by Rick Ankiel
As the highways go, that’s only about seventy miles closer to St. Louis. The way I saw it, I was a million miles closer. Just about everybody in that clubhouse had been to the big leagues or was on his way. I swear, from the top of the mound at Tim McCarver Stadium, I could almost see the lights of Busch Stadium. The Cardinals weren’t very good in 1999, but it didn’t yet matter to me. McGwire was still hitting about every fastball five hundred feet in St. Louis, and Drew was the regular center fielder, and a guy who’d won a World Series with a game seven walk-off hit just a couple years before—Édgar Rentería—was the shortstop, and they were in St. Louis too, where I wanted to be.
It seemed I’d spent my whole life dreaming of playing in the major leagues and working for something impossibly far away, always moving closer but never quite getting there. And then, one night, a manager named Gaylen Pitts handed me a baseball. And then I was pitching to make it to the major leagues, to take somebody’s big-league job. That baseball in my hand was as close as I’d ever been, at nineteen years old, two years from the hallways of Port St. Lucie High School, a year out of Peoria, Illinois, and I was going to throw the hell out of it.
“Just keep doin’ what you’ve been doin’,” they said, and I’d stand on those Pacific Coast League mounds and for the next three months do something like that, not a thing in my head but covering those last three hundred miles to St. Louis.
CHAPTER
TEN
On a Monday night at Olympic Stadium in Montreal, a month after my twentieth birthday, after fifty-two minor-league starts over parts of a couple summers, I made my major-league debut. The date was August 23, 1999. I’d flown to New York and been picked up at JFK Airport by a couple clubbies—Kurt Schlogl from the Cardinals and a guy they called “Icky,” but whose birth certificate read Kevin Mercorella, from the Mets. Kurt was at the baggage claim, and Icky manned the car at the curb. When Kurt and I reached the passenger-side doors, the car was running, the doors were locked, and Icky—amid the commotion of cops and whistles and taxis and horns and everything else at JFK—was sound asleep. Kurt thumped the window.
“Icky!” he shouted. “Sleep when you die!”
“Nah,” Icky said in an accent thick with New York. “Just resting my eyes.”
So he turned to me and said, “Rick, you ever seen an asshole wrapped in plastic?”
“An asshole wrapped in plastic,” I said. “Uh, no, I haven’t.”
Icky was laughing so hard he barely got to the punch line.
“Take a look at your driver’s license.”
Thanks, Icky. And welcome to the big leagues.
The Cardinals split a doubleheader at Shea Stadium—they lost on a late hit by forty-year-old Rickey Henderson in the opener and beat forty-year-old Orel Hershiser in the second game—and I tagged along to Canada.
The path, going back a bunch of years, was indirect. The baseball had been pretty good, pretty true. The world around the baseball had been a test. My mother and father sat in the dark stadium in Montreal that night, along with about thirteen thousand other folks who’d bothered to come see two teams that were about out of season.
My parents seemed proud and happy. They were, for the moment, it would appear, together, or together enough. I really tried not to ask. Some time had passed since I had pitched and they had sat together in the stands, but not so much that it felt unusual. The greatest difference, perhaps, was that I wouldn’t be able to hear my father. And I would not under any circumstances be throwing a knuckleball.
The game was unremarkable for its outcome. Wearing number 66, I pitched five capable innings, and the Expos beat the Cardinals, 11–7. The remainder of the 1999 season—I’d make four more starts and three other appearances—was remarkable only for how familiar it felt. This game, one played by grown men in massive stadiums, was still played in that little rectangle they called a strike zone. The better guy won. The smarter guy lived to see another pitch. The tougher guy was standing at the end.
Six days later, I matched up against the first-place Braves, the team of my youth, and John Smoltz, whom I’d grown up wanting to be. He pitched eight innings, I pitched six, and the Braves won in twelve innings. More than forty-five thousand people were at Busch Stadium that night, which was when I began to fall in love with the city and the fans in their red caps and red shirts and red fingernails and red everything. I lived that month in a hotel room downtown and walked back from the ballpark to strangers calling my name and offering from crowded bars to buy me a beer. That I wasn’t old enough to get past the bouncer occurred to none of them, which was just as well, so I waved and thought, When’s next season start?
