by Rick Ankiel
Within a few days, I was at the doctor’s office, submitting to a variety of exams, including a blood test, that the doctor and I both knew would lead to a prescription for HGH. If I could take something that would put me on a mound sooner, that would make me of some use to the Cardinals a few weeks early, that was not prohibited by the league, then, yeah, sign me up.
My first dose arrived. I paid with a check. Several tubes came in a box. A powder and gel were in each tube, separated by a seal. The idea was to twist the tube, break the seal, allow the powder and the gel to mix and then push the needle into my skin, which weirded me out some but wasn’t so bad after a while.
I did this for almost a year. I did not return faster than the rehabilitation schedule in the pages of that binder said I would. I did get leaner, so there was that. I looked better in a bathing suit.
I took HGH because it was, by MLB standards, legal. I told no one. In 2005, when MLB banned HGH, I stopped using HGH.
A couple years later, in September 2007, the clinic where I received my HGH got busted, because the pharmacy from where it got its HGH got busted, because the Albany, New York, district attorney’s office had investigated and busted a ring of dealers who sold performance-enhancing drugs on the Internet. And I had paid with a check, which is how I ended up with my day at the center of a decadelong performance-enhancing-drugs conversation. I was not part of the investigation, other than being identified as a customer (along with about a dozen other ballplayers), and I was in no legal jeopardy. I didn’t see what the issue was.
So, on what otherwise was one of the best nights of my baseball life—I’d hit 2 home runs and had 7 RBI in Pittsburgh and was as of then batting .358 with 9 homers and 29 RBI across 24 games—a clubhouse attendant sidled up to me in the dugout and said, “Walt Jocketty’s on the phone in the video room. Wants to talk to you,” and the Cardinals general manager told me there’d be a story in the next day’s New York Daily News reporting that I had used HGH all those years ago.
This, just in time for my return to the major leagues as a hitter, just in time for me enjoying—really enjoying—baseball again, just in time for all the other stories calling me the Natural, and just in time to slip me onto here and here of the Mitchell Report.
So that sucked. First, because I felt I’d done nothing illegal. Second, because it was forever ago, before anyone—myself included—knew much about HGH. And third, because I’d managed to go, like, a whole month thinking only about baseball, and now I was in a dugout in Phoenix having reporters ask me leading questions about cheating, and a couple days later I’d be in a hotel conference room being interrogated by MLB investigators and FBI agents. The fact that I was not in trouble legally or, ultimately, with the league seemed lost on everyone.
Did it bother me? I didn’t think so. But I also hit .069 for the next week and a half.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
Among the many wonders of the monster was its attention to the elements of time, space, and various other dimensions, leaving, for example, the following absurdity:
Throw the ball from sixty feet, and it will come out fluttering and crazy, like a pigeon with one wing. If you shot the pigeon 95 mph out of a cannon.
But if I threw the ball from 250 feet, it would be beautiful. Pure. True. A bullet’s trajectory. A laser’s precision. An artist’s flair.
This makes little sense, but then, none of it did.
Maybe it was the freedom to simply let it fly. Maybe it was the lack of expectation. Two hundred and fifty feet—or more—is a long way to throw a baseball with any reasonable hope for perfection. From the center-field wall to third base, you don’t think glove any more than you’d stand 180 yards out on a fairway and think hole. You think rhythm. You think vicinity. Sometimes you think cutoff man, but that’s not nearly as fun.
Distance—really, anything at one hundred feet or more—was my friend. While maybe I could have continued to survive at sixty, tiptoeing through every day like I’d been, from one hundred feet, two hundred feet, more, the ball felt right in my hand again. The game looked right in my head. That arm Tony La Russa had once fawned over, it was still there, still attached, still strong and capable. The love-hate period with that arm was over the moment I picked up a bigger glove, set up deep on the outfield grass, and started hunting fly balls and base runners.
Inside, I begged them to run.
