The Phenomenon

by Rick Ankiel

  It wasn’t the first time I’d said it to him, but it may have been the first time the sentiment stayed with me after I hung up. I couldn’t shake the Thing, the results on the mound hadn’t changed, my elbow was killing me, and the organization now seemed to be losing interest. Through the frustration, through the pain, through the games, I couldn’t see how anything was going to change for the better. If anything, my career was trending in the other direction. I’d focused for so long on the psychological element of who I was, fought that fight, and now my body was falling apart. I wasn’t sure what that left.

  “Then stop,” Harvey said. “Write a book. There’s your way out. Make yourself a little money and go. You know, Ank, there always are choices.”

  He said it as though he’d been waiting for this opening, for the frustration and embarrassment to become too acute to ignore. I was sitting on my couch and couldn’t have hit the TV set with a baseball, for the aim and strength such a throw would require.

  “I don’t know, Harv,” I said, maybe not ready yet after all. “Talk tomorrow, OK?”

  I pitched fifty-four innings in Double-A Knoxville, Tennessee, that summer, and wound up with 49 walks and an ERA near 7. Since February I’d been buying Percocet by the drum, taking Percocet by the handful, to treat the pain in my elbow everyone seemed to believe was minor, or normal, or in my head. They had given me the ball and I had tried to pitch, and now the Thing and the elbow had joined up for twenty pitching appearances that had tested my pain threshold and my sanity. By June, I barely could brush my hair or turn a doorknob with my left hand. The plan hadn’t worked, not even close, and so I was in L.A., and Dr. Lewis Yocum was threading out a ligament from my right wrist and making it into a new elbow.

  I awoke from my Tommy John surgery wondering what I’d be doing for the next year, another one soon to be gone. I’d be twenty-five by the time I was on a mound again, going on four years since the pitch that had started all of this, and what I’d have to show for it was a lot of sleepless nights, a big-league ERA over 7, a terrific rookie-ball season, a scar on my elbow, and another on my wrist. On my way out, Dr. Yocum handed me a binder. In it, a manual on how I’d spend the coming year, from wrapping the bandaging in a plastic trash bag before showering all the way to ninety pitches on a mound at full tilt, with a lot of tiny steps in between.

  Basically, I’d be learning how to throw again. And, well, that part didn’t sound so bad. I’d also be learning to live again. Put one foot in front of the other, head down, a teardown and buildup, the way you’d—I don’t know—pull all of your clothes from your dresser, refold every shirt, rematch every sock, and stack them neatly in their drawers. I quit drinking, a special point for Harvey, who for years had seen me hose down bad days with alcohol—and sometimes pills—and celebrate good days with the same.

  “If you want to beat this, you’ve got to stop,” he said many times.

  I’d stop when the Thing stopped, though. It had picked this fight. I was defending myself, any way I knew how. Still losing, most nights, but still in there, still swinging. I had the wall. I had my will. I had my books, telling me there was hope. I had Harvey by my side. Then I had my way of forgetting, if only for a few hours.

  What was real? Everything but those few hours. The twenty-one hours around those few hours. The pain, the suffering, the fear and, yeah, the progress, the fastball that cut just a little and locked up a right-handed hitter to end an inning, that was all real. A little too real some days, granted. Most days. And still real. Still who I was, in there somewhere, in there fighting.

  The beer, the vodka, whatever it was the night before, had taken to feeding the anxiety of the following day. The effort of holding firm against the Thing for those twenty-one hours, letting go for three, then returning to the emotional and physical struggle had accomplished little but leaving me vulnerable when it counted. I was still afraid. I would look into the stands and see strangers in football helmets and hard hats, mocking my inability to throw a ball where I wanted, laughing at the man who used to be Rick Ankiel, and I’d remember that only one person could throw this next pitch. I’d better find out who that person was. The way to do that, Harvey told me often, was to be that person—wholly that person. I’d run head-on into this for so long that the time had come to strip myself to nothing and know finally how it would end. No drugs, no liquor, no escape routes. Well, maybe the occasional beer. Harvey’s point, that I must feel the pain in order to treat the pain, was that I’d require clarity to cope with whatever came next. To beat whatever came next. Or, perhaps, to live with whatever came next.

