Lake Buena Vista, Fla. — Sports psychologists swear by the power of visualization, picturing something positive and trying to repeat it.

Braves reliever Peter Moylan knows. He has lived it.

Vino Wong / AJC (ENLARGE)

Before being spotted by a scout in 2005, Peter Moylan wouldn't have dreamed he'd be signing autographs for Braves fans.

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Back home in Australia, 10,000 miles and several years before his major-league break, Moylan saw the movie "The Rookie" starring Dennis Quaid.

It's the story of Jim Morris, the Texas high school chemistry teacher who started throwing in the upper 90s after 12 years out of pro baseball. He made the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 1999 as a reliever.

Moylan was a pharmaceutical sales rep and former minor-league pitcher for the Minnesota Twins, who got his baseball fix playing in a weekend league with his mates. He bought "The Rookie" DVD and watched it five or six more times.

"Wished it was me," Moylan said.

Soon enough, it was.

At age 26, Moylan was discovered at a club game by a scout for the Australian national team. Within two years, he was pitching for the Braves.

Now, sitting on the other side of his remarkable climb, Moylan wouldn't mind if "The Rookie" had never been made.

"I might have a movie deal myself," Moylan said.

What's different about Moylan's story is his rookie season didn't climax with a strikeout in his major-league debut, like Morris' did. Moylan put up one of the best rookie seasons in baseball last year. He was the arm manager Bobby Cox repeatedly turned to, working his way from mop-up duty into a primary set-up role. He led all major-league rookies in ERA (1.80), opponents' batting average (.208) and appearances (80).

Moylan begins his second full major-league season as the next line of defense to closer Rafael Soriano.

"You could use him to get out of a jam in the fifth or sixth or put him in the eighth," Cox said. "I wouldn't have any problem putting him in the ninth. A guy like that is valuable. He had a sensational year, just sensational."

Moylan said he wasted his first opportunity with the Twins. He never made it out of rookie ball, thanks in part to his antipathy for the 6 a.m. wake-up calls required in the Gulf Coast League.

"I was a complete goof-off," said Moylan, who was 17 when he signed with the Twins. "I was young and stupid. I was more focused on going out and having a good time."

He went back to Australia and got a sales job from an ad in the paper.

Some seven years later, he was still wearing a suit to work, peddling packaging materials to pharmaceutical companies. Three times a week, he'd head to a cricket field that he and his buddies converted to a baseball field with cones and chalk.

When he'd first left the Twins, Moylan had to have two surgeries for bulging discs, so, as a Blackburn Oriole, he played mostly first base. But when they ran low on pitching, Moylan started fooling around with an old side-arm motion he'd goofed off with as a youngster.

Throwing from the side didn't hurt his back, and his control wasn't bad. Neither was his velocity. When the Australian scout put the radar gun on him one August day in 2005, Moylan was throwing 94. It was harder than he'd ever thrown, and it came as a shock to him.

"I thought someone might have been playing a bit of a prank on me," Moylan said.

Moylan came to Disney World for the World Baseball Classic packed for two weeks. He stayed for eight months. The Braves signed him to a minor-league contract and invited him to Atlanta for the last two exhibition games. To make the trip, he had to borrow size 14 dress shoes from fellow Aussie minor-league pitcher Phil Stockman for his size 12 feet.

These days Stockman wouldn't mind being in Moylan's shoes. But Moylan isn't taking anything for granted. How could he?

"My first goal honestly is to make the team," Moylan said early in camp. "The arms that we've got here? We've got arms all over the place. I don't want the Braves to think I'm sitting back on what happened last year. I've forgotten about last year already. This is a new year."