The Phenomenon

by Rick Ankiel

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  This again.

  “I’m good, Scott,” I said.

  “You sure?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Ank,” he said, “you ready to go play?”

  “Go play what? I’m done.” Wasn’t he listening? Wasn’t anybody?

  “Outfield. For the Cardinals. I talked to Walt.”

  Wait. What?

  “Jocketty,” I said. “You talked to Walt Jocketty, and he wants me to play the outfield. For the Cardinals.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not bullshitting me, are you?”

  “You’re a big leaguer,” Scott said. “You can do this. They’ll start you on the minor-league side. You’ll work your way up. It’ll work. You’re good enough.”

  Scott and Harvey had worked this out. Harvey had advised against it, against inviting more failure, unless Scott was absolutely sure I could return to the major leagues. A five-year minor-league slog, topping out in Double A, sending me back to the couch again at thirty years old, would only put more miles on that same psycho-logical tire.

  “When have I ever been anything but up-front with you?” Scott chided.

  “I know. I know I know I know.”

  “You can do this. Go have a good time. Go beat the game. You’d be great.”

  Damn, I’d just quit baseball. Three hours before, I’d said good-bye. No regrets. I sat up, looked around, found the poster. Who do I trust?

  I hit in high school. I hit a little in the big leagues, when pitchers figured there’d be nothing to lose by throwing me fastballs. I did hit some in the minors. That was rookie ball. Against kids. I wasn’t an everyday player. I hadn’t played the outfield since Port St. Lucie. This was crazy. Beyond crazy. But I was twenty-five. Wasn’t that when regular people started their careers? It would never work. But it might.

  I tried to clear my head. Was I ready to fall back in love with baseball? Was I going to do this to myself again? Didn’t I want to sleep?

  “They wanted me?”

  “This isn’t charity,” Scott said. “You can play. You can do this.”

  “OK, lemme think.”

  “Ank, I believe in this. I think you should too.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  Well, damn.

  “Tomorrow, huh?”

  For the first time that day, I let a little of the outside world in. I went to my computer.

  Lory Bailey grew up in Deerfield Beach, on the coast about halfway between Miami and Fort Pierce. She lived a little north of there, in Delray Beach, about a half hour south of Jupiter. A mutual friend introduced us. I found her beautiful and strong-willed and smart and refreshingly unimpressed with what I did for a living, because at that particular time I wasn’t so sure myself. She’d never heard of me before we met. Of course, there was no reason she should have. Still, to her, I wasn’t that guy, which I was to plenty of other people.

  Lory had been a Miami Dolphins cheerleader, loved sports, and understood that a certain amount of selfishness is required to play the game well, but that didn’t mean she was going to live with it. We’d met a month before. She didn’t mind my house having a Ping-Pong table where the dining room table should have been. In fact, she thought it was great, and I thought she was great for thinking it was great. Maybe she believed the video game/jukebox thingy in the living room was a little over the top, and the red carpet was a bit too much like, well, red carpet, but she didn’t let on, and we listened to the same music—country, hip-hop, whatever. We watched Forrest Gump until we could recite the lines to each other before Forrest did. One day, Lory would walk down the aisle to the theme song—“Feather”—from the movie. Sometimes she even sat through Scarface.

  Lory was game for a sports bar, which I confirmed on one of our first dates, or for an afternoon on a wave-thrown boat on the ocean. On the back of the boat, I handed her a rod with a fish on the end of it, and she reeled in a three-foot spinner shark like she’d been born for it. “I grew up on a canal,” she said, answering my surprise. “There were fish in my backyard.” I didn’t have to hide from her the rising anxiety of the coming baseball season because it dissolved when I was with her. It was simple like that. We were simple like that.

  I had my father to bear. She had lost hers when she was eight years old, to a drunk driver so many New Year’s Eves before.

  So I sent her cards that she’d keep forever. And when we weren’t together, we’d be talking on the phone or instant messaging on the computer. We were a month into this thing, and it was perfect, and we both thought so, so I figured I should tell her I’d quit my job, and then Scott had called and I’d sort of, maybe, possibly unquit. I signed on to the computer, and there she was.