  Thirteen months after Tommy John surgery, 1,399 days after October 3, 2000, I stood on a mound in Jupiter, Florida, the center of a Class-A ballpark called Roger Dean Stadium. Under the lights, after a day of rain, the place seemed cleaner, shinier, than usual. It smelled fresh, like all of the days before, the years before, had been washed away.

  This, I knew, likely was my last shot. Maybe the Cardinals would stick with me for as long as it took. If not, maybe somebody else would take a chance. I wasn’t pitching for that anymore so much as I was pitching to get it right. To win. To beat this thing and let tomorrow bring whatever tomorrow brought. The scouts could save the batteries in their radar guns, save the ink in their pens. I wasn’t there for them. I was pitching for so much more. I was pitching for me, pitching for Harvey, pitching for the truth, pitching because the Thing had expected me to quit a long time ago. So I’d pitch just to piss it off.

  I’d barely pitched in two years, and the innings I had thrown had been with a sore elbow. The recovery from Tommy John was arduous, physically successful, and in the end not a cure for the rest of me. From the first tentative postsurgical twenty-foot toss of a real baseball, I knew that I might have left my original ulnar collateral ligament behind, but not the Thing. It had survived. I returned to breathing exercises, to controlling the anxiety as best I could, even for those twenty-foot tosses. I watched games on television, studied the pitcher, and sought mechanical cures for my windup and release. For a year I inched along like that, the little guy on my shoulder reminding me my recovery would be his too, that he’d get stronger along with my elbow, and I’d nod and turn the page in Dr. Yocum’s binder and find what the next inch would bring.

  Those pages, those inches they prescribed, led to Roger Dean Stadium on August 2, 2004, a Monday night, the first batter St. Lucie Mets outfielder Lastings Milledge, the first pitch a ball, the fourth pitch rifled into right-center field for a triple.

  “I’m still young, but I don’t feel like it sometimes,” I’d told an Associated Press reporter the day before. “I almost feel like I don’t have time. But I do.”

  I kept throwing. Kept breathing. I pitched two innings, didn’t walk a batter and struck out three, the last two on curveballs. God bless the curveball.

  “He had such a sharp break on it,” one of the St. Lucie guys said afterward, “you could hear the snap coming out of his fingers.”

  Could’ve been the scar tissue.

  I threw thirty-three pitches, twenty strikes. I made another Class-A start five days later, another five days after that, and kept throwing strikes. Then two Double-A starts for the Tennessee Smokies, in which I walked two across nine innings, and a late-August start for the Triple-A Memphis Redbirds on a Sunday afternoon. The game was in Oklahoma City at Southwestern Bell Bricktown Park. I’d pitched there three and a half years before, days after I’d given up pitching drunk and begged to be sent down, and in three innings I’d walked six batters and thrown four wild pitches. I remembered there’d been a lot of football helmets and hard hats in the crowd that day.

  Every ballpark could be a test of past failures and buried memories, some new way to summon the anxiety that was only too eager to return. The solution was to start at one hundred, work backward, breaths in between. Nothing had changed, except I’d gotten better at distracting myself from the catastrophe that could happen and chasing the outcomes I wanted to have
happen. The balance was delicate. The effort was exhausting. And then it was time to pitch. In six innings, nearing the day the Cardinals would decide whom to call up for September duty, I struck out six Oklahoma City batters and walked none.

  With a fastball that hung around 90 mph, which I dared not throw much harder for the effect it would have on my command, a curveball I never loved more, and a developing changeup, I’d made six minor-league rehabilitation starts on my new elbow. The results: 23 2/3 innings, 2 earned runs, 23 strikeouts, 2 walks.

  August was nearly over. Three and a half years later, I’d pitched myself back into the big leagues.

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  I could pitch a little at the end. I could pitch enough to think of myself as a pitcher again.

