The Phenomenon

by Rick Ankiel

  What was it with us?

  Steve shrugged. I shrugged.

  He’d enjoyed a pleasant upbringing with attentive parents. He’d had meaningful relationships. He’d had his own family that he loved. They loved him back. The job was going great. My life had been slightly more complicated, but until that afternoon on that mound in St. Louis, I’d had no idea what an anxiety attack was, and even then it took months to recognize it for what it was. Point is, while our backgrounds differed, Steve had thought life was going pretty well. So had I, if in a somewhat different way. He ended up making a professional start drunk on a bottle of wine. That was the difference between us. I chose vodka.

  “I remember sitting in my backyard at 4 in the morning, tears coming down my face, asking, ‘Why?’” Steve said. “Because I didn’t know what caused it. To this day I don’t know why.”

  His expression changed from lively to hard. I wondered if he was feeling what I was, the slight turn of the stomach, the subtle disorientation that reminded me I could conjure the panic whenever I wanted. Put me on a mound in my imagination, put a ball in my hand, ask me to throw a strike…

  “The most god-awful thing,” Steve continued, “is being in front of thirty thousand people when you know you shouldn’t be out there. I couldn’t make myself quit, and I threw from behind the mound, I threw on my knees, I threw halfway from the mound. I was in the bullpen when I knew I wasn’t going to be used, and I would throw every pitch for both pitchers; I’d throw 250 pitches just to see if I could force myself. It was just awful. Then, going to the minor leagues, by then, I was a cartoon.”

  We were strangers held together by baseball, an ability to play it for a period of time and two slow, terrible, humiliating divorces from it. I saved the relationship with a bat and a glove. Steve sat behind a microphone and found some peace in the crowds and games that would grow before him most nights. Years later, he old and gray, I wondering what was next, we smothered our old frustrations in laughs that were mostly genuine and in sighs that were fully so. He’d made the best of a time in his life that hadn’t gone anything like he’d expected or wanted. He’d raised those boys of his, the boys who at a young age would come home with autograph requests from their classmates, who’d later come home asking why those same classmates were calling their father a bum. They got over that, just as Steve had, and Karen had. If anything, Pirates fans felt deep sympathy for their World Series hero turned emotional wreck, even if they didn’t quite understand it. They missed Steve Blass, though probably not nearly as much as he missed them.

  He would take some comfort, even forty years later, in having tried every available remedy, no matter how hopeless it seemed. By the time he walked off a spring training field in Bradenton, Florida, his head down and his sons’ hands in his, he’d attempted hypnosis and meditation and overthrowing and not throwing. He’d tried pitching drunk. As his career spiraled, bringing with it a good part of his life, the single bit of clarity was that he couldn’t look up at eighty-five years old and wish he’d done more. There’d already been enough regret.

  “If I’d have known then what’s going on now,” he said, “I would have taken myself to Harvard Medical School and said, ‘Here I am, boys. Fix it.’ But we didn’t have that then, that sports psychology.”

  What they had was a corner bar, and a lot of lonely drives home, and twenty-four teammates who hadn’t the slightest idea of what to say to help. Well, we have sports psychologists now, and we still have all the other stuff too, and hardly any more answers. The nightmares still come. People still ask, total strangers, as if they were musing on a coming rainstorm.

  Hey, what happened? How come you fell apart like that? That musta been terrible, huh, Steve? Ever figure that out? Woo-wee, you were awful, huh?

  “It’s too personal,” he said.

  “None of their business,” I offered.

  He shook his head.

  “None of their business,” he repeated.

  “They don’t know you well enough,” I said.

  “You can’t say, ‘Hello, it’s nice to meet you, what went wrong?’ I want to slap their face.”

  “That’s when I say, ‘You don’t know me well enough to ask that question.’”

  Steve tried to tell himself then, and still tells himself now, “It’s what you do, not who you are.”

  It’s true. But try telling that to a twenty-one-year-old who sees only baseball ahead, or even a thirty-two-year-old who sees only baseball when he looks back. Try walking down the street and having every set of eyes remind you of it.

