The Phenomenon

by Rick Ankiel

  What the hell is this thing?

  Dr. Mark Oakley is a clinical psychologist, a full clinical professor at University of California–Los Angeles and the founder and director of the Center for Cognitive Therapy, which has offices in Beverly Hills, California, and Diamond Bar, California. He consults with UCLA sports teams. He has a son who plays baseball.

  We spoke in the summer of 2016, coming up on sixteen years after the wire in my head corroded, which is not the precise technical phraseology. I had not thrown a professional pitch in twelve years. Why not? Why had I lost the one thing that most defined me, all at once? Even in the darkest of hours, when the yips threatened to consume me, the reason for my affliction was, I believed, irrelevant. It happened. It wouldn’t let go. During all those years, I knew that if I were to pitch again—not merely survive but pitch—the more critical question was not why but how. How it worked, how I could work around it, how to tame the monster. Twelve years later, when pitching was no longer an option, the question “Why?” had become, at the least, a curiosity. To my surprise, I discovered that young players in the throes of performance anxiety, some of it severe, would be prone to asking “Why?” or even “Why me?”

  I answered the only way I could, the only way I knew. That was “I don’t know why.”

  So, while driving my boys to the water park one morning, I called Dr. Oakley and asked him. Why?

  Why the yips?

  Why some people and not others?

  Why the easy stuff? The routine throws?

  Why, if it can be contracted so easily, can it not be cured as easily? Why, if it can be summoned in a single pitch, can it not be buried in two or three or a thousand?

  “The yips,” he said, “can be explained in both psychological and neuromuscular terms, and it’s extremely complicated. It’s very difficult to treat and very difficult to understand.… What it boils down to, a mistake is made, ultimate trust is eroded, pressure interferes with the lack of trust, and that compounds the problem. Now there’s anxiety, and a vicious cycle ensues.”

  Along come the obsessive thoughts, Dr. Oakley said, the failure, the pursuit of perfection now fouled by anxiety and more failure and more anxiety.

  “This,” he added, “is a phenomenon on steroids.”

  I asked if a particular type of person, and the athlete within that person, were more prone to the failure-anxiety-failure merry-go-round, still thinking of “Why?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “There could be people with predispositions. That said, everybody in the right circumstances might be susceptible to it, and all the anxiety disorders”—here he mentioned obsessive-compulsive disorder—“have things in common. That is, the arousal that comes with it. That’s the common denominator.”

  So which comes first, the mistake or the anxiety? Which causes the other?

  “I would have to say it’s probably an interplay between the two,” he said. “The changes are physiological. Adrenaline, heart rate, blood pressure. And then it’s that classic fight-or-flight mechanism engaging. Between the two, the system starts locking up.”

  Ball one, ball two, ball three…

  “I’ve taken a paradoxical approach,” Dr. Oakley said. “First, know there is no cure. Anybody who tells you otherwise is being misleading.”

  The typical treatment, in my experience, was to ward off the feelings of anxiety, which, exposed and left to bubble, led to full-blown panic and embarrassing results. I practiced every day, nearly all day, to tamp the rumblings of uncertainty. I built walls against the approaching forces that surely would wreck the fastball I’d have to throw in eight hours. Those were the breathing exercises, the attempts to distract myself and drive whatever was surfacing back inside. Nearly every time, those walls would fall at the first sign of peril. What I’d think later was Bigger walls. I need bigger walls. And a moat.

  The focus, then, was to manage what was going on. The keywords were focus, eliminate distractions, and, my favorite, relax.

  Just throw the ball, Rick.…

  “When a person’s really distressed, they’re overwhelmed by that,” Dr. Oakley said. “Turn it on its head. Instead of curtailing that moment, bring it on. Experience that. Spend more time with it.

  “Most people, of course, don’t want to spend time with it. It’s not a pleasant thing. So what I do, and it goes along with treating anxiety disorders, I try prolonged exposure to it. You actually need more time with it, what my friend Ken Ravizza calls ‘getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.’”

