MLBeat

With apologies to the beaten-down Barry Bonds, the most unpleasant disappointment in MLB this spring has been the white flag on Rick Ankiel's pitching career. You probably already know that Ankiel was once the closest thing to the next Sandy Koufax that we've seen since the real article himself: electric stuff, an imposing presence, clearly the kind of superior specimen that only comes around once every so often, a St. Louis Cardinals ace-to-be for the next decade. This spring he has scrapped any plans to come back as a pitcher in favor of a career as a power-hitting outfielder. Ankiel was always that rarest of breeds, the pitcher who could hit, and I remember watching one of his games in Busch Stadium when he roped a potential grand slam into the upper deck about five feet foul, eliciting the wild applause you get when you see future greatness beginning to realize itself in the present. It's tough to see a future for him in the majors as a hitter, though it would be outstanding if it did come to pass.

In 2000, Ankiel broke into the majors with St. Louis at age 20 and threw 175 innings with 197 strikeouts and a 3.50 ERA, foretelling a Hall-of-Fame career that was to come and earning himself the nod to start Game 1 of the Division Series against the Atlanta Braves. The box score for that game now lives in infamy, as that was the day of Ankiel's Implosion. It was a flaming ten-car pileup of an appearance, serving as a reminder that the dreaded Steve Blass syndrome can attack without warning and, more importantly, without a known cure. Four tortured years and one Tommy John surgery later, Ankiel's pitching career is over.

Peter Gammons did as good a take on Ankiel's situation as anyone else has, concluding with this snippet:

None of us can ever relate to how Rick Ankiel or Bobby Sprowl, Dave Engle or Chuck Knoblauch feels. Unable to do the one thing they could always do so well, and being unable to do so with what they think is the whole world watching.

Setting aside the matter of Koufaxian talent, I can relate to Ankiel. As a St. Louis resident when he was called up, I looked upon him with the same sort of paternal encouragement that any great baseball city has for its up-and-coming stars. But when I saw him throw five wild pitches and walk six in under three innings that day in October 2000, he instantly became my favorite player, the one I pulled for harder than anyone else, because I knew right away how long and arduous the comeback road was going to be for him. I knew because those wild pitches looked eerily similar to some of the pitches I was throwing by my senior year in high school.

I was never going to become a major-league prospect, but I'd had my share of success pitching over the years. At age 12 I emerged onto the Dixie Baseball scene by becoming my league's only sidearmer, as well as its only curveball artist. Thus began a fitful pitching career that saw, at times, plain hittable mediocrity (age 13 and part of age 17), effectiveness mixed with some hiccups (age 15), and stretches of utter dominance (ages 14, 16, and part of age 17).

A natural sidearmer from the moment I first picked up a baseball, I always relied on movement, funny arm angles, and whatever breaking pitches I had invented for myself that particular week. My career as an infielder had been stunted by my inability to throw a straight ball across the diamond; it always broke, sunk, or simply disappeared in a cloud of dust down the right-field line. But that's a great quality for a pitcher to have, and for a few years I managed to be one of my league's better pitchers despite below-average velocity. My age 14 season - the summer of 1994 - was the peak, as I perfected the ability to sling a few fastballs over the plate and follow up with a roundhouse curve that buckled more than a few knees.

One of my problems was my tendency to use a radically different pitching motion every year:

• Age 12 was the Andy Ashby dip-and-drive that I could suspend in midair for a couple beats to throw off hitters' timing, mixed with a huge curveball to do so even further;
  
• Age 13 was the Steve Bedrosian accelerated leg kick, keeping the hands high and snapping my neck back frequently to see where the ball was ending up;
  
• Age 14 was all out of the stretch, keeping hands low like a RH Paul Assenmacher (I loved to copy pitching motions I was seeing on TV) and incorporating a slider and splitter to complement the roundhouse curve, winning twelve games in a row and starting my All-Star team's opening tournament game -- basically the highest honor you can hope for in Alabama at that age;
  
• Age 15 was modeled closely after Charlie Liebrandt, with miserable results until I changed my template to Greg Maddux and mysteriously got a whole lot better, just in time to earn the All-Star starting spot again;
  
• Age 16 was stretch-only and featured separation of the hands during the windup, the legality of which was disagreed upon by many umpires but the execution of which brought me some success;
  
• Age 17 started out depressingly mundane and ineffective -- a lackluster John Smoltz impersonation -- until, with the help of my pitching coach Hunter Roquemore, I went completely, 180 degrees, Kent Tekulve/Chad Bradford pick-up-the-grass submarine with my delivery and became unhittable so long as a) my arm didn't hurt and b) I could find the plate regularly, leading my high school team to the third round of the Alabama 2A state playoffs;
• Age 18 was an attempt to replicate the success of Age 17 that didn't go so well.
  

