by Rick Ankiel
“So what are you gonna do about it, Ank?” That’s what he’d say, and I’d come up with something, and then I’d go do that, with Harvey’s help.
He was seventy-five and very ill when I set out from Jupiter, Florida, one morning to see him. He was in Asheville, North Carolina, at home, where more and more he was bedridden. Over the previous decade, he’d become part of the fabric of my daily life, from the day Scott Boras introduced him to me to when he became my shrink—“I don’t shrink, I stretch,” he’d protest—to when he became what I’d hoped for in a father and what my boys should’ve had in a grandfather. I had to see him. Declan was a newborn, and when I called Harvey to tell him I was coming, he rasped, “I’m only still breathing to see the pictures.”
The plan that day was to fly into Atlanta and connect into Asheville. There were storms, and the second flight was canceled, so Lory and I rented a car and drove the two hundred miles to Harvey’s house. I wanted her to meet him. The final hour, we drove in darkness and a heavy downpour as we ascended into the Great Smoky Mountains. Harvey lives on the top of a mountain, I thought while squinting through the rain and windshield wipers. Of course he does.
Harvey knew he was dying. I knew he was dying. I went to say thank you.
Before Harvey, I’d not given much thought to the reasons certain people come along and become part of who you are. So many had come and gone already. So few had stuck. Yeah, Harvey was paid by Scott Boras to settle the fluttering souls of the .220 hitters and gopher-balling pitchers out there, but that wasn’t why he answered his phone at 3 o’clock in the morning “Ank, you all right?” It wasn’t why he stayed on the phone until the morning turned orangey-gray up in those mountains, until my heart was settled and my eyes were dry.
Harvey was well enough to come to the table for dinner. We talked about nothing, really, the way old friends do when the weather’s bad, the house is warm, and the food—his wife, Anita, cooked—is comforting.
I’d turned my back on my father because I was a better person without him. But I also knew I’d have Harvey. He’d tell me it wasn’t my fault. I was not responsible for who—more precisely, what—my father was, or what he’d done to my mother and me, or what I should have done about it. Sometimes I believed him. But it did soften the guilt I carried. I could not have changed what happened on the mound that day in St. Louis or in the years that followed, not by trying harder or caring more.
What happened happened. Now what?
By then, I was proud of whom I’d become. In a lot of ways, I felt like I was a survivor. I liked the way I looked in Harvey’s eyes. More, I liked what that said about me. It was important to me to sit across from Harvey a different man, a better one. That was why I went. To say good-bye, of course. But also to show him he’d led me to a good place. I was OK.
I couldn’t say much on his doorstep the next morning. We both knew there’d be one last hug, one last sad smile.
“Thank you, Harvey,” I said. “Thank you.”
Not long after, we spoke on the phone. He was tired. He told me he’d pinned a photo of Declan on the wall so he could see him.
“It’s going to be OK,” he said.
“Harvey…” I started.
He stopped me.
“You,” he said. “You are going to be OK.”
“I know, Harvey.”
“Know what else?”
“What?”
“It’s not your fault.”
I laughed. So did he.
Harvey died a few days later.
So you want to know about the yips? About the monster? Harvey knew the yips. He knew they weren’t temporary. He knew they weren’t confined to a ball field. And he knew there’d be casualties, starting with me. He was right all along, by the way. He was saving my life. Perhaps not in the literal way, because, as I’ve told my friends, “You ever find me hanging from the garage rafters, I was murdered.” It wasn’t that way.
I saved the life I had, though, the one I wouldn’t have given up for anything. Harvey showed me how, sometimes simply by asking, “OK, what the fuck you gonna do about it?” Emphasis on the profanity, hard like that, as if to say, It’s a big-boy world out there, Ank, and bad stuff happens, and then you decide: I’m in or I’m out. I answered that question every day, every damned day, and in the end I was prouder of that than I was the home runs and the strikeouts and the money and even the uniform. What the fuck was I going to do about it? Win. Work. Try. Show up. Laugh. Cry. Fight if I had to. I was going to stand up to the big-boy world, all of it, and they could carry me away if that was what it came to. Maybe I couldn’t always throw a strike. Maybe I couldn’t always hit the slider. But sometimes I could.