  A narrative is developed, Dr. Oakley explained, that re-creates for the afflicted the physical occurrence that sparked the psychological reaction. So, for example, if a pitcher began throwing baseballs to the backstop and suffered, as a result, a panic attack right there on the mound, that pitcher’s psyche would be brought back to that moment—the sights, the sounds, the feel of the ball off his fingertips, and then the physical and emotional reactions to that pitch. That is, Dr. Oakley reconstructs the inaugural exposure to the yips so that the response is similar.

  Maybe that requires ninety minutes or longer, and the patient spends time in that horribly uncomfortable place, over and over, living and reliving an experience he—or she—has typically attempted and failed to forget. The yips sufferer is provided a tape whereby he may summon his fears at will, and live with them again, and soak himself in the experience.

  On the field, when the world went sideways and I turned to my relaxation techniques, I found that they invariably fed my already growing anxiety. By turning my attention away from the hitter, away from the strike zone, away from the game, and to myself, my own problems, I’d acknowledged there was an issue. And the issue was me.

  “It’s the same thing,” Dr. Oakley said, “if we have someone who fears elevators. We have them spend time in elevators. If they have a fear of heights, we spend time at heights. Until they stop responding to it. A lot of prolonged and repetitious time and you basically get sick of it.”

  When the panic comes, and it will come, the patient already has been there, and been there a lot, and perhaps it does not seem as scary or hopeless. Maybe, even, the whole thing is a little boring.

  “Does it work?” I asked.

  Sometimes, he said. “I try to help,” he said. “Sometimes I can’t. But there are people I do help. Then, rather than demanding excellence, like it’s all or nothing, they are free to pursue excellence.”

  There are stories of recovery. Steve Sax survived his battle with the yips. Jarrod Saltalamacchia, the big-league catcher, revealed he’d used a technique called “tapping,” clearing negative emotion by touching parts of his body with his fingers, to overcome a fear of throwing to the pitcher. Mackey Sasser left the game, lived in a trailer on a beach for long enough to ease the stress, then found peace and a reliable arm stroke while coaching college players. Even Steve Blass, long after he retired, found a method to relieve his throwing anxieties, if only for a few glorious days when he was fifty-five years old. Sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes it has to be.

  There are ways, I suppose, to fool the brain into believing all is well, that the mystery is solved, and that the body should follow. Still, the Thing is lost in there somewhere, locked in a place that is neither fully brain nor arm, that is both.

  It does not ever leave, even when rebuilt. The ashes remain.

  Dr. Ken Ravizza has been a sports psychologist for four decades. Men and women, boys and girls, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, the afflictions of doubt and fear and anxiety that come with the games touch them all, and for that Ravizza has adopted the chilling adage “You go and you stand naked before the gods.”

  Be they Olympic gods, golf gods, or baseball gods, or parents, coaches, or fans, be they television cameras or press-box hounds, they regard the worthy and unworthy with the same grave countenance. Play the games. Play them honestly. Do not tremble. Do not stumble. Do not fail.

  Now, go have fun.

  I’d go to the ballp
ark, throw, do what I needed to do in the weight room, and then for the next twenty-two hours I’d be in my hotel room, by myself, driving myself crazy. I was very lonely, and very scared.

  —Mark Wohlers, 1998, New York Times

  I don’t need this. I’m not out here for the money. I’m out here to have fun. I don’t need the money. I don’t need this.

  —Chuck Knoblauch, 2000

  I remember walking into the clubhouse in San Diego, slamming my glove into the locker and seriously considering quitting at something for the only time in my life. I mean, it was almost like I was a prisoner to it. I’d wake up with it, go to bed with it and feel it in my stomach when I ate. Everybody made fun of me. I was the laughingstock of the league.

  —Steve Sax, 1999, Los Angeles Times

  I know my problem strikes some people as absurd. At least once a day, some friend, casual acquaintance or perhaps even a stranger who recognizes me will say, “Why is it that you can’t get the ball over the plate? It seems so simple.”