  We typed back and forth about nothing, really, just life, and Lory gave me an opening.

  “Can’t take anything for granted,” she wrote about something.

  “Speaking of that,” I lunged.

  “Yessss…”

  “I’ve been thinking about this for a couple weeks. Just trying to make sure what the right thing would be to do. For me to be truly happy. And I came to my decision today. And I retired from pitching. Gonna announce it to the media tomorrow. I’m gonna trust you to keep that between me and you. But it’s just not fun for me anymore.”

  “Wow,” she typed.

  “I know.”

  “If you are sure that is what you want to do, I’m with ya sweetheart. You have to do what ultimately makes you happy.”

  “That’s exactly what I came to.”

  “Well I’m happy for you then. I’m sure it was a hard decision. Do you know what direction you want to go in, or did you just know that wasn’t what you wanted to do?”

  “I feel better already.”

  “Good,” she wrote. “I’m happy if you are happy.”

  “Knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do.… I might move to a position.”

  There was a pause before Lory answered.

  “Can you hit?”

  I laughed. “Don’t try me like that.”

  I told her I’d see her tomorrow, signed off, and smiled. I can hit, I thought. Right? I mean, I can probably hit. I stood and walked to the window, sensed the snook again, knew they were out there fighting. I thought about the game, what it had once been to me, and I felt it again in my heart. Not racing this time but swelling. I was going to be a ballplayer again. A real ballplayer.

  Can I hit?

  Hell, yes.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  I slept that night, all the way through, and woke up dazed. After a minute or two, first spent wondering why I was so rested, it occurred to me that I was an outfielder today, as of right then, and that I didn’t have to pitch today, or tomorrow, or ever again, and it was so crazy and wonderful it might work. If I’d dreamed, I could not remember of what. I paused at a window, looked down into the backyard, and thought, I should have that wall fixed. I looked around at a world that would never have me throw another pitch, the choice I’d made twenty-four hours before, and was offering more. A do-over. All I’d had to do to get there was donate eight years of my life, some self-esteem, several prime years of baseball, a biological father, an elbow, countless deep breaths, and parts of a cinder-block wall.

  I was good with that. I’d tried. I’d not regret a moment of the effort to be the next Koufax, even when it was hopeless, even if I could’ve started taking fly balls and batting practice all those years ago. If this was the journey, then point out the path. Pitching the way I had, living with it as I had, had brought me to here, and taught me to forget yesterday, and reminded me there could be no shame in effort. Nobody had worked harder over those eight years, of that I was sure, and no reasonably healthy person had endured more. Yeah, I was a wreck for a long time. And, yeah, I showed up every stinkin’ day to wear it, or beat it, or survive it.

  That made me the guy who would do the improbable, and already in my he
ad I could hear those who would not believe.

  A pitcher. Is going to be an outfielder. A pitcher. Is going to try to hit. At twenty-five years old. Good luck with that. Wait’ll the sliders come—they’ll make the Thing look like a puppy dog.

  That only made it more fun. The pressure was gone. You boys want to bring the cameras? The notepads? The questions? Bring ’em on over here. Psshht, hell, yeah, I can hit. I think. I mean, let’s go find out.

  The drive the morning before, when I’d handed in my uniform, was all but forgotten. They’d just give it back. I had my bats, had a general idea where center field was, had Lory beside me, had Harvey behind me, and had a whole career before me. My mind was so clear I could’ve sworn my head was lighter, and I sang along to the radio like a man who could actually sing. I waved to the security guard, now thoroughly perplexed.

  Babe Ruth, of course, I knew about, he having been a pitcher for five notable years and a twenty-game winner for a couple of them and otherwise about the best hitter ever. As a Cardinal, I’d heard Stan Musial had started as a pitcher before becoming an outfielder, a Hall of Famer, and a legend in St. Louis. Other than that, the examples of men who’d walked off the mound and into the batter’s box with any sort of success were rare. There were first basemen and outfielders and catchers who pitched in high school and college. There were plenty who went the other way, catchers and outfielders who found breaking balls were easier to throw than hit. And there were more—those who ascended to the mound or descended from it—who failed.