“Yeah, I was watchin’, Ank,” he’d say. “I was watchin’. And I’m proud’a ya.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
I retired again, for good, shortly after the summer of ’13, when the New York Mets released me and the phone went silent. I was thirty-three years old, coming up on thirty-four. More than eight years (and three thousand plate appearances) had passed between retirements. Lory and I had two young sons. They would grow up in a stable, loving household, not far from where I’d grown up. My mom lived with me. My father I’d lost track of. I fished for a while, raised my boys, and helped Lory do all the things she’d done alone for so long.
At the end, I’d thrown 242 innings and won 13 games in the major leagues. I’d played 4,115 innings in the outfield and retired a .240 hitter with 76 home runs. I arrived at twenty years old, departed a month before my thirty-fourth birthday, those fourteen years maybe not entirely what I’d expected but all I had, and I am proud of those years. All in all, I’d played for six teams in six cities—St. Louis, Kansas City, Atlanta, Washington, Houston, and finally New York. Some of those places loved me, others weren’t sure what to do with me, and they all gave me countless opportunities for the life I wanted. Somewhere between the rage and the hopelessness, between the imperfect and the thrilling, between the ball in my hand and the bat on my shoulder, I did find the life I got. It was worth the time. It was worth the effort. It was never boring.
Seven years a pitcher, seven years not, a career spent on the fine line between glory and disaster, on the barrel of a bat, on the run and in pursuit, led me back to the same question. Not why, but why not? Why the hell not?
I wasn’t exactly finished with baseball, but it seemed finished with me. I mourned that for a while, but nothing too crippling. After a year and a half out of the game, a year and a half chasing Declan, Ryker, and whatever fish was biting, and pushing my boat farther across the ocean for the big fish, I took a job with the Washington Nationals. They asked me to be their life skills coordinator, a vague title for a vague job. I guessed I’d be the guy who, no matter the problem, could look a player in the eye and say, “Yeah, been there,” and then, perhaps channeling Harvey, add, “So what are you gonna do about it?” And in the process of looking a young and troubled man in the eye, and listening to his story, and feeling the pain he’d been hiding for too long, I began to remember who I was. That was me.
I met Domenick Mancini for breakfast at a place called Jimmies, which stood just off the first tee at Turtle Creek Golf Club and served the dual purposes of restaurant and “baseball gallery.” It was mid-June 2015. I came from Jupiter, a drive of about ninety minutes up I-95. We were ten minutes from the Nationals’ spring training complex, where for the previous four months Domenick had worked very hard, even desperately, to throw a baseball so it would go where he intended.
He was twenty-one years old, same as I was on October 3, 2000.
We sat at a small table on the patio, which was crowded. The waitress twisted sideways to navigate the gap between our table and the one beside ours, where a woman and her young son worked over a floppy stack of pancakes. Golfers scuffed past on the path between the patio and the golf course.
Dom was maybe six foot three and lean. He’d been drafted the previous June from Miami Dade
Junior College. The Nationals had taken him in the twelfth round and signed him for $150,000, nearly twice what twelfth-rounders typically received. That was because of the 97 mph fastball. He had a big arm. Everybody loves those. He fell to the twelfth round because he’d suffered a minor injury near the end of his final college season, and he wasn’t always sure where that fastball would end up, and the scouts didn’t know either, so the debate over one Domenick Mancini, right-handed pitcher, was whether that fastball was hard enough and close enough to controllable to save him from a very short professional career.
