by Rick Ankiel
“Hey,” I said, half in and half out of Tony’s office, “you’re right, I don’t want to go down. I’ll try.”
Tony nodded.
“Good,” he said.
I made three more starts—11 innings, 14 hits, 12 walks, an 8.18 ERA. I wasn’t back. I was worse. The club sent me down to fix it, and I was relieved. More than three years passed before I returned.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
Johnson City, Tennessee, population 60,000. Howard Johnson Field, capacity 3,800. Rookie ball.
A suitcase. A duffel bag. Some books. A serious crisis. Just dropped it all on the floor of a room at the Holiday Inn over on Springbrook Drive, a six-minute drive to a new pitcher’s mound.
The instructions on my way out of St. Louis were something along the lines of “OK, Ank, go get right.”
“I’ll be back,” I said, and meant it.
The first stop on my recovery had been Memphis, where the Triple-A team was. I made three starts. They went like this: 4 1/3 innings, 3 hits, 17 walks, 12 wild pitches, a 20.77 ERA. That’s a lot to happen over 13 outs.
Somewhere amid the carnage, I’d walked the bases loaded, thrown a wild pitch, and watched from the mound as another run scored. A pitcher is expected to cover home plate in that situation. I did not. I’d not forgotten about that, and I’d not made the decision not to cover, exactly. It just happened, and I stood out there with my feet in cement, the blood draining from my head, unable to feel the ball, pretty much all hell breaking loose, and when I came to, the other team had one more run than I’d last checked. I wasn’t trying to big-league anybody, certainly not my teammates, and I didn’t intend to disrespect the game. Probably I was just tired of looking at stuff go bad.
I wasn’t long for that game. The manager came to me afterward. “I know it’s been hard on you,” he said, “and I know you’re frustrated, but you still gotta play the game.”
“Yep,” I said.
“And I gotta fine you a hundred bucks for not covering home,” he said.
I looked up at him, by then half eaten by the monster, and was struck by the lack of compassion. Baseball rolls on. Baseball doesn’t flinch. Baseball demands order. Pay your fine and move along. Didn’t I know it.
“Whatever, man,” I said.
The larger issue, of course, was what then? I couldn’t throw strikes in the big leagues. I couldn’t throw strikes in the minor leagues. The monster was getting bigger, stronger.
The club asked if I wanted to go home, to get away from it for a while. Scott Boras and I had a long conversation about it, and I talked it over with Harvey, and I told them all I would not run away. Besides, what would I be running to? A life in Fort Pierce without baseball. I’d had that once. I wasn’t going back. What I needed was this, to keep throwing, to keep trying, to be around a game I loved even if it wasn’t so sure about me anymore, to—OK—cover home when the game called for it. I should’ve covered home.
Send me down, I asked.
You’re already down, they said.
Lower, I said.
The idea was to play ball again. Laugh again and mean it. To get out from under the lights, the pressure, the consequences of a bad pitch or ten. It would have been a restart, except I’d never been to rookie ball before, so technically the assignment was even more severe. The choice was here or home, and I wasn’t going home.
Summer was coming, so the air was getting warm and sticky, like it does in Tennessee. The mountains were nearby. There was fresh water to fish on, and good music to go with the beer, and friendly people to talk to. The Holiday Inn was a star or two short of a big-league hotel, but it was plenty warm and dry enough for a guy down on his luck and looking to blend in.
I walked into the clubhouse at about the age a lot of guys walked into that clubhouse. I walked in with a grin, and my shoulders back, and embarrassed that I was there. Six months before, they’d all seen it. I was kicking ass, had left this minor-league stuff behind forever, and was up on that mound in St. Louis in the most important game that town had seen in years. Most of them would never see the big leagues, much less start a playoff game, and I had, and I’d retched all over myself. It was one thing to sense anger, even scorn or pity, on the streets of St. Louis, another to pull a locker next to a guy you knew was thinking, Geez, dude, don’t get any of that crazy shit on me.