My fastball was hard—in the upper 90s—and reliable. My curveball earned its own nickname—“the Snapdragon,” Mark McGwire called it. I was learning to pitch, a game at a time, getting it, understanding it, feeling good about where the game was taking me, even as my father was again being hauled to jail. The old-timers held me up against legends. A little wild, like a young Koufax, they said. A little mean, like Gibson at any age. The Cardinals, an organization with a proud history of legendary pitchers, seemed satisfied with the first Ankiel, maybe the next in line. I played along with the comparisons without giving them much mind, knowing the game had a way of separating the past greats from anyone who happened along with a fastball and a curveball, and maybe, just maybe, a future. It was enough to be there, to have a chance at whatever was out there every fifth night.
It was those nights when I saw only the catcher’s mitt. When I heard nothing. When I was thinking, but not really thinking, I’m going to put the ball right there. When it was right, I was in touch with everything.
Then I’d throw the pitch. Often enough, it was right, or right enough that it’d be better the next time. The catcher—that September, Alberto Castillo or Marcus Jensen—would decide the pitch and where he wanted it and pretty soon the mounds at Busch Stadium or Wrigley Field or Turner Field began to feel like the one at Port St. Lucie High School, like they were home, and I belonged on them. That summer, in the months before I was summoned to the big leagues, I’d become consistently accurate with the fastball away from right-handed hitters, so that it could be a strike or it could tease them a few inches out of the zone or I could sink it and miss their bats entirely. That became the difference between simply overpowering minor-league hitters and competing against big-league hitters. I liked the inside fastball. In fact, I preferred the inside fastball. But it was comforting to know the outside corner was there when I needed it.
I guess I was learning how to pitch then, and learning what good hitters did to mediocre pitches and sometimes did to good pitches. And none of it felt like it was too much. I didn’t feel too young or too raw. I certainly wasn’t nervous. Not ever. I was not afraid, and nothing that happened over those thirty-three September innings when I was twenty nudged me from the certainty that I would show up in spring training the next year and be one of the Cardinals’ five best starters, and that I would start thirty-some games, and that I’d be great at it.
Spring training is routine. Wake up at the same time every morning. Back out of the driveway at the same time. Stroll into the clubhouse at the same time. Button the top button of the jersey at the same time. Clatter across the concrete path to the field at the same time.
Players, coaches, trainers, clubbies, even the writers abided by the routine, honored the routine, built walls around the routine to ensure its purity. If the routine can be trusted today, then it can be trusted tomorrow, and one of those tomorrows would include a chartered flight out of the routine, the start of a new season, and a whole new routine. It sounds boring and tedious. It is, in fact, the only way to start in February and end in October, the only way any of that comes with success or sanity. The way to nine months of every single day was an hour at a time, a minute at a time even. Try not to look back. Definitely do not look forward, because the destination is tiny in the distance, and to chase that would be a reasonable path to ex
haustion. No, just hit the next mark in the routine. Do that, and when that is done the next mark will appear. Hit them all, and at the end of the day you’re fed and rested and healthy and strong and clear-headed and confident. Miss one, then another, and that day gets wobbly, and the next is too full trying to cover for the previous one, and the next is messier, and this is how sore elbows and bad Aprils and doubt and stomachaches are born.
I gazed at my father’s back in that spring of 2000, and what was going through my mind was not that he’d hoisted himself from his chair in a courthouse in Fort Pierce to stand before the judge who would sentence him for his crimes but what was happening to my daily routine. What tomorrow would be as a result. What I’d do, whom I’d have to talk to, where I’d go, all to catch up, all to get back on schedule.