On the days I got a couple hits and on the days I didn’t, I could still run after a baseball. I could still hold a wary man at first base. I could still go get the reckless man at third. That was the game like it used to be. Just the game. No more obsessing over it. No more counting breaths. I was still surviving in some ways, the usual ways that come with an unusual life, but I was competing in most. And when I returned to the big leagues, when my understanding for what it had required of me had matched my gratitude for it, there’d be nights when the game was so familiar again. Swing the bat, run the bases, catch the ball, throw it, and count ’em up at the end.
Just baseball, you know? Man, I’d missed it.
So it was on May 6, 2008, Coors Field in Colorado, the Cardinals having won twenty-one of their first thirty-three games, me in center field. The lousy part about me in center field was that I’d replaced my friend Jim Edmonds, who’d been important in my transition from pitcher to outfielder. One of the great athletes and center fielders in the league while in his prime, a World Series champion and a four-time All-Star, he also was coming up on thirty-eight years old. He’d taught me things I couldn’t learn anywhere else, how to feel the game. We’d talked for hours about instincts and hunches and what those meant for standing in exactly the right area at exactly the right time when the baseball came down.
Then he was traded to the San Diego Padres for David Freese, a young third baseman who one day would find his own place in Cardinals lore.
The great part about me being in center field was, well, I was in center field. For the Cardinals. I was playing every day, hitting with some success, and, on this particular night, making two throws from the outfield that would help win a ball game. My arm was winning games again, and that, even amid an inch-at-a-time baseball season that leaves almost no time for self-assessment, felt like something worth honoring.
First inning, runners at first and second, Rockies burner Willy Taveras the lead runner, one out. Fly ball to deep center field. Second baseman Adam Kennedy standing on his base, arms over his head. The idea here, in almost all circumstances, is to keep the trailing runner from moving up to second. Almost nobody throws to third. It’s not the play. But, man, he was gonna run on me? On me?
So I threw out Taveras. A tracer shot, my hand to Troy Glaus’s glove. On the fly. If Glaus hadn’t caught the ball, it would’ve hit the bag. Inning over. Threat over. The place went crazy.
When I reached the dugout, teammates were shaking their heads and laughing. I loved it.
Tony La Russa, who held a somewhat unnatural love for the cutoff man, came over, smiled, and said, “That was awesome. Don’t ever do it again.”
Maybe he was joking. Probably not.
It was a once-in-a-season throw. Maybe once in a career. It was my second-best throw of the night.
Omar Quintanilla hit a line drive to left-center field. The ball landed in the grass, skipped, bounced a few times, and rolled to the wall. Coors Field’s outfield is massive by design, due to the lack of gravity or something. A ball to left-center field is a triple almost every time. By the time I’d gathered the ball and registered our left fielder, Ryan Ludwick, shouting, “Three! Three! Three!” I was so far from third base I could barely see it. But I knew it was there.
A crow hop, and I let it fly. As far and hard as I could throw a ball. Why not? Why not try? I thought, That’s the one. Just That’s the one. I knew it was going to be good. Really good. The ball cleared two cutoff men, the crowd began to groan as it realized that ball and its base runner were now in a dead heat, and then the ball arrived at Glaus he
ad high just as Quintanilla arrived on his belly. He was out too, a thunderbolt from left-center.
And the conversation began about my arm again, and whether it was the best outfield arm in the league, and I couldn’t help but smile at such a thing. This was the same arm that had almost run me from the league. The same arm that had inspired so many career obituaries.
The thing was, I never thought about mechanics anymore, because I trusted them. I didn’t worry about where the ball would go, because I trusted it. I did occasionally worry about what La Russa thought, but put me in the moment, give me the ball and a daring base runner and a crowd wishing for something magical, and I would attempt that throw. “Let it eat,” we’d say. “You gotta let it eat.”
A couple years later, Braves manager Bobby Cox was quoted as saying, “He has the best outfield arm I have ever seen—better than Rocky Colavito, Ellis Valentine, Bill Robinson, you name ’em.”
He loved Colavito, but Cox said, “I’ve never seen anybody throw like [Ankiel].”