After I hung up my cleats and was coaching with the Nationals, I met many young men like Dom. More than I expected. They didn’t all have the yips. Some did. Some felt it coming and wore expressions like men paddling back from a waterfall. Others were finding themselves casualties of pro ball—the pressure to perform, to grow up, to justify their signing bonuses, to make their families and hometowns proud, to stand up under the scouting reports, to make the right decisions, to be accountable for the bad ones. Social media recorded their triumphs and predicted they’d rocket through the minors. It also recorded their mistakes. Then, when they were done with all that, they were asked to hit .350. Or strike out the side. Maybe learn a new pitch. Change the way they’ve swung the bat for fifteen years. That against the sort of competition they’d never seen before, both in the other dugouts and in their own clubhouse. To an eighteen-year-old in A ball who has thirty pounds to gain and what must seem like an entirely new sport to learn, the major leagues might never have been so far away. That’s a lot to forget every night.
It does things to people, especially young ones. They start failing at baseball for the first time in their lives. Doubts gather and gain strength. Sometimes those things send a baseball to the backstop when it was supposed to hit a catcher’s mitt.
That morning at Jimmies, Dom was composed. He smiled when he talked and even laughed at his own expense. He said he might be in a little trouble as far as his career was concerned, and I told him I understood how that felt. He said when he drove around town he sometimes slowed at Little League fields and watched young boys and girls throw baseballs so easily, so accurately, and wished he could again too, and I told him I’d once hit the backstop with a ceremonial first pitch at my old Little League and been booed for it. He said there were good days and bad and admitted they were mostly bad lately. I nodded my encouragement, but what I thought was He’s in the thick of it.
I was a life skills coordinator, which is what they called a sports psychologist who doesn’t have a college degree but has seen plenty of time in the thick of it. It’s what they called the guy who knew too well the doubts swimming in Domenick’s heart and head. Where they’d send him. How they’d probably never leave. But you fight. You find a way through it or around it. You ask for help. They send me in. And we go to breakfast.
Dom grew up in Weston, Florida, outside Fort Lauderdale. His father, Sal, was a pretty fair baseball player in high school and loved the game. By the time Dom was two years old, Sal was feeding him tennis balls to knock across the living room, and while other sports came and went through Dom’s adolescence, his game was always going to be baseball. He became a pitcher at ten years old. He made his high school team as a freshman, grew three or four inches and added twenty pounds between his sophomore and junior years, and by his senior year was throwing 92 mph. He won three games in the playoffs for American Heritage High School that spring and signed with Florida Atlantic University (FAU). For a young man whose goal—dream, even—was to be a professional baseball player, to one day pitch in the major leagues, the path was promising. He was big enough and strong enough and threw hard enough. All he had to do was get hitters out. All he had to do was throw strikes.
Dom did not pitch in an official game at FAU. He instead began to unravel at FAU.
“It wasn’t one pitch,” Dom said. “Just a gradual thing. So gradual. I got to FAU that summer, and I’d make one or two bad throws. I’d think, That was weird. In games that summer, I’d pitch fine. Then the semester started, and now I’m making three or four bad throws.”
Dom got confused, started losing confidence, and pretty soon was reasonably sure he couldn’t pitch at a Division I school in that condition. So he transferred to nearby Miami Dade. He’d pitch his way back to a four-year school in junior college. And he’d go back to playing catch with his father, Sal, at the park, where it had all started. They’d get their gloves. Dom would bring the bucket of balls. That’s right. A bucket. Just to play catch.
He couldn’t have his father chasing baseballs across the park. Even when his father backed up to a fence, the caroms were unpredictable (and occasionally dangerous), so they’d throw and throw and throw, and then they’d go find the balls and refill the bucket and start over. Dom came to hate the metallic chunks, pings, and thuds of baseballs running up against chain-link fences. He’d miss the clean and mindless pleasure of baseballs going where they were supposed to go, finding leather. But, you know, maybe the next throw would be the one that solved it. If not that one, then the one after. His mind would get out of the way eventually, he believed, and then hoped, and then he could get back to where all this had started—standing on a mound and throwing the pitches that would make him good enough.