I was sure I would make the Cardinals’ rotation out of spring training. I’d pitched well enough the previous September to know whatever talent I had would play in the big leagues and that whatever I needed to learn could happen there, around big-league players, and not in Memphis. In order to do that, however, I’d have to be there and around big-league players, not taking a day off to sit next to my mother on a wooden bench just to show a judge that one Richard Ankiel had loving family and people who believed in his rehabilitative potential, none of which the judge probably believed anyway.
I gazed at my father’s back. He was going to jail for a long time, and everyone would know that when I’d told them he was a drywaller that was only part of it, and I’d be the guy in jail’s kid, and I thought, Hell, there’s worse things. No more crazy phone calls from the old man, I wrongly thought. No more worrying about Mom. Wrong again. No more burying the truth. I didn’t wish prison on him, but the benefits of it weren’t lost on me either. Life was about to get really shitty for him. There was part of me that felt bad about that, even if by any measure he’d had it coming. And life was about to get a little softer, a little calmer, for the rest of us. For months my father had been edgy even by his standards, convinced he’d be offed by the Bahamians he’d screwed over or by friends of the handful of others he’d screwed over, so we added paranoia to his list of personality traits. Then there’d been this federal agent, a woman, who’d guided him through the process of rolling over on his former partners—these were the people he believed would surely cut his car’s brake lines now—and he became convinced that she had fallen for him. Like, romantically. And I—a kid who had not the vaguest idea of how any of this worked but had watched enough TV to know when a scammer was getting scammed, by a cop no less—turned away so as not to laugh directly in his face.
My father was going to jail for five years or thirty or something in between. My half-brother, Phil, was already in the system, in a cell somewhere because, basically, he’d drifted into Dad’s line of work. So I sat beside my mother, who wasn’t any happier to be there than I was, and we waited for the inevitable, and while we did I had the thought that having a father who smuggled drugs and waved guns around like a redneck Scarface might actually work for me. I wasn’t just some twenty-year-old rookie with a fastball and a tough-guy act. The shit I’d seen, that I’d put up with, that I’d lived alongside and defended myself against—that was real. That left scars. Think some baseball game at Shea Stadium is scary? Try staying one room ahead of a lousy-drunk father pissed because you swung at ball four in an American Legion game. Try getting caught and made to run laps for it. Try being the one telling your mom it’s fine, it’s OK, because if she stepped in I’d be picking her up off the floor too. Try finding bags of pot where the toilet paper should be or dustings of coke on the kitchen counter and then being told you’re the good-for-nothing idiot.
In the game you make your reputation a pitch at a time. Keep showing up, keep doing your job, keep making the right decisions, keep getting outs, keep standing out there without fear or hesitation. That’s a gamer. But, hey, if some hitter wants to hold in his head somewhere that I’m a little tougher than he is, that I’ll fight if I have to, that I’ve had a life that didn’t look anything like his, then maybe that buys me an inch or two on the inside corner. Maybe that gets him rocking back off the plate, and maybe he doesn’t even know it. Just his instinct telling him it’d be best to give this one a little extra room.
It was a dumb notion, probably. But I’d believe it for a while. If my father was going to distract me from being the ballplayer and the man I wanted to be because of his presence, then I figured he could at least be useful in his absence. The details of his crimes and then his punishment would be in the newspapers, and the Cardinals would ask why I hadn’t told them and I would answer that I didn’t think it was important. Reporters would slip in questions about my father, somewhere between how my arm felt and if that changeup was coming around, and I’d let my face get serious and tell them, “People make mistakes. He made a mistake.” I wasn’t sorry people knew. I didn’t care. He wasn’t me. He hadn’t been for a very long time. He wouldn’t ever be me again.
I gazed at my father’s back and thanked him for making me a harder person and a meaner pitcher. I thanked him for the reputation I probably didn’t deserve.
He stood behind the table next to his lawyer and the judge looked down at him, then at some notes, then back at him.
Dad got six years.
I stood up, walked out of the courtroom, gave my mother a hug, and drove back to Jupiter so I could be a big-league pitcher, rep or not.