  He stood in that little room with the humming refrigerator, and he gave me a long hug. I think, even after so many decades, he needed it more than I did. He smiled and said to call anytime. I told him I would.

  He was right, I thought. Nobody knows like we do. Nobody. Lucky for them.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  Gary Bennett Jr. was a professional catcher for nineteen years. He could throw a baseball sixty feet without the slightest anxiety for seventeen of them. The last two he drank himself to sleep most nights and prayed he would not be in the lineup the next day.

  He retired at thirty-six because of the yips.

  In the spring of 2015, Gary was in St. Louis for the Cardinals’ fantasy camp. He’d played for the Cardinals for two seasons: in 2006, when they beat the Detroit Tigers in the World Series, and in 2007, when he made one odd throw in spring training and never again felt right with a baseball in his hand.

  Gary was not one of the great Cardinals, but he was a good-enough one, and certainly one of the better guys. We were teammates for about two months in 2007, from the day in August when I became a major-league outfielder to the day the season ended and he could go home to not think about baseball for a few months.

  We’d seen each other occasionally since, usually at events such as the fantasy camp. I’d asked him for some time to talk about the phenomenon we shared, though we both knew it was optimistic to express it in the past tense. That little guy still sat on our shoulders, daring us to try a throw, even in fantasy camp. We met on a Wednesday evening in the lobby of the Westin Hotel, a block from Busch Stadium. The Cardinals played the Milwaukee Brewers that afternoon. I brought a bucket of Bud Lights from the bar. He sat down, easygoing as always, and drew a dripping bottle from the ice.

  “It was spring training, 2007,” he said. “The bases were loaded. Jason Isringhausen’s on the mound. I went to throw the ball back; I just held on to it too long. I, like, stiffened up and I bounced it and he ran off the mound and had to grab it. And then, the next pitch, all I could think of was All right, take your arm back, and everything got real stiff and real mechanical from that point on. After, I’m like, What the hell? It affected me. It got worse in ’08. It got considerably worse in ’08.”

  Gary managed a smile. What’s done is done. Right?

  He’d caught fourteen games after I’d been called up in 2007. I’d not known he had the Thing. He’d covered it well enough, or I’d refused to see it. Nobody’d talked about it. I was in the big leagues, I’d spent so many years pushing the yips out of my head, and things were going so well, it had simply not registered that the guy three hundred feet away might be in distress.

  He smiled again with some weariness and emptied his beer.

  “All of a sudden,” he said, “I didn’t know how to put one foot in front of the other. I didn’t know how to inhale or exhale. That’s what was crazy to me, was, you know, since I can barely remember, four years old, I can pick up this ball and throw it at some semblance of an area, and now I can’t throw it fifty-eight or sixty feet, or wherever the pitcher was. Within a wingspan? Six feet? Five feet?”

  The shortest distances were the hardest, I said. In the worst of it, he’d had the pitcher come down off the mound into the grass, a few steps closer, and closer still. Gary would work up the courage to flip the ball toward him in a soft, pathetic-feeling, wounded arc designed for damage control. He might have ha
d to do this more than a hundred times a game, throwing against the tension in his fingers, his hand, his wrist, his elbow, up to his shoulder, but mostly in his head. In his subconscious, he didn’t mind when a batter put a ball in play—it’d be one fewer throw back to the pitcher. On foul balls, he’d ask the umpires to throw in the new balls. Jim Joyce, the veteran umpire who’d seen it all, was especially accommodating. It was humiliating, but not worse than two-hopping a toss to the pitcher or, hell, on the really bad days, four-hopping the shortstop.

  His body had turned on him. The game too. I knew the feeling. I knew the pain would not be confined to three hours. I knew there were ways to cope with the twenty-one hours around those, and they weren’t always healthy.

  Gary held up the fresh Bud Light in his hand. His therapy. His friend.

