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of the mental side of sports has become a popular topic among the intelligentsia. In 2000, the New Yorker ’s Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article entitled “The Art of Failure.” In it, he defines “choking”—the worst kind of athletic failure—as the opposite of panic. He might as well have been quoting Dorfman from the 1980s. “Choking is about thinking too much,” Gladwell writes. “Panic is about thinking too little.” In 2012, writer Jonah Lehrer cited in Neuron a study by a team of researchers at Caltech and University College London, in which escalating monetary rewards were offered to players of a simple arcade game. As the stakes got higher, player performance significantly worsened.
    Intellectuals like Gladwell and Lehrer buttressed their writings with reports from the front lines of neuroscience research, which had become all the rage, but their findings echoed Dorfman from the ’80s. Only Dorfman didn’t need to don a white coat in order to discover the degree to which self-consciousness altered athletic outcome. His laboratory was Major League Baseball itself, and after Alderson gave him the opportunity, the ensuing years found him developing his unique approach and putting his theories into practice.
    There was, for example, the mano a mano with Jose Canseco in the minors, after the phenom failed to run out a grounder. There Dorfman was, right in the slugger’s face after Canseco nonchalantly shrugged off his lack of hustle by chalking it up to “normal” frustration.
    â€œ Normal? ” Dorfman shrieked. “You want to be normal ? You’re an elite athlete. You’re already exceptional—and that’s what you should want for yourself. To be extraordinary, not ordinary.”
    Canseco, backing down, asked how he should have handled his emotions. “Just train yourself by saying, ‘Hit the ball, run. Hit the ball, run. Hit the ball, run,’” Dorfman explained. “It’ll become an acquired instinct. It doesn’t matter how you feel during combat; you fight.”
    Just a year and a half prior to Moyer’s visit, Dorfman had been instrumental in settling down A’s pitcher Bob Welch. Welch, a recovering alcoholic, had always been a jumble of nerves, fidgeting on the mound to the point of distraction, especially when the pressure mounted. “You can make coffee nervous,” Dorfman told him. Welch would become frenetic on the mound, in a rush to get the ball back from his catcher. Dorfman and catcher Terry Steinbach conspired together. When Welch would walk to the front of the mound, waving his glove in order to get the ball returned— now! —Steinbach wouldn’t throw it. That, Dorfman told his pupil pitcher, would trigger the signal in Welch’s mind to take a deep breath, exhaling slowly, bringing himself down.
    To the ballplayers, Dorfman was as in-your-face as the other coaches, it’s just that he provided practical mental tips. Welch joked, “If you told Harvey you just killed somebody, he’d say, ‘What are you going to do about that?’”
    Dorfman’s emphasis on practical tactics was an actual psychological school of thought he was the first to apply to baseball: semantitherapy. Freudians, Dorfman believed, in their search for the long-dormant cause of a patient’s fear or neurosis, forgot to treat the manifestation of those fears. Perhaps the root of a fear of flying is in a patient’s childhood in the form of a long-ago traumatic experience. But just as real are the current-day sweaty palms and heart palpitations as the plane readies for takeoff. In baseball, Dorfman realized, if you conquer the symptoms, you kill the disease.
    Now this kid Moyer presented with some familiar indications. Fear, doubt, lack of confidence, distracting thoughts. For the better part of three days, Dorfman would give the kid the full treatment. He and Anita,