastball that sailed and swerved behind Gregorious, Mayza crumpling to his knees, a burning sensation snaking down from his elbow to his fingertips, his arm swelling immediately, the Rogers Centre going silent in horror.
Mayza had torn his ulnar collateral ligament and his flexor tendon. He’d need Tommy John surgery and a year-plus of rehabilitation to have any chance of pitching in the majors again. Shehan put him in touch with Swanson; several Millersville players had rehabbed at FullReps. In early 2020, as COVID-19′s spread threatened to shut down society, Mayza drove from one sporting goods store to another along the East Coast, hoarding bungee cords and resistance bands and barbells so he could keep to the regimen that Swanson and the Blue Jays prescribed for him. But when he wasn’t heaving medicine balls against his homemade plyometric wall or long-tossing to build arm strength, when the monotony and the doubts preyed on him, Mayza leaned most on the man he’d called the previous year: Jarrod Spencer, a sports psychologist based in the Lehigh Valley.
“The beautiful part about Tim,” Spencer said in a phone interview, “is he’s a wonderfully passionate person, and in life, a person’s greatest strength at times can be their greatest weakness.”
The low point? He missed the entire pandemic-shortened 2020 season. The Blue Jays took him off the 40-man roster, then invited him to spring training as a long-shot free agent.
“With Jarrod, I had someone who could talk through these moments, who could get me through those speed bumps,” said Mayza, who during his rehabilitation earned a master’s degree in sports administration from Ohio University. “You’re going up and down, and you’ve got to stay level-headed.”
He made the team, and on opening day 2021, in his first appearance since the injury, he pitched a scoreless inning, striking out two, at Yankee Stadium.
The journey to wisdom
Michael Morales is 20 years old and a pitcher in the Seattle Mariners’ farm system, and he happened to be training at FullReps alongside Mayza on that morning last month.
“Asking about Aaron?” he said with a sly smile.
It was good he could bust Mazya’s chops about the home run, right?
“Yeah,” Mayza said, “he’s not shy.”
The Judge home run isn’t a forbidden topic for Mayza. How could it be? ABC and ESPN kept cutting into other programming to show Judge’s at-bats as he approached Maris’ record. “Even if you were watching Grey’s Anatomy,” Mayza said. He threw eight straight two-seam fastballs, eight straight pitches that were supposed to sink, thinking that Judge would eventually hit one on the ground. Judge didn’t.
Turning to track the ball’s flight, Mayza threw his hands in the air in an are-you-kidding-me gesture. Spencer saw the home run in real time and knew in that instant that, soon enough, he and Mayza would be talking about it. Swanson, who grew up on Long Island and whose grandfather was an usher at the old Yankee Stadium, was watching the game with his father, Bruce, who yelled out: “Oh, no! Not Tim!” When Mayza visited Upper Perk in October to speak to several baseball players about the college recruiting process, Bob Carpenter, the school’s principal, told him that he had texted Mercon while Judge was still rounding the bases. “I felt horrible,” he said to Mayza. “For you.”
Mayza didn’t mind that he would be forever tied to Judge in the sport’s collective memory. What bothered him was that, in a tie game with postseason implications, the home run had put the Blue Jays behind. He hadn’t done his job. A year earlier, two years earlier, Mayza wouldn’t have done what he did next, though. He stayed in the Blue Jays’ clubhouse longer than usual: a ride on an exercise bike, 30 minutes in the sauna, enough time to decompress, to relax, to make sure that he wouldn’t be a clenched fist when he returned home to Darian. How many elite athletes never learned to confront and manage such stresses and insecurities? How many wouldn’t even bring up the subject? How many still won’t?
“Dealing with this stuff at the major-league level was definitely a transition for me,” he said. “When I was in Little League, it was not acceptable. That type of behavior was not acceptable. Now you’re seeing more stories about performance anxiety, and people are dealing with it. It’s easy to have a good outing and leave the clubhouse happy. But when you’ve had those tough outings, how do you combat it?”
Here’s how, if you’re Mayza: You review that showdown with Judge and conclude that you need to spend the winter honing your slider — slowing it down and giving it a more pronounced break to distinguish it from your fastball — so that, if a similar scenario presents itself, you might have the confidence to throw it and, maybe, surprise the hitter. You spend five days a week and four hours a day at FullReps and the rest of your time with Darian and your two sons: Everett, who is 2, and Graham, who isn’t five weeks old yet. You talk to Spencer once a month, just to check in and clear away any flotsam in your mind.
“Wisdom equals healed pain,” Spencer said. “When a person really works on their emotional wounds and heals them, they seem wise, and Tim is a very wise man.”
On Sept. 28 at Rogers Centre in Toronto, Tim Mayza was the losing pitcher in the Yankees’ 8-3 victory over the Blue Jays. In one-third of an inning, he allowed two earned runs on two hits, one of which was one of the most famous home runs in major league history. It took a long time for him to learn how to accept the truth of that moment: The real failure would have been if he’d never given himself the chance to throw the pitch at all.