  “I’d have drinks, and I’d find a movie that would take my mind off it,” he said. “Then I would sleep as long as I could possibly sleep, get up at 2 and go to the park, so I wouldn’t have to think about it. If I got up too early, at 7:30 or 8 or whatever, I’d get breakfast, set my alarm for 2, and go right back to sleep. Then as soon as my eyes opened…

  “I don’t know what the definition of clinically depressed is, but during that ’08 season, I was. All I wanted to do was have a beer or sleep. That’s all I wanted. And this helped me not think about it. When I was sleeping, if I dreamed about it, fine, but I was still sleeping, or I’d think other things. Last thing I wanted to do was pull it apart, examine it.”

  Gary’s baseball life became absurd, because that’s where the monster dragged all of us just before it swallowed up the rest of our lives, made those absurd too. He was a catcher who didn’t want to catch, a ballplayer who was afraid to play ball, a man who didn’t know where to go for answers beyond a bar and a hotel room with blackout curtains. The problems of our adulthood had always been soothed before—or perhaps put off—by the hours at the ballpark. If he could’ve, Gary said, he would have lived there, because it was about his favorite place in the world. Until it wasn’t, and it had turned on him just as it had the rest of us, and then he could barely hold up under the thought of it.

  Gary was born and raised in Waukegan, Illinois, about an hour’s drive north from Wrigley Field. His father was a welder and a roofer who turned the television channel to the ball game—Cubs or White Sox—every night. Among the first photographs of Gary and his father is one of the two playing catch. Gary is in a diaper.

  He was a catcher almost from the get-go.

  “I had a good, quick first step,” he said, grinning. “After that, my range tapered off quickly.”

  So not just a catcher, a born catcher.

  A month and a half after his eighteenth birthday, Gary was drafted in the eleventh round—293rd overall—by the Phillies. He turned them down. He would play college ball, and from a list of seven or eight possibilities, among them Indiana, Wisconsin, and Creighton, he chose Southwest Missouri State. When his father asked why Southwest Missouri State, Gary told him, “I think that’s the best chance I’ll have to compete for playing time.”

  His father nodded and gave Gary one of those let-me-get-this-straight looks.

  “So,” he said, “you’re picking your college strictly on the baseball program and how much you’ll play.”

  More a statement than a question. Gary nodded.

  “Interesting,” his father said.

  Gary called the Phillies and signed.

  Over thirteen seasons spread across eight teams, Gary batted .241, nursed more than a few pitchers through good starts and bad, and generally held down the games behind the starting catcher. He was tough and prepared and confident, what the men in the clubhouse would call “a gamer.”

  “I felt I got the most out of what I had,” he said.

  When you can look back on your days as a ballplayer and swear to yourself that you gave it everything you had, every day, every year, then that’s a career. That’s what the jerseys framed in Gary’s den will remind him of. That’s what the friends he takes into middle age will represent. That’s what the backache and knee replacements will be for, and why he’d wobble around after games with concussion symptoms so severe he couldn’t remember his wife’s phone number; the privilege of that life and the respect he tried to pay it every single day.

  It thanked him at the end by saying, “Strap in—there isn’t enough beer in the world to save you.”

  Gary would at times test that theory. Anything that might pull him from the darkness, the fear of the darkness, was in play. That meant visualization. That meant thousands of dry throws, a balled-up pair of socks in his hand in a hotel room who knows where. It meant laughing at it, crying about it, hiding it, letting it out into the world, breathing in for four counts, holding it for five, releasing it for seven. It worked in the hotel room. And then his arm would seize anyway, as though it had been turned to stone, resisting a lifetime of ease and fluidity and muscle memory.

  He was thirty-six when the 2008 season ended. By any measure, his body had baseball seasons left in it. He called his agent and said, “Don’t try to find me a job.”

  “But Gary…”

  “Just don’t.”