Rookie ball, man. In Tennessee. There were eighteen-year-olds on that team. One of them was named Yadier Molina. The future big leaguers were him and maybe one or two other guys. The former big leaguers? Just one that I counted.
The plan was to take away the top deck of the stadium. The second deck too. And the cameras. And the newspapermen. And SportsCenter. And a final score that would appear in any major newspaper. Just get back to a baseball and a batter. However many people wanted to show up, that was fine too, but they weren’t important. Nobody looked at the standings. This ballpark, this roster, was about getting better, learning the game, trying not to be homesick, balancing a checkbook, saving enough money to eat at the end of the month, trying not to drink so much that you made a complete fool of yourself, even, for some, learning English and the ways of the culture. Me? This ballpark, this roster, this little town I hadn’t heard of before Tuesday, was heaven. First thing that happened, I met the local beauty-pageant winner. We dated. She was nice. The next thing, they gave me a uniform and a day to pitch, and the whole thing was so delightfully charming I couldn’t help but forget that a couple weeks before I’d needed a pint of vodka to convince myself just to walk to a pitcher’s mound.
So I threw a ball off the backstop. So what? Tell that Molina kid to go get it. I’d wait. Go ahead, man, take another base, I’ll strike out the next guy.
The plan worked. I pitched great, I played great. Again. In rookie ball, yes. Against a bunch of kids whose best stories were about high school. But still, great. A man’s gotta restart somewhere.
Also, they let me hit. A couple days a week, in and around my starts and in-between-start throw days, I was the designated hitter. And damn if it didn’t feel like high school ball again. Show up at the park, pitch one day, rake the next, laugh all day long. My first game with a bat in my hand, I hit two home runs. Say, tell me some of those high school stories of yours, partner.
From Harvey, I’d learned a technique—a game, really—that forced me to concentrate on something other than baseball and distracted me from the growing feeling of doom. Across a grid of ten-by-ten squares, I’d have a teammate write numbers randomly, one to one hundred, and then I’d search for the numbers in reverse order, drawing an X over them. Before long, guys were drawing them up without my asking, dropping two or three at a time in my locker. When they felt too easy, I’d listen to the radio at the same time, heightening the chances of my mind straying. Pitching well, even pitching poorly, was a lot of work.
Not to say I was cured or anything, but eight or nine months had passed since I’d felt good about myself as a ballplayer. I still had to practice my breathing, still had to settle into a peaceful place in the hours before a start, and was still haunted at night. But I also didn’t have to pretend I was fine when I wasn’t. I could walk around between starts and not feel the weight of the last start and the next start. Batting practice cleared my head. Watching a game through a hitter’s eyes again, measuring some young buck from Kentucky or California or Texas, remembering what it was like to have that fearless an arm and then learning what to do with it, then getting my hacks, the experience seemed to purify me. I could inhale and exhale normally instead of those tight little huffs that were all the Thing would allow. While I hadn’t swung a bat this regularly in several years, the relaxation mechanisms that were hit-and-miss on a mound were quite reliable in a batter’s box. The swing was rusty at first, but my mind was clear and my heart ran low. Rather than hoping to survive a game, I was competing for hits and for wins, and it looked and smelled and sounded like baseball again.
In 105 at bats, DHing twice a week
, I hit .286 with 10 home runs and 7 doubles. In 14 starts, over 87 2/3 innings, I had a 2.05 ERA with 158 strikeouts, 18 walks, and only 8 wild pitches. Granted, it was rookie ball, and I didn’t belong in rookie ball. But, given rookie ball, sentenced to rookie ball, what happened was what should’ve happened. I should’ve dominated, all things being equal, which they most certainly hadn’t been. Any big-league pitcher would. Only, in the months leading to those results, those months thinking, Oh, shit, it’s my day to pitch. Oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit…, there’d been more than a few occasions when I’d rather have been anywhere but on a baseball field. Also, if the rookie-ball thing had failed, the next level down was tending bar in Fort Pierce.