  “First day, Harv,” I said on the phone on the way over.

  “Go get ’em, kid,” he said.

  “I will.”

  Standing in the clubhouse that morning, some guys had heard about my change in plans, others said, “Yer gonna what?” and a few hadn’t realized I’d been gone the day before.

  “So, yeah,” I told them, “I’ve had kind of a weird twenty-four hours,” before bursting into laughter.

  I couldn’t recall being in higher spirits. Man, it was good to be out from under that burden and in that locker room, with those guys, a whole day waiting. I wasn’t afraid. If there were any nerves, they registered low on my personal anxiety scale, right there with what I was going to have for lunch and whether the orange crop was going to come in OK this year.

  On the sheets of paper tacked to the corkboard, “Ankiel” was not listed under bullpens or sprints or pitchers’ fielding practice—or my personal domain, which was unspoken and unwritten: Hey, Ank, get here at dawn so nobody can watch.

  Today it was “Hey, Ank, go hit with the A-ball guys, then go hit with the Double-A guys, then see you in the cages, just keep piling up at bats.”

  I went to Jim Edmonds.

  “Whatta you think?” I said.

  “Well,” he said, “you’re gonna need this.”

  He handed me an outfielder’s glove, bigger than the one I used for pitching.

  “And use this,” he said.

  He gave me a tiny glove, not even a foot long, that he used as a training tool. Catch enough fungoes and batting-practice fly balls in that, the regular glove will feel like a butterfly net.

  “Anything else?”

  “Good luck, Ank. Good to have you on our side.”

  “Thanks, man.”

  I gathered up a couple bats, a pair of metal spikes, and my two new gloves and ran off to my new career, wearing a smile you could have seen from St. Louis, or Johnson City, or Knoxville, or my own backyard.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  I arrived early. I stayed late. I soaked my aching body. I bandaged my bubbled and bloody hands. I shagged fly balls so earnestly that the other outfielders began bunching in left and right fields, leaving me to chase the demons away.

  The second day, with the A ballers, I had four hits in six at bats, and it was fun. Even when I’d pitched better at the end, when I’d ground it hard enough to get back to the big leagues and walk off a mound with some satisfaction, it hadn’t ever been fun anymore. That, maybe, was the part of me I’d missed the most, even more than the great, effortless pitcher I’d felt I could be. I’d missed being able to enjoy it. I’d missed looking forward to the next game. I’d missed racing into the outfield gap, not sure you could reach a ball but maybe you could, and I’d missed the hours it would take to get a swing just how you liked it, then backspinning a ball so pure you hadn’t even felt the contact. Mostly, I’d missed competing against the other guy rather than competing against myself, getting back to a game that would be settled by the width of the ball and the breadth of the man.

  I knew I’d make it. Absolutely knew it. But if by some force of humankind or nature I didn’t, hell, it would be satisfaction enough to have had a good time trying. So I stood across from Dave McKay, an exceptional outfield coach, and put my feet where he told me to, and began to learn to become a big-league center fielder. And I hit off a tee, and hit soft-toss, and hit BP fastballs, and faced real pitchers, and began to learn to be a big-league hitter.

  When I saw a smirk, or even imagined one, or read a sentence about what a long shot this was, or listened to the radio long enough to learn what a valiant yet futile effort I’d undertaken, I’d show up ten minutes earlier the next day and make up ten minutes on whoever thought their job was safe.

  All I had to do was avoid the sixty-foot throws, which wasn’t so hard. It was going to be OK to fail once in a while anyway, which was liberating.