The problem with changing my delivery so much is that I never figured out how to fix one when flaws emerged in my mechanics, opting instead to find a new motion entirely. But my success at Age 17 as a submariner was intoxicating, not to mention the only realistic route to a pitching career beyond high school as I was clearly going to lack the velocity and/or killer curveball to succeed pitching conventionally at a higher level. When I threw submarine the ball would sink suddenly and violently, leaving hitters with no choice but to fist a three-hopper right back to me. I also threw a Jeff Nelson-style frisbee floater just to make them look even sillier as an added bonus.

By Age 18 I had noticed that my hand would go almost completely numb by the fifth or sixth inning of pitching underhanded, and there was one infamous start against high school rival St. James in cold weather where my Implosion happened. Unable to even feel the ball in my hand due to the frigid conditions, I slung the ball all over the backstop until I was removed in the second inning. I can't remember how many hitters I plunked (I'm pretty sure I blacked out), but I do remember being desperate enough to actually try three or four different motions right there in the game as a last resort. I was so furious at myself that I marched straight to the bullpen and made Jake Kiser catch me for about 50-60 frustration throws as I tried to remember how to throw submarine. That was the end of my effectiveness as a pitcher really; I had a couple decent games after that but never did any more real damage. About half of the games I appeared in after that I had to be removed from out of concern for opposing hitters' safety, not to mention the remaining shreds of my dignity.

The worst part was the lack of understanding from coaches and teammates. I don't blame them though, because I wouldn't have been able to understand it in someone else either. Here's a pretty talented pitcher, a guy who has shown success in the past, and now he just doesn't want to throw strikes! Or, worse yet: what a head case he's become! There is nothing like the frustration of having to work with someone you think to be a head case, and the belief that all it takes is the proper psychological talk or bullpen session to fix this guy and he'll be all set. They tried all of the above with me but none of it took, and mostly I sulked in the corner of the dugout, the fate of that guy who had It, lost It, and was struggling in vain to get It back.

It hasn't been tested extensively or anything, but I truly believe the only way to get It back, to beat Steve Blass syndrome, to teach yourself how to throw strikes again is to simply put the ball down and stay away for at least six months. Go on sabbatical, stay in shape, pick up a book, buy a new XBox game, learn to play guitar. Then, when you do come back, you have to find a good pitching coach and re-learn everything from scratch. (Mark Wohlers essentially did this when he suffered his case of Blass, although it took Tommy John surgery and a few years to happen and his stuff was gone by that point anyway.) I doubt we'll ever see it tried regularly in the majors though, because professional pitchers are always refining, always tinkering, and always expected to be able to produce, except in the case of recovery from surgery. The next version of Rick Ankiel will be surrounded by pitching and sports psychology gurus who believe they can fix him in one session, except that they will just make things worse and...well, you know how the rest goes.

I somehow made my summer league's All-Star team during that last season, despite not being able to pitch anymore due to the "torn mind" that Gammons described. I decided then I wouldn't go out for my college's baseball team that fall even though it's a Division III school, because...you know, baseball just takes so much time and I wanted to focus on other things. With no place to play on the diamond, I closed out my baseball career that summer on the Southeastern Blue All-Star team as their primary pinch-hitter -- their John Vander Wal if you will -- and in that role I was fairly successful. It's a good life: warm up with the rest of the team, make all the same jokes with the guys that you could make before, and practice your swing in the dugout until the sixth inning rolls around and they need you. Stroke a single to right field and you're the hero for the day. Your uniform doesn't even need cleaning in time for the next game. It's not the same as being your team's star pitcher, but it's a perfectly respectable job to have and I was able to save a little face with my peers with that.