That was enough for me. It made my day, that someone would say something like that. That it was Bobby Cox, one of my boyhood heroes? Days don’t come better. Damn, that arm had almost sucked the soul straight out of me. But I wouldn’t let it. And a few years later, it was a good part of the reason I was back and aimed to stay.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
Late on a Friday night one October, tucked in against the San Francisco Bay, I resisted counting the steps along the way. There were too many. The stories were too long and too complicated, even composed and recomposed in my own head.
A decade and six days had passed since I’d stood on that mound in St. Louis and come undone. And yet, to some, I was still that pitcher, still the guy playing away from the unthinkable, and I suppose they weren’t entirely wrong.
I liked to think of it as playing toward something wonderful. As reaching for something remarkable. As living the life I got instead of the one I’d assumed. The fact it also put another day between the monster and me wasn’t entirely insignificant either. Another game. Another four at bats. I was an outfielder, just a guy trying to make his way separating the fastballs from the sliders. But, generally, when I walked into a room, a ghost followed.
“He was the sure thing,” Chipper Jones recounted to reporters late on that Friday night one October. “The next guy.”
That ghost.
Chipper was in that ballpark, in that batter’s box, a decade and six days before. Then he was a teammate for a couple months in 2010, which made me an Atlanta Brave for a couple months, just like I’d allowed myself to dream when my friend Dennis and I had played catch in the backyard forever ago. The Braves had traded for me in August, we were in the playoffs—not Chipper, he’d blown out his knee—that October, and Bobby Cox was retiring, and we were all in San Francisco to play the Giants, one last run for the Braves the way I remembered them. And me.
Me. I was five years into the accumulation of at bats, all those I’d lost when I was busy being a pitcher, then forgetting how to be a pitcher, and then trying to become a pitcher again. I was a year removed from being a St. Louis Cardinal, they having seen my batting average fall from .285 to .264 to .231 over three seasons, and then a young Colby Rasmus had arrived to take innings in center field, along with at bats. I knew I was done in St. Louis long before it was over, as my playing time had slipped and my batting average with it, or perhaps it was the other way around. I was unhappy at the end. Tony had to know it. Free agency was coming after 2009, and when the Cardinals were swept by the Dodgers in the division series, I packed for home and another fresh start.
I signed with the Kansas City Royals for a year, which became all of twenty-seven games when I pulled a quadriceps muscle, and got back just in time to hit .367 in the week before the July 31 trade deadline.
Rusty Kuntz, an amazingly talented coach for the Royals, leaned into the batting cage one afternoon a few minutes before the deadline. In a game in which coaches sometimes were more concerned with themselves and their careers, Rusty thought first of what was best for the player. The game was hard. Rusty knew it. He was selfless and genuine in his teachings, in his support, and in the energy he brought to the grind. He was a guy the players would say “gets it,” meaning he knows what allows ballplayers to perform and produce. As important, he knows what pulls them apart. And it’s all separated by about an inch.
“Hey, player,” he said, talking to me, “you need to go to the manager’s office.”
“What for?” I asked.
“All I can tell you,” he said with a grin, “is it’s not good for me.”
Among his other duties, Rusty was the outfield coach.
“Am I getting traded?”
He shrugged. “Manager’s office.”
I laid my bat against the netting. When I reached the office, Ned Yost, who had replaced Trey Hillman after 35 games, was there. So was the general manager, Dayton Moore.
“Hey,” Ned said, “you’ve been traded.”
“OK.”
“To the Braves,” he finished. “It’s really a good thing. They need you.”
The Braves. My Braves. Like the baseball gods had shone a light on me. All the unhappiness—I hadn’t gotten along with Hillman, the injury, the losing, in all a situation that hadn’t agreed with me—cleared in the moment Ned said, “Braves.”
They were in first place in the NL East. They were a team. The first time I went to dinner as a Brave, I looked around and was surrounded by twenty teammates. Bobby Cox, the legendary manager, would retire at the end of the year, and I’d get to watch his farewell. Now I just had to hit.