  So simple. That noise you just heard was what’s left of my hollow laugh.

  —Rex Barney, 1954, Collier’s Weekly

  Who does this happen to? It’s someone who cares a lot.

  —Harvey Dorfman, 2001, Houston Chronicle

  “And,” Dr. Ravizza said, “you still have to go out there and perform.”

  Naked, before the gods.

  “I have not found the cure,” he said. “I think it’s different for each person. It’s not black or white but gray.… For me, I talk about it first as an arm issue. Maybe there’s a tweak, keep it in that area. That at least buys a little time before we go to the dark side.”

  He recalled speaking with a long-forgotten baseball prospect, a catcher who hit well enough to make a career of the game and lost that career when he could not throw a ball accurately farther than his own shadow. The organization brought in a sports psychologist, who told the prospect right off, “This is a critical situation, and it’s going to determine whether you get to the big leagues or not.”

  “Ken,” he said, “whatever you do, never tell anyone that.”

  “I’ll take that advice,” he answered.

  There are more of them now than ever, Dr. Ravizza said, and I believe that. In my year with the Washington Nationals, traveling the major and minor leagues, I saw them. Some were on the verge. Others were full-blown. A few would say hello, talk around the subject, and take my card. Eventually, they’d call. When the booze didn’t work, when the anger wasn’t enough, when the self-pity outran the resolve to “handle this,” and when the nightmares came, they’d call.

  “Yeah,” I’d say, “I know. I know.”

  By then, everybody knew.

  “Whoo, it’s a hard one,” Dr. Ravizza said. “First thing, they may get through this, they might not get through this. People do get through this. And I admire their courage. Whatever the result, it’s something—this courage—they’ll take with them through their lives, that’s a part of their character, a part of who they are.”

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  On the afternoon of October 3, 2000, Steve Blass sat in his favorite chair in the living room of his house in Pittsburgh. A baseball game was on the television. He still loved baseball, stubbornly.

  The game was televised from St. Louis. He’d done some pitching himself so was eager to see the great Greg Maddux, who on his best days ran a game with marionette strings. The ball behaved when Greg Maddux threw it. Against Maddux, for the Cardinals, pitched the young left-hander everyone seemed to think so much of.

  Steve Blass wouldn’t ever forget that game, which would make two of us.

  In his chair, he winced. His heart rate quickened. He’d seen a million wild pitches. He’d seen this, what was happening on his television screen, this emotional distress, once before. That time, it was him.

  “Oh, my God,” he said aloud to no one. “Oh, my God, I know. This is terrible. A terrible thing.”

  He looked into my face, twenty-one years old. He saw calm. He knew better.

  “Why at the beginning?” he said. “Why now?”

  His wife, Karen, looked up. She’d lived it as well.

  “I hope this isn’t what I think it is,” he said to her. “At least mine was at the end. Shit, if he doesn’t get over this, he’s not going to have those things, those wonderful things we had, remember, Karen? Playing for all those years, playing with all those guys…”

  He knew, though. It was exactly what he thought it was.

  The phone rang. It was a writer from Pittsburgh, a man he’d known for decades.

  “You watching this?” the man asked.

  “I’m watching. It’s not any fun either.”

  Steve Blass won 103 games from 1964 to 1974, all for the Pittsburgh Pirates. He beat the Baltimore Orioles twice in the 1971 World Series, including in Game 7, a 2–1, complete-game masterwork that brought him icon status in Pittsburgh.

  In addition to being a good pitcher—he won at least fifteen games four times and in 1972 won a career-high nineteen, finishing second to Steve Carlton in the Cy Young Award balloting—Blass loved his work. He was a cutup in the clubhouse. He was known to throw a complete game, receive the ball from his catcher, then pass the ball to a young fan on his way from the field. He even enjoyed talking to reporters, calling them over for laughs and long conversations after games. Few appreciated baseball or their place in it the way Blass did. It wasn’t just a job for him, which made the end especially cruel.

