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.

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