The ball flew off my bat sometimes. I hit 11 home runs in 6 weeks in ’07, when every at bat drew wild and comforting cheers from Cardinals fans, then 25 home runs in 120 games in ’08. Other times, just putting the bat on the ball was an effort, like I was forever a half step behind, forever seeking the answer in the cage.
I was still in there fighting when the air went cool that October, and the Braves were still in it, and it was game two of the National League Division Series at AT&T Park, and we were all out there in the eleventh inning, waiting on the swing that would end it. I arrived at the plate, looking for a fastball in the form of a taco.
The pitcher was Ramón Ramírez, a right-handed reliever. As I’d measured Ramírez from the on-deck circle, our catcher, Brian McCann, had hissed at me. He’d flied out against Ramirez in the tenth inning.
“His glove, Ank,” he said. “When he’s comin’ with the heater, he squeezes his glove. Looks like a taco.”
I nodded. A taco. OK.
Ramírez came set. And I’m thinking to myself, That a taco? Yeah, that could be a taco maybe.
I fouled it off.
He threw me five fastballs. The last one was definitely a taco. It landed in the bay.
I had to resist the urge to return immediately to the dugout. Running the bases seemed redundant. I wanted to go laugh with the guys on the top step. I wanted to tell ’em about that fastball, how I was looking for it, barreled it, and knocked forty-four thousand people on their butts.
Instead, after a muted bat flip, an ex-pitcher’s bat flip, whatever you might call it, I hightailed it around the bases and went straight to McCann.
“Taco,” I said, laughing.
“Taco!” he shouted.
I didn’t know how long this would last, honestly. I was just thirty-one. I felt young. I could still run. I could throw. Man, could I throw a baseball. Not confined to an imaginary box and an umpire’s interpretation of it, I was free again, and the ball behaved again. I loved to throw.
Hitting was hard.
That fifth fastball split the plate, a little up. The contact was so pure I could barely feel the ball off the bat. The right fielder, Nate Schierholtz, made a few disheartened strides toward the brick wall behind him. No ballpark can hold a 450-foot fly ball. And that one landed in the bay.
And so I don’t recall being happier o
n a baseball field than I was that October night in San Francisco, the night I struck the blow to win a ball game for those guys, wearing the uniform I’d so admired for as long as I could remember. I was a ballplayer. A good ballplayer. A struggling ballplayer at times, a great one given the moment. But, all in all, a ballplayer. No more, no less. How often over the years I’d hoped just for that.
“You know, it’s awesome,” Chipper said that night. “It really is, how things come full circle. He’s had the bad taste in his mouth for so long. Trust me, I was in the batter’s box against him and it’s not fun. But he’s here, back in the playoffs and a hero for the Braves tonight.”
Yeah, you know, something like that.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
Harvey Dorfman died during spring training, my first with the Washington Nationals, in 2011.
He would have explained this better. That is, what happened to me. What happens to all of us. How a grown man who has performed a single act his entire life, an act that is so simple or has become so simple, finds that it becomes not simple and, beyond that, in a lot of ways, incapacitating.
I couldn’t remember how to throw a baseball. What it felt like. Did I bring my arm back like this? Or like this? What would my wrist do? Bent? Straight? Where would I hold the ball in my hand? Did I let go of it now? Or… now?
Then, of course, it was too late, and then every minute on a baseball field became devoted to throwing a damned strike, and then so did the rest of my life. It wasn’t healthy. In fact, it got pretty dark some days.
He also could have explained what came after that, when the clouds lifted and when I was me again. We met that afternoon in the spring of 2000, we became inseparable a year later, and after that he became the friend I needed. It wasn’t just me either. So many times conversations with other ballplayers, other young men, some lost and others found, started “Hey, you’re a Harvey guy, right?” We’d recall his go-to musings, chuckle at the Harveyisms, and then get to reciting the virtues of Harvey. He saved careers. He probably saved lives, or at least made them exceedingly more livable. The world was simpler from where he sat, and he was wise enough and kind enough to make a little room for the rest of us who wouldn’t otherwise see it like that. We were all Harvey guys.