  The Cardinals started me in Double A as the everyday right fielder in Springfield, Missouri. I struck out a lot. So they restarted me in Single A as the everyday right fielder and occasional center fielder for Quad Cities in Davenport, Iowa. After two months, they sent me back to Springfield. When the season ended, I was a .259 hitter with a .339 on-base percentage and, in 369 at bats, 21 home runs. I wasn’t Babe Ruth, but neither was I a pitcher trying to survive a game that was over my head, and neither was it a gimmick. The outfield grass felt good under my feet, and throwing a ball two hundred feet or three hundred feet was a lot easier than throwing it sixty feet, six inches, and I’d live with the cruelty that it could be a lot more accurate too.

  The winter brought opportunity. I could prepare like an outfielder. I could lift weights like a hitter. If I could produce in Double A, and I was by the end, then Triple A was only a matter of getting stronger and smarter, and piling at bats on at bats, and reading the line drive that was going to top-spin dive in front of me or backspin over my head. There was catching up to do, which meant settling into a single set of hitting mechanics and swinging until they became second nature, and then separating the sliders from the fastballs and the cutters from the rest, and that was going to be the hard part. I’d always thought great hitters are born and yet don’t become truly great until they’re holding a wood bat under dim lights in a little town where the mosquitoes are big enough to carry away a hot dog, chili and all. That’s where the habits are formed, the ones that settle your heart when the pitcher has won two hundred big-league games and has seen plenty like you and isn’t the least impressed. I remembered feeling that way about lots of hitters, and I won only thirteen games—one of them with the help of a bucket of vodka.

  My objective, then, was to cram seven years, those formative years for hitters, into one off-season, and I walked into spring training in 2006 with the other position players feeling like I was physically ready to compete. What I’d need was gamelike at bats, and there’d be plenty of those over the course of spring training, so I stood amid Jim Edmonds, Juan Encarnación, So Taguchi, and Skip Schumaker, feeling like my bat would play and knowing my glove and arm would. Whatever Jimmy did, I did. Where he went, I followed. What Darryl Kile had been to me as a pitcher, Jimmy had become to me as an outfielder, the kind of selflessness I never forgot. I was still working on footwork in the outfield and staying short to the ball in the batter’s box, but it was coming, and I could still hit a ball a long way. I hadn’t left that in high school.

  The 2005 Cardina
ls had won one hundred games and lost in the National League Championship Series to the Houston Astros. The sense in St. Louis was that the 2006 team could be at least as good. I wanted to be a part of that, and that drove me through the early part of camp until, one morning two days before our exhibition opener, Tony La Russa stopped me and said, “You’re starting in center in the first game.” I was going to be in a big-league game—in March, in a spring-training ballpark, but still—as the center fielder for the Cardinals, a huge honor, and if not for the nagging ache in my knee, everything would have been perfect.

  Turned out, the patellar tendon was torn. They sent me for surgery, then months of rehabilitation, and by the time I was sturdy over that knee again, I was preparing for 2007. They were right about the ’06 Cardinals, by the way. While I was bringing my knee back to life, they were winning the World Series. Albert Pujols was great. Chris Carpenter was great. I got another scar.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  My father was released from prison around then. He’d been led away when I was a twenty-year-old pitcher. He returned when I was a twenty-seven-year-old outfielder, my pitching career long gone, all of which had happened without him.

  He called one night, having wrangled my number from somewhere, and attempted what sounded maybe like an apology, something along the theme of it being all his fault because he’d gone to jail and it would have been different if he’d been there for me. And I was tired of him already.

  I hung up, hoping that was the end of it, sure it wouldn’t be. I worried for my mother. She stayed closer to the house than she would with my father locked up, fearing now a chance meeting. The past six years had been good for her, and now she had to think about where she was going, whom she might run into. It was starting again.

  Lory and I would be married that winter, on New Year’s Eve. The nearer the wedding drew, the more she missed her father. Being a kind soul, she gently suggested that I invite my father back into my life. The years, maybe, had changed him. Or maybe not. But wasn’t it worth finding out? You get one father. Our children, when we had them, would get only one grandfather. There’d be no harm trying to forgive him, and perhaps the prospect of rebuilding a relationship with me, meeting Lory, would lead him to treat my mother with decency.