  I met Steve in July 2015. He was seventy-three years old. He smiled, shook my hand, and led me into a basement room across the hall from the visitors’ clubhouse at PNC Park in Pittsburgh. Steve worked as a television analyst for Pirates games. The cramped, sloped-ceilinged room served as an office for the broadcast crew, but really it was a place to plug in a small refrigerator for the postgame beers.

  “I’ve been looking forward to sitting down,” he said, “because nobody knows like we do.”

  I nodded. I thought I was looking forward to it too. I hoped I was. It wasn’t easy bringing back the worst parts of my past, willingly chasing horrible memories I’d pushed away for so long. My instinct was to let them lie in the ditch I’d left them in a decade before.

  As it happened, the Cardinals were in the visitors’ clubhouse across the hall. Fifteen years after he’d sliced up his hand and then watched from the dugout rail as I came undone, Mike Matheny was in the manager’s office, thinking through the night’s lineup. I’d gone in to say hello, brushing as I did against the familiar road grays I’d last worn six years before.

  The day I met Steve in Pittsburgh, not forty feet from the door that led to the Cardinals, I was thirty-five years old, younger than some of the men in that room, still spitting distance from my prime. But I was retired, twice over. As they prepared for a baseball game in what would become a pennant race and a one-hundred-win season, I’d settle into an old office chair, seeking a clue as to why I was on the wrong side of the hallway.

  Steve hadn’t thrown a significant pitch in more than forty years. He was older than my father. He retired at thirty-two, barely two years after winning nineteen games and four years before I was born, because he couldn’t throw strikes anymore. A quarter of a century later, I caught what had become named for him: Steve Blass Disease.

  That is, the sudden inability to do what you’ve done for your whole life, and to have that failure play in front of the whole world… day after day after day. And then you go home. That’s the antidote—an Adirondack chair on the back porch.

  Steve had watched from a distance the day my career died. It would be an extended death, and I would fight like hell to stop it, but it was inevitable. He said he had wanted to reach out, to come closer, to tell me his story so maybe I wouldn’t feel so alone. Every time, he’d stopped himself. He’d asked himself what would be the use. There’d already be enough inside my head, Steve knew. I wouldn’t need him in there too. And there was no cure, none t
hat he knew of, so what would he have said? He laughed to himself, remembering the remedies that had come by mail to Riverfront Stadium, in care of the guy who couldn’t throw straight. Four-leaf clovers, they’d said. Crosses, of course. Looser underwear, they’d recommended. He’d tried that last one.

  Blass was not the first to contract the Thing, only the one they named it after, and so I went to Pittsburgh looking for answers when we both knew there were none. If nothing else, when the subject of the yips came up anywhere in the game, the first names put to them might very well have been in that little room: “Let’s see, there was Blass…, and Ankiel…” Followed by expressions that moaned, “Those poor bastards.”

  He was a happy guy and a good storyteller. He laughed easily. I liked him. It was plain that four decades had eased the trauma of losing prime seasons to a defect no one understood, least of all him. A page at a time, the calendar had done its job for Steve. He’d been married to Karen for fifty-two years. They’d raised two boys. He’d remained near the game, in a city that adored him, scars and all.

  Yet it won’t ever let go. That’s the ruthless truth of it, and if you’re Steve Blass or, say, me, you may as well learn to live with that. For a period of our lives, we’d been pretty good at something. We were big-league pitchers. We knew that wouldn’t last forever, but twenty-one years old or even thirty-one years old hardly seemed a time to stop believing in tomorrow. Our arms were strong. Our hearts were set to the rhythms of the game. So we’d run our laps and take the ball and try to throw it past hitters. That was the plan.

  And there we were, five feet from each other, neither with a notion of what had brought us together. The symptoms showed the same, rendered a quarter of a century apart. The cause, though? Was there something in our brains? Something in our pasts? What had made us vulnerable, and allowed just about everyone else to look away and to go on pitching and playing?