By late summer, I was looking forward to pitching. Almost as much as I was looking forward to my designated-hitter days. The assignment was temporary, and the plan was to rebuild my psyche and have a decent time doing it. The plan was working. Enough so, in the eyes of the organization, that toward the end of the season I was told the time had come to leave Johnson City and pitch at a higher level, in the minor-league playoffs.
I said no.
I couldn’t stay in Johnson City forever. In fact, all anyone talked about was leaving, getting to the next level, inching toward the big leagues. Not me. Not yet. Winter was coming. I’d already spent one off-season troubled by the final pitches of a baseball season. I couldn’t do another. The emotional foundation Harvey was helping me pour hadn’t set, I knew, because even the mention of a bigger stadium, larger crowds, and playoff pressure stoked inside me all the same anxieties.
“I’m not ready,” I said, that simple, and what I thought was Is all the progress I’ve made really worth a playoff win—or loss—in Double A?
Teams had come to Howard Johnson Field, and I could hear the young guys—the hitters—talking to each other when they found out I’d be pitching.
“Hey, can I borrow your catcher’s gear?”
“On your toes, boys, this one doesn’t know where it’s going.”
On and on…
And then I’d strike out a couple of them an inning. Decent fastballs. Not the 95 I’d had but a restrained, even cautious 90 or 91. Curveballs they’d never seen before and maybe wouldn’t again. They were playing to make a career for themselves. I was pitching for my life over here. And I wasn’t going to let anybody push me out of it. Not a pitching coach. Not a bunch of kids from down the road. And not the Cardinals.
No, I’d stay put, count backward from a hundred, hit another ball over the fence, strike out an eighteen-year-old and have myself a season I could be proud of.
The Cardinals couldn’t have been too mad. In September, they asked if I wanted to come spend a month with the big club in St. Louis. I wouldn’t pitch or even play at all. I wouldn’t be on the roster. I’d come watch the games, be around the guys, and continue the healing from the dugout rail. For whatever reason, I’d held it together long enough for a few months to be not the pitcher I was, and not the untroubled young man I was, but a decent pitcher and a man who was surviving. That was enough progress for one summer.
In recognition of that progress, I may have celebrated too hard. Free from the mental gymnastics that got me to the mound, then kept me on the mound, then followed me from the mound, even in Johnson City, I had a good time in St. Louis not having to think about pitching. A lot of that good time was at the ballpark. Some of it was not.
In my apartment one night, I considered that the stress of the year—the anniversary of October 3 was near—and the various antidotes I’d chosen for it had found me in a reckless place. “Real” tasted better chased by Bud Lights. It slept better with Xanax. It looked better after one last round and a boozy promise that tomorrow would be happier. I was just trying to get through the day, probably afraid to face what everyone else suspected was true, that I might never be the guy who’d first gotten up on that mound last October. I was twenty-two. Nobody should have to think about that at twenty-two, and I wasn’t about to, and the way that I was not going to was to remove myself from the truth of it. One beer at a time.
These are not habits that go unnoticed. The Cardinals gently suggested I go home, and I found myself agreeing, and I packed the truck and left. I’d still pitched all those innings. I’d still had a good time doing it. I’d played ball again, really played ball, and I was sure I was gaining on something better. Harvey and I would have the winter to get ready for spring training. I was optimistic. The dark thoughts weren’t gone, but there were smudges of light that hadn’t been there before. I’d go home and work on those.
Besides, that cinder-block wall was waiting on me.
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
There was more to the wall than arm angles and release points. The wall was therapeutic. The way some people meditate, I suppose, I went to the wall. People schedule their days around the gym, or lunch, or meetings, or fishing, or, say, a ball game, and I scheduled around the wall.
For four and a half months, in and around the rest of my life, from early October to the middle of February, I might not have missed a day. Sometimes that was twenty minutes on the wall. Others, it was hours, and I’d be startled to look up and see that the sun had gone down when just a couple throws ago it was midafternoon. It depended on the day before, or the pitch before. It depended on the ferocity of the night terrors early that morning.