  I’d carry the approaching game in my head and my stammering heart all day, and in the hour before the first pitch, that quiet time when there was nothing to do but wait and think and stare at the clock, it would settle in my stomach. But I’d become pretty skilled at keeping the bad thoughts out, holding off what before had felt—and surely was—the inevitable wave of panic. In that way, I’d start stacking sandbags against it, counting backward from one hundred, inhaling between every number, and slowing my heart. By then, I’d rarely have to reach seventy-five or eighty before my body and psyche felt like mine again. The nightmares raged still. I had books to treat them, early-morning movies to soothe them, exercises to wear them out.

  On September 7, 2004, after elbow surgery, after 101 2/3 innings in the minor leagues since the spring of 2001, after shutdowns and restarts and a good amount of tears and thousands of talks with Harvey and millions of pitches thrown (real and imagined), I walked out the front door of a hotel and crossed the street to Petco Park in San Diego. Jeff Suppan would start for the Cardinals against the Padres. I’d be in the bullpen for the kind of duty pitching coaches like to call “stress-free.” For them, maybe.

  I wasn’t the pitcher I’d been once before. I wasn’t the pitcher with the electric arm who’d pitched fearlessly from that unremarkable baseball field at Port St. Lucie High School into that soaring stadium in St. Louis. Neither was I the pitcher who followed, who doubted every footstep, who doubted every arm stroke, who doubted every outcome—not really. I walked into Petco Park a survivor, still not entirely sure of myself but reasonably sure I could feel a baseball in my hand on a major-league mound. I would control my heart. I would see the mitt and believe the ball would find it. I would finish an inning having pulled my teammates three outs closer to a win.

  So my fastball wasn’t what it was. That was by choice. It was more reliable at 89 or 90, at less than full effort, than it would be at 95. My career, if there were to be one, would have to be about control. I’d control my mind, which would settle my heart, and control my effort, which would guide my fastball. It would have to be good enough. What others called stress-free I’d call being. Just being. Surviving.

  The ballpark was only a few months old then, and in a way, so was I, at least in the parts of me that I’d been rebuilding. By then, I was less afraid. Not unafraid, and still capable of passing the security guard in the parking lot, carrying myself on sturdy legs through the hall to the security guard at the door to the clubhouse and finding my locker and the uniform hanging in it, all without my heartbeat running off. I was not twenty-one years old and untouchable. Not young, and still hopeful for the day and proud of what had gotten me to the day and willing to start over a different pitcher and a better, stronger man, now at twenty-five.

  Frankly, it had been exhausting. And yet I arrived a relief pitcher with the other September call-ups to a team that hadn’t seen much of me since, tears streaming down my face, I’d asked to be sent to the cover of the minor leagues.

  It was a Tuesday, a night game in San Diego, where the air turned cool that time of year. These Cardinals would win 105 games, beat the Dodgers in the division series and the Astros in the National League Championship Series, and then get swept by the Boston Red Sox team few saw coming in the World Series. These were the MVP3 Cardinals of Albert Pujols, Scott Rolen, and Jim Edmonds, of four—Jeff Suppan, Chris Carpenter, Jason Marquis, and Matt Morris—fifteen-plus-game winners, of Jason Isringhausen at the back of the bullpen. And of me, a few years late and a few miles per hour short, for ten September innings likely meaningless—and surely forgotten—except for me.

  Suppan pitched the first five innings. The phone in the bullpen rang. “Ank,” I heard, so I removed my jacket, carried my glove to the mound, and began to loosen. The sixth inning was mine with a 4–2 lead. More than five years after my major-league debut, going on four since that playoff game against the Braves, an eternity in between, I loped across the field, kicked at the rubber atop the mound, steadied myself, and looked in at the catcher. It was Mike Matheny. Funny, I thought. Funny after all these years.

  The first Padres hitter was Xavier Nady, an old friend and a good one. I exhaled. Matheny asked for a fastball. OK, right foot back…

  Strike one.

  All right, then.

  Strike two.

  Nady did bounce a single into center field. I looked at him at first base, like, Thanks, pal, and smiled. The rest of the inning—my inning—was as precise. Curveballs followed fastballs, and strikes followed strikes. By the end of a scoreless inning in what would be a 4–2 win, twelve of fifteen pitches were strikes. I’d had plenty of innings that had gone the other way.