I hope Ankiel gets to do the same someday.

Labels: ankiel

It is no exaggeration to say I had waited for today - Draft Day - with more anticpation than I had reserved for any holiday, or payday, or any other kind of day in years. I can't say why I look forward to baseball so intensely this year (marginally more so than other years), but I can say that by the time 2 p.m. PT rolled around today I sat surrounded by no fewer than three editions of Baseball Prospectus, two separate notepads of rankings and cheat sheets I'd composed, and a twice-drained mug of coffee. My fingernails were already bitten off to the bone. I have a problem.

I was drafting for my first-ever keeper league, the ramifications of which I may not be able to accurately quantify for decades. This also marked my re-entry to fantasy baseball ESPN-style, which means no deviation from standard 5x5 scoring unfortunately. Why ESPN forbids anything beyond the most rudimentary customization is beyond me, but it helps explain why Yahoo leagues have taken so much of their business (that, plus the lack of free ESPN leagues). I'm sure ESPN realizes how much business fantasy baseball brings in for them, but it wouldn't take too much tweaking for them to grab a whole lot more.

Anyway, the 24-Hour Procrastination Center consists of twelve managers, some of whom seem to know each other in two distinct circles. We're using rotisserie scoring because head-to-head requires little more than a distaste for starting pitchers and a killer rabbit's foot. Here is the draft recap, but I know that can't be very interesting to an outsider such as yourself. Much more important -- not to mention relevant to the credibility of this particular pit stop on the information superhighway -- is whether the owner of the Mission Magicians can follow the same advice that I gave would-be fantasy owners recently. Let's check it out:

Have a beer or two. Um...I'm not here to talk about the past.

Don't be afraid to show favoritism. At this point it must come out: the editorial controller of the MLBeat is a lifelong Braves fan. (Save your disdain as I shall immaculately defend my allegiance in future posts.) I took Tim Hudson in the 3rd, Chipper Jones in the 6th, and Dan Kolb in the 10th. All are justifiable in terms of my needs at the time, as well as their values where I took them. Check. What's more, the fate of the 2005 Braves pretty squarely hinges on the continued success of these three players, so I am quite comfortable with these choices so far.

Improvise. This I did. My original plan was to snag two ace-caliber pitchers in the first three rounds and stack up on hitters from there, making sure not to completely miss out on closers in the meantime. Instead, my 11th slot in the draft order -- not to mention my pick of Soriano over Randy Johnson at 14th overall -- meant that I had to settle for Hudson by his lonesome atop my staff. I took three closers in an attempt to a) set the bar in saves and b) make everyone else panic, but it didn't work and as a result I missed out on some good offense (Wells, Posada, Bay, and/or Andruw Jones might have ended up on my team otherwise). This resulted in a late scramble to fill out my OF slots, which I did capably (Lane, Burrell, Holliday, Mondesi), but the casualty is my starting pitching; if Jeff Weaver is a mediocre #2 in real life then he's mere fodder in fantasy, frankly.

Allow yourself a good choke. The point of this rule was not to come unglued, which I never did, though I did have to make a few decisions under the gun. My biggest choke here was probably taking Kolb in the 10th when Jason Varitek, both Guillens, Braden Looper, A.J. Burnett, and Barry Zito were still available. More of a hiccup than a choke really, though Burnett would look nice on the roster right now.

Pick a good middle reliever. There were simply too many intriguing late options at SP for me to take this one too seriously, but Ugueth Urbina qualifies and is likely to pick up a few saves along the way.

Beware the perfect roster. Not a problem. Eaton, Millwood, and Mondesi are highly droppable, and I plan on proving it in the months to come.

Take an injured player. Wade Miller will start out on the IR, with Mike Sweeney to inevitably follow.

Prepare to hate your team. Can't say I do. I actually think I put forth a pretty well-rounded effort top to bottom, which is a sure sign I'll be wallowing in ninth by June. Let the record show that I was somewhat satisfied with my efforts at this point.

Right now I know very little about my competitors except that they seem to know what they're doing. We have the chance for a full-participation league, and if I can snag a few appropriate waiver pickups then I can stay afloat in wins and steals and then....wait a second, I'm just writing all this to myself aren't I? Is anyone still around? Guys, come back! I'll be less self-indulgent in the future, I promise!