That spring, after enough of Scott Boras’s urging and my conclusion that it would be the only way for him to stop harping on it, I agreed to meet Harvey Dorfman, a man with a rep of his own. He was a sports psychologist. I’d heard of those guys. Not by name or anything, but the fact that they were around, that one of them had even worn a Florida Marlins uniform and sat on their bench while they were winning the World Series. Turned out, that was Harvey. Some of the older players, I’d learned, were big on the mental side of the game, which was fine, but I figured I was set there. I’d spent my whole life, such as it was, exploring new ways to shut people out.
“Just talk to him,” Scott said. “He’s a good guy. You’ll like him.”
“I’m good,” I said. “Nah.”
But Scott would not let it go, and one afternoon I had an hour free, and Harvey was in Jupiter, and if an hour with Harvey meant even one fewer conversation with Scott about how good a guy Harvey was, it would be worth it. So I knocked on a hotel-room door and a sixty-five-year-old balding man with dark circles under his eyes opened it. OK, this was gonna be awkward.
“I’m Rick,” I said.
“Harvey,” he said.
I walked into the room, looked around, and said, “All right, so do I lay down on the fucking couch or something or what?”
He laughed like he’d heard it before and gestured toward a chair.
I’d been lied to my whole life. I trusted no one except me. Give me the ball, make me no promises, stay out of the way. That’s the lens through which I eyed Harvey, and answered his easy questions, and wondered when I could leave.
It was fine. He seemed a decent guy. He was warm and smart. He was curious without pushing too hard. On my way out, in spite of my reservations, I asked if he played golf. It was supposed to sound like an invitation, a way to continue the relationship without really committing to it, in case he didn’t want to. Maybe out of duty to Scott. Maybe because I liked the man, if I had no use for his skills. Maybe he knew that.
“A little,” he said.
I nodded. We both knew we probably wouldn’t be playing any golf.
As I walked down the hallway, I considered the previous hour. I was the toughest guy I knew. I was twenty years old, and life, finally, was great. I’d worked for that. Where had somebody like this been eight years ago, when I was picking my mom off the floor? Seven years ago, when I was saying good-bye to Dennis? I could’ve used some answers then. But now? What did I need with a head doctor? I’d fixed that.
Yeah, good guy, this Harvey Dorfman. And I’d
probably never see him again.
The Cardinals of seventy-five wins and a fourth-place National League Central finish in 1999 would become the Cardinals of ninety-five wins and a first-place National League Central finish in 2000. In the off-season, they’d traded for Darryl Kile. Freed from the thin air of Denver and Coors Field, he won twenty games and was an All Star. Mark McGwire played half the season and hit thirty-two home runs. Jim Edmonds played the whole season, hit forty-two home runs, and was an All Star. Fernando Viña hit .300. Mike Matheny, the veteran catcher with a reputation for intelligence and professionalism, signed as a free agent and was better than his reputation. Eric Davis, at thirty-eight, hit .303, and J. D. Drew, at twenty-four, hit .295. Will Clark, at thirty-six, hit .345 in a third of a season. The starting rotation was veterans—Kile, Garrett Stephenson, Pat Hentgen, Andy Benes—and me.
Kile, who’d made his major-league debut as a twenty-two-year-old a decade before, was especially kind. By then, he’d won a lot and lost plenty too, so he had a way of seeing the game and then imparting insight that was authentic and encouraging. I was raw in spots and a little wild at times—ten strikeouts over six innings in my first start became five walks in five innings in my second and another seven walks in five innings of my third—but that didn’t bother Darryl.
“You’re right there, Ank,” he’d say. “An inch here or there.”
Dave Duncan, the pitching coach, didn’t say much and Mike Matheny had a dozen other pitchers to tend to. So I’d sit and listen to Darryl, and he’d ask questions about this pitch or that one, and I began to understand that there needed to be a good reason to throw that pitch in that situation to that hitter to that spot, and Mike wasn’t going to be there to call every pitch for the rest of my life.
That season—every at bat against every hitter in every city, the wins and the losses, the dumb mistakes and the flashes of clarity—was to prepare me for twenty years of this. Darryl reminded me every day, in his words and just by being there and caring.