Dom had some days like that too. He had some very good stretches at Miami Dade. The coaches there lowered his arm slot, and that worked for a time, until it didn’t, so by the fall of 2013, Dom was seriously considering quitting baseball. He’d been out of high school for a year and a half. The struggle was so raw, so real, so hopeless that when the baseball team held its annual scout day, Dom sat in the stands with the scouts and charted pitches.
“Hey, Dom,” a scout said. “You throwing today?”
“Not today,” he answered.
“Why not?”
He shrugged.
As the day went on, Dom reconsidered. Why not? Back off a little, try that lower arm slot, throw a few fastballs, find out once and for all if he could do this. The scouts were all there. He might be done with baseball anyway. No regrets. So he threw.
And, well, he threw strikes. He started calling out locations, and that’s where the ball would go. He felt a twinge of confidence. He smiled to himself between pitches, not having had even fifteen minutes like that since high school. The scouts pointed their radar guns and made notes on their clipboards.
One of those scouts told Dom later, “You looked good.”
Dom thanked him and tried not to look surprised.
“Know how hard you were throwing?”
He shrugged. He knew he’d eased off the velocity for the sake of strikes.
“Eighty-nine?” Dom guessed.
“Ninety-six.”
Ninety-six, and he’d commanded it. It had felt easy. That day, those throws, how he was able to walk off the mound with his head high, to feel joy, it allowed him to remember he’d been pretty good at pitching once. And that it was in there still. Maybe, he thought, he’d whipped it, and when the season came, he mostly pitched like he had for the scouts, carrying that confidence as far as he could, into the draft, through a summer of minor-league ball, and into a winter in which he’d never worked harder to become the best pitcher he could be.
A few months later, on the patio at Jimmies, Dom told that story. He’d allowed himself to believe that he was free from the anxiety, from the single imprecise throw that could lead to the emotional wobble that could kick over the first psychological domino that could—maybe, chillingly—take the game away. His game. That he was free from whatever he’d left back there.
He shook his head at the absurdity of it. The throws were going sideways again. It had started in the winter, when a few inches of gnawing imprecision had restarted the emotional ripples. The indecision. The way he’d draw back his arm and then go physically and intellectually blank. He’d fought it, yet he arrived at spring training uncomfortable, not quite right, afraid of what might come when everyone was watch
ing.
First thing every morning, two lines of pitchers—one along the foul line, the other in the outfield—would begin their throwing routines. Dom grew anxious. His throws were getting wilder. He began to fear he’d accidentally bean a teammate. When everyone else was cutting up and shaking off the morning rust, he was trying to slow his heart rate and talk himself into relaxing. One morning, he showed up with a bucket filled with baseballs, and as he lugged it to the foul line, he wondered if he even liked baseball anymore. He was sure it didn’t think much of him.
I’d given Dom my business card in spring training. He looked at it, saw the words life coach, and thought, My life is fine. Then he went to his hotel room and prayed they wouldn’t ask him to throw the next day. A couple months later, after enough of those nights, he called.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Pancakes,” I said.
I told him we’d figure it out, though I wasn’t sure. I told him to have fun, to remember what it felt like to be carefree on a baseball field. I told him my story in ten minutes, starting with that pitch in St. Louis, ending with the day I retired from pitching. I used some of Harvey Dorfman’s words, but really I borrowed from his understanding over our breakfasts. I could talk to Dom while we played catch. In the days that followed, I did. And I could walk him through the techniques that had once lowered my anxiety levels so I could cope with my relationship with the baseball. I did. One pitch at a time, I told him. Just that one. Not the last one, not the next one, the one in your hand. But this, in the end, would be between Dom and Dom.
As we finished out on the patio, the woman at the table next to ours asked if we were ballplayers. Dom said we were. She put her hand on her son’s shoulder—he was maybe five or six years old—and said he was a big baseball fan. She asked if we had any advice for him.