Since I've last posted the Congressional steroid hearings happened, and a number of pundits have come down with a wide range of opinions on the subject. This only confirms my previous point that steroids are great for MLB, especially during a time of the year when interest is just starting to ratchet up in the sport again. This is true in the same way that the Bush administration is good for politics: formerly apathetic citizens have their ire aroused sufficiently to get them to pay more attention to the process. In the meantime, papers are being sold, websites are being hit by the million, and I have one more thing to be sanctimonious about over my weekend Eggs Benedict.

Just to recap some of the slam-ees, we've got Canseco, McGwire (many, many, many times), Commisioner Bud, MLB's leadership in general, and Congress for holding the hearings in the first place. Pay close attention because you may not hear this from me ever again: I agree with all these takes. Everyone who put on a suit that day is at fault here: the players for cheating in the first place; Selig and his cronies for encouraging steroid use via their silence over the past fifteen years; Congress for some of the most shameless, hypocritical, and ill-informed grandstanding on record (which is saying something); McGwire obviously for reasons well-documented; Sosa for being Sosa; Canseco for recanting everything he promoted in his book; and even the pundits themselves, just for doing their jobs and blowing all this way out of proportion. I suppose that would include me as well, but whaddya gonna do. (I've got my priorities straight at least; much more important to me at the moment is getting my League filled in time for the draft.)

In response to those who wonder why these hearings are happening now -- as opposed to a decade ago -- I've heard rumblings that some lobbyist affiliated with the NFL has a stake in making baseball look bad. This is some brilliant conspiracy theorizing and not totally implausible, but I doubt it due to the chances it would blow up in the NFL's face. So far the Carolina Panthers steroid story hasn't gotten traction, though I can only hope that changes in time for the fall camps. I'd wager that most Americans doubt the NFL is any cleaner than MLB, but for some reason nobody seems to care. That's the real head-scratcher for me: why is the NFL getting a free pass?

That's the only thing we're lacking here: perspective. It's hard to stay calm when Congressmen and columnists are all going hysterical at the same time, but McGwire's Hall of Fame chances should stay intact (at 100%) because you can't remove him from context. Cheaters in baseball go back to before the turn of the 19th century. Senator (R-Mars) Bunning's ballplaying contemporaries had no problem with widespread amphetamine use. McGwire homered 49 times his rookie year, presumably before he'd seen his first syringe. And if we've learned anything from this current quagmire, it's that the depths of the steroid problem go beyond the handful of players who have been convicted in the court of public opinion. Singling out McGwire for humiliation is only reasonable because of his heavily lawyer-influenced testimony; his accomplishments are not any less worthy of recognition.

In April the season will start as always, and this too shall pass. The record books are not going to be altered in any unnatural way. The only fans who will stop following baseball are the sort of fair-weather scum I don't need to have around in order to enjoy my favorite sport. (These are the same people who claimed they would never watch baseball again after the '94 strike, and now here they are making noise again.) In other words, the total damage from this whole shebang will eventually add up to zero. Just how I like my scandals: juicy, worthy of endless debate, and harmless in the long run.

And now, this. It should come as no surprise that Mark McGwire turned out to be a major juicer, any overly cautious blabbering about innocent-until-proven-guilty be damned. What always surprised me the most were the repeated denials, right up until this Leak happened. McGwire had to know the hammer was going to come down eventually, right?

This has Clinton-Lewinsky written all over it. I don't mean to veer too far off the MLB path -- wait, yes I do. Clinton should have just admitted his affair with Lewinsky the first chance he got. He hadn't broken any laws, he hadn't sent anyone off to war, and everyone would have eventually gotten over it (except for Hillary). Instead of Ken Starr, we would have ended up with Leak after Leak about the tawdry habits of JFK, then Andrew Jackson, then Nixon, then...I don't know, Taft. And Clinton would have been exonerated with a flurry of "hey, c'mon, who doesn't?" But when you deny, and deny, and twist around, and deny further, you lend more and more gravity to That Thing You Done Wrong, and once the Leak comes out you've already backed yourself into a corner, surrounded yourself with rattlesnakes, and doused yourself in KC Masterpiece. (This exact progression has been depicted several times on Malcolm in the Middle.) Now McGwire will soon have to publicly deal with being not just a cheater but also a liar.