  Seven years later, over a couple Bud Lights and a basket of wings, Gary said the nightmares were gone. There’d been an issue at his son’s Little League game once—his ceremonial first pitch on opening day had hit the backstop with an embarrassing clunk—but real life doesn’t involve a lot of sixty-foot throws. He can attend fantasy camps, catch up with old friends, and wrestle through a few throws—from third base—and make peace with the idea that not everything ends with solid contact and a victory parade. Sometimes things end with an ignored phone that wasn’t going to ring much anyway.

  He coped. He’d played all or parts of eleven big-league seasons before the Thing came for him, which is better than most. At least there was that. But looking that night at Gary, I could see that there was more under the stories we laughed at. Those baseballs he spiked, those throws he sailed into the right-field corner, those afternoons he spent wishing there weren’t games those nights, a guy doesn’t just retire from that. Guys like Gary, they don’t walk away from a minute of baseball if they don’t have to. He left two, maybe three, years early. That’s a lot of baseball, a lot of life, unplayed and unlived.

  In some ways, I told him, the Thing is not unlike cancer. A lot of people who get cancer did nothing to attract it. They are not flawed people. They did not abuse themselves. It’s not as though they stood too close to someone who already had cancer. So they, perhaps, can wonder why they were chosen, but they cannot blame themselves.

  “It’s not your fault,” I said, repeating a line I heard often.

  Gary nodded and looked up. He tried not to overthink it anymore. He preferred to remember that championship season and, even smaller, so much of the good that came of his playing baseball. The feel of a handshake after a win. The flutter of two fingers calling for a curveball when the scouting report said never throw this guy a curveball, followed by strike three. The few minutes before a game when, hell, anything could happen, but the view was great and the anticipation was exhilarating. Where’d that go? Why’d that have to go?

  The last time he stood on a baseball field, after all those wonderful years, he didn’t want to be standing on a baseball field.

  “It sucked,” he said. “It absolutely sucked.”

  After a pause, he said, “It weighs on me that I ran from it.”

  He didn’t run, I tried to remind him. He was taken away.

  “I would like,” Gary began, then restarted, “I’d want to know why. I would like to know why. Why the fuck did this happen. Not ‘Why me?’ but why does it happen to anybody? For so long you go from doing this, this, and this. You don’t think about it. And all of a sudden you lose the ability to do that, and you have to think about it. Why? What changed?”

  I couldn’t answer him, so I just stared back.

  “I care, actually,” he said.
“I would definitely want to know why. Not that it’s going to change my life or the way I do anything, but it would just be nice to say, ‘Oh, OK.’”

  He just wanted to get it.

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  I threw the pitch, which lowered the lever, which released the anxiety, like a cement mixer had emptied itself into my head.

  There was the question, now that I’d been afflicted, of what to do with that. The immediate answer was to throw another pitch. (That would be the plan for what seemed a very, very long time.)

  I didn’t dare look into the dugout. Weak pitchers, insecure pitchers, they look into the dugout, their eyes begging to be saved: “Come. Get. Me. Hurry.” I instead would compose myself, throw a strike, win this game, right now. Then another Braves hitter would step into the batter’s box, maybe not dig in like he might otherwise, and I couldn’t get it right. Like I was standing on someone else’s legs. Throwing with someone else’s arm. Thinking with someone else’s brain.

  And the ball would do what it wanted, not what I wanted. Like I’d lit its fuse and let it go and it would whistle and fly off in a cartoonish spiral.

  Oh, shit, Tony La Russa thought.

  Dave Duncan stood near La Russa. He searched my delivery for a glitch. Nothing glaring, he thought. Nothing to explain this. The release point is wrong, he thought, but why? The rest of it looks fine. He looked at La Russa. La Russa returned the gaze. Their eyes spoke: Uh-oh.

  Get him through this, they thought. Get him through this game, the next, get him through the winter, he’ll come back fine. Hell, get him through a pitch. One normal pitch.

  Scott Boras watched on television from Newport Beach, California. He followed the flight of one pitch. Then another. And another. He picked up the phone and called Harvey Dorfman, the sports psychologist I’d met the previous spring.