  Five days later in Los Angeles, I pitched again, an inning in relief of Chris Carpenter. I threw nineteen pitches, fourteen of which were strikes. So two innings, no runs, zero walks. When the anxiety bubbled, it didn’t paralyze me. Pushing it away required time and energy, and the nightmares came nightly, and the remedies sometimes took more out of me than the innings did. As a starting pitcher I’d prepare to throw strikes once in five days. Out in the bullpen, life felt a little more complicated. I wasn’t going to pitch every day, but that phone rings a lot, which gave me plenty of chances to breathe and count backward from one hundred.

  A week after L.A., in front of more than forty thousand people at Busch Stadium, I threw two scoreless innings—nineteen strikes, eleven balls. I struck out the first three Diamondbacks hitters and later walked my first batter. It didn’t bother me. I struck out the next guy.

  The results were important. I’d take four innings over twelve days and a zero ERA, five strikeouts, and one walk. I got shellacked in Colorado after that, which can happen, and finished my season with four good innings against the Brewers in St. Louis. The Cardinals were going to the playoffs, and I was making arrangements to add some innings in Puerto Rico over the winter so I’d be closer to ready to pitch a full season in 2005.

  More important, I could be in control. It wasn’t easy. In fact, it was a burden. In order to be upright for three hours of baseball, I had to all but shut down for the other twenty-one hours. It meant little messing around with teammates and no time for—or commitment in—the rest of my life. I had to get to 7 o’clock, or whatever time it was when the bullpen phone rang, and the only way there was to drag my mind along a narrow, worn path.

  It was work. And daily self-repair. From May 10, 2001, my previous big-league pitch, to my next on September 7, 2004, I’d searched and fallen and healed and wondered who I was, then who I’d ever be again. What I’d learned was that I could be a pitcher if I wanted it enough. If I was willing to sacrifice the rest of my life for it. Maybe I wouldn’t be a great pitcher, maybe I would, but what became important was winning the game around the game, the one in my head.

  The fight chose me. It would get a fight back. There was no other way. That was what September of 2004 was about—wearing a big-league uniform and standing on a big-league mound and getting big-league hitters out and feathering in the second and third decks, the television cameras, all the people, and a score in the paper that people cared about. I hadn’t won, but I was back in the game.

  I used to describe it this way: If a boy had
reached to pet a large dog and that dog had bitten him, he’d think of that pain every time he put his hand near a dog again. That’s what pitching had become for me, even when I was pitching well enough to keep pitching. Every time I picked up a baseball, I was reaching out to that dog. Its ears were back. It was growling. My heart raced. The blood drained from my head. I reached further and hoped it wouldn’t bite and waited for the pain.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  Four and a half years after the pitch, a pitch that even all that time later seemed so innocent, I retired. I’d taken the very long route to an afternoon on my couch, where I relived as much as I could recall if only to properly bury it.

  I’d surrendered. And as I lay alone on a familiar couch in my living room, I thought again of those dark baseball seasons, the recurring nightmares on minor-league mounds and the restless nights in minor-league hotels, the major-league hope that was only that. They were behind me then, for the first time. I could have put myself back on those mounds, closed my eyes and felt the weight again, felt the liquid in my head begin to bubble, and felt the disappointment again. Instead, at twenty-five, I’d retired. My baseball career was over almost before it had started, and I was not at all unhappy about it.

  I’d had to go before I turned into a roiling puddle of anxiety and was squeegeed into a drain and run out to sea, which wouldn’t have been much of a life. One morning I’d quit my job and driven home and fallen into the sofa—brown, wide, and perfectly worn, as though I’d bought it all those years before for just that moment. I was done with baseball. Me with it, it with me, and now all I had ahead of me was… I hadn’t the slightest idea.

  Between my original signing bonus and the game checks I’d lived on for parts of four seasons at various levels, I had some money. Enough to take some time off and figure it out. Enough to keep my gas tank full, enough for a bucket of baitfish and a six-pack of Bud Light when I wanted them. That sounded good enough to me.