The big winner in all this is going to be Barry Bonds, once it eventually comes out that everyone was taking injections of one kind or another. One has to think Sosa can't be far off, with a handful of other Congress-bound sluggers to follow, and maybe even a pitcher or two whose velocity mysteriously bumped up 4-6 mph over the last few years. And soon we'll come to the most sensible conclusion possible, which is that Major League Baseball is extraordinarily difficult whether you're on drugs or not, and things will gradually descend to normal again.

We should consider ourselves fortunate that all this hoopla is upon us in the midst of March Madness (today was Selection Sunday), not to mention smack in the middle of spring training, with position battles and Grapefruit League footage heralding the start of another glorious season. Once the games start I look forward to following standings and scoreboards again, and by the time this McGwire mess is in full gear, so will everyone else. The NFL, on the other hand, won't have any distractions from its Leak, which also popped up Sunday. Nine players on one team? Performance-enhancing drugs in football? Never!

Buster Olney, in the column I linked above, closed his summary with the remark that "history is destined to remember this period as baseball's Steroid Era." It was probably a no-brainer of an ending for him, but try to recall the last time you read a nostalgia piece referring to baseball's Greenie Era and get back to me. If a genie could grant me one wish at this point, I would want everyone just to take a deep breath and pre-emptively move on.

Here's the Link of the Day. This is actually from last summer, but I just found it so it's recent material in my book.

My drafts are still two weeks away, and barring any further spring training injuries I'm fully locked and loaded. My cup of fantasy enthusiasm officially runneth over. Take these Pointers as some of the scraps. They are intended for entertainment purposes only, and since my current readership primarily consists of friends, some of whom are in leagues with me, they may well be Fantasy Red Herrings.

• Go ahead and have a beer or two. Even if your draft is at 8am on a Sunday. ESPN's Tristan Cockroft disagrees, favoring the Puritan approach instead. That's when you know you take fantasy baseball too seriously and should really think about getting a dog instead.
• Don't be afraid to show unilateral favoritism, within reason. The "within reason" disclaimer should go without saying. Whenever you see a guy in your league who tacitly reveals his loyalties by drafting the Arizona Diamondbacks' entire lineup, you know he's content with a summer in dead last place. But when you're drafting in the sixth round and looking for an OF and you deem your available options to be Andruw Jones, Jason Bay, and Garret Anderson, and if you happen to be an Angels fan, then you should knock yourself out. The random nature of fantasy baseball means that it's anybody's guess who will have the best year out of those three, so you might as well avoid the conflict of interest.
• Improvisation! Navigating a 25-round fantasy draft is like being a quarterback calling plays at the line. You want to come in with a plan - say, to snag a top 2B like Soriano or Giles early, secure one ace pitcher a la Prior or Pedro, try to snag John Buck late as your catcher, etc. But then someone snatches Giles right out from under you, and everyone starts picking closers in the 3rd round, and you notice that after four rounds you've taken three corner infielders and Brad Lidge. At that point you'll need to be able to rip up your cheat sheets, cut off contact with Ground Control and land this thing manually. This brings up...
• Allow yourself one good solid choke. Accept it as inevitable that you panic and pick someone you are doomed to find deeply unsatisfying, like Paul Lo Duca or Steve Trachsel. Don't let it ruin your day. Try not to let it happen until the later rounds so it'll do the least damage. In my fantasy basketball draft this past year I delayed my choke until the penultimate round, ending up with Derek Anderson when I really wanted Vladimir Radmanovic. Cost me very little.
• Pick a good middle reliever. I say this for no reason, except that it always gave me a certain twinge of joy to own Francisco Rodriguez, the game's best middle reliever the past two seasons. How much he helped my teams is an open question, but the musk of superiority I gave off after drafting him is undeniable.
• Beware the perfect roster. I'm referring to the roster that has every position filled and with sufficient adequate backups for any unforeseen slump or mishap. This sounds nice, but it's better to have one Worst player you'd just as soon drop. The perfect roster is dangerous because you'll miss out on any waiver-wire activity due to a reluctance to drop anyone. In a similar vein...
• Take an injured player. Griffey, Jeff Zimmerman, Jeff D'Amico, it doesn't really matter. They can facilitate the aforementioned roster turnover you need, and in the meantime they can sit on your DL as symbols of a brighter future that may never come.
• Lastly, prepare to hate your team. No matter how well you prepared, and no matter how well you really drafted, you'll look over your roster once the draft is completed and feel a distinct pang of dissatisfaction, especially once you identify the one gaping weakness your team is sure to have. Live with it, deal with it, and sleep on it before you panic and drop half your players onto waivers in favor of Jeff Fassero, Toby Hall, Jason Simontacchi, Bobby Higginson, and Bill Hall. Thank me later.