At the wall, I was evading danger, an ocean liner zigzagging away from a hostile submarine, just out of range. I was treating the fears that bad habits would stick or that better habits would fade, and those rendezvous with the wall smeared from one to the other, from day to day, from pitch to pitch. The wall fed my obsessiveness, settled my stomach, eased the dread that this was all leading to nowhere, to a life in which, at twenty-two, I would be left to wonder, What now?
The sound of the ball striking those cinder blocks played to a rhythm that slowed my heart. Thump-thump-thump. Thunk-thunk-thunk. Thump-thunk-thump-thunk-thump-thunk, intertwined like that, finding a pace that soothed me into long breaths and slow, deliberate mechanics, so I would not rush through points in the delivery that were sticky and unnerving. Breathe and throw. Breathe and throw. Chase off the evil thoughts, welcome the sun and the breeze and the kid in the backyard just killing time.
“So whatta ya got today?” I’d sigh, and fish a ball from a bucket and go to work becoming the next Koufax again, or the first Ankiel, whichever came of that. Hours later, I’d lie in bed, exhausted, knowing I’d done all I could that day to whip the monster and fighting the urge to get up and throw a few more. Just a few more. Then I’d be fine. The Cardinals seemed to believe in me again. I seemed to believe in me again. So just those few more. I could make it even better. Those were my thoughts as I closed my eyes, of full ballparks and tied games and me with the ball in my hand again, everyone waiting to see what would come next, waiting to see if the kid had it in him anymore. And then I’d peel off the covers, pull on some shorts, pick up my glove, and go to the wall. Just a few more.
All of which, by mid-February, when it was time to report to spring training, left me with a very sore left elbow.
The magnetic resonance imaging showed a partial ligament tear. The wall had thrown back.
There are methods of recuperation from an elbow sprain. There are procedures to fix it, the most common of which is ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction surgery, known as Tommy John surgery. I figured I’d go ahead and get it done. I would turn twenty-three in midsummer. In a year I’d be right back in spring training with a fresh elbow. Maybe the surgery, followed by a year’s recovery, starting over with a throwing program, would dampen the Thing. Most of all, however, my elbow hurt, and I didn’t want it to hurt anymore, and I couldn’t pitch with it like this, and I certainly was in no condition—physically or psychologically—to pitch around the pain. It had been hard enough in perfect health.
The team, in consultation with its doctor, outside doctors, Scott Boras, and, to some degree, me, chose a different remedy
—rest. A year of rest. Go home, they said. Don’t throw. We’ll see you in December. Another summer gone.
I resisted. If something was broken, and it would seem my elbow qualified, the best option was to fix it. The worst scenario was to take a year off, in theory to allow my elbow to heal, and then return the following winter with the same problem. Then there’d be no option but surgery, and instead of sitting out one year, I’d lose two. Two more years of my prime. Two more years of distance between the pitcher I’d been and the pitcher I was trying to become again. The progress of the summer before would be lost to a plan that amounted to “Just rest.”
The orders, instead, were to go home. So I went fishing. And I didn’t throw. And then I fished some more. And I watched baseball on television and occasionally wondered if this wasn’t getting away from me. And every once in a while, in the cool of the evening, I’d go to the wall, just out of curiosity, just out of boredom, and lob a baseball toward my future.
Darryl Kile died that summer. He was thirty-three years old. They found him in a hotel room in Chicago, hours after he’d been expected at the ballpark. Blocked arteries, they said. The memorial service was held at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. I sat with former teammates and future teammates and thousands of strangers, and I thought about Darryl’s wife and children, and about my boyhood friend Dennis, and about Rob Harris, gunned down in Orlando, and how none of it seemed fair. Darryl had been good to me for no reason but to be good to me, and I wanted more than anything in that moment to be his teammate again. To be his friend again. I went back home, back to waiting on my arm and my career, heartbroken.
Nine months passed that way. My elbow still hurt.
I flew to Los Angeles in July of the next summer, 2003, days before my twenty-fourth birthday.
“Fuck this,” I told Harvey. “Maybe I’m done.”