The Phenomenon

by Rick Ankiel

  Dom smiled at me and then at her.

  “Hey, just have fun,” he said. “Don’t take it too seriously.”

  I grinned.

  “Yeah