The anticipation has set in and quickly melted down to frustration as we all come to realize just how overrated spring training can be. Today the top baseball story in the Bay Area was the burning question of where Erubiel Durazo will bat in the order, thus ignoring the relative unimportance of batting order for the sake of something to write about spring training. No spring training game has ever mattered, and the only relevant and meaningful spring training stories have been about someone's torn labrum or busted knee. We still have to wait another month for baseball to start, as far as I'm concerned.

So today the top baseball topic comes from a football story: the trade of Randy Moss to the Raiders. His welcome-to-Oakland press conference merited a sizable chunk of the Chronicle's front sports page, attention usually reserved for a home-team playoff victory, or maybe a Jose Canseco assassination. Accenting the story is this angle: Randy Moss is a wide receiver with such incredible potential that owner Red McCombs considered firing the head coach just to light a fire under him.

Not often do we hear someone come out and say it so bluntly. Coaches are nominally supposed to have the full backing of their employers, right up to the minute they get fired. Normally overt signs of weakness such as this would indicate serious lame-duck status. But we know this is really a common practice in all the major team sports. The article even mentions the frequency with which teams keep superstar players while firing coaches , in addition to this gem of a line:

Moss leaves Minnesota with every major receiving record for a player in his first seven seasons in the league.

Hard to top that. Favoring the star doesn't always work (Kobe's Lakers, Iverson's Sixers, Lindros' Flyers...it goes on), but it makes sense to anyone who saw the 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks win the World Series on the strength of two ace pitchers whose utter dominance was able to overcome the bumbling in-game strategery of their manager.

The burning question we've produced: which current MLB teams are run by players?

Such a player would have to be a) playing really well, because people listen to a pitcher with a 2.10 ERA; b) charismatic enough to be the acknowledged team leader and assertive enough to be outspoken when necessary, thus eliminating from consideration the soft-spoken likes of Carlos Beltran and Greg Maddux; and c) on a team without a dominant establishment in place, such as Joe Torre or Bobby Cox.

Bonds. If you were the GM with Barry Bonds on your team, Objective A would have to be to keep Barry happy at all times.

Pedro. Rookie manager, marquee offseason acquisition, success-starved team, shiny new World Series ring. Check, check, check, and check. All he needs now is to back it up on the mound for a few months, at which point he could probably get Ricky Martin hired as manager if he wanted.

Sosa. Um, strike this one.

Jose Vidro. Not really, but he should get some special recognition here. For the worst six-year-span in any franchise's history, he was the glue on the Expos, a one consistently All-Star caliber player who stuck it out through all the uncertainty, vagueness, and appalling lack of direction, even going so far as to accept a healthy contract extension from Omar Minaya in the midst of all the swirling contraction talks. (Of course Vladimir was really the glue for awhile, but he was predictable enough to bide his time until free agency and head for the highest bidder.) Without Vidro's unflailing loyalty, the Expos/Nationals franchise would have had no personality or continuity whatsoever. They should allow him one free handpicked managerial hire as compensation since the team is going nowhere in the standings anyway.

A-Rod If He Was Still in Texas. Yes.

This brings up one final (for now) point, which is that it's much more common for a star player to demand to be traded to a contender as a way of escaping his manager or team. It takes a special kind of enmity to decide that your team is good enough to win it all as presently composed, now all you need to do is influence the front office to replace the manager. Call it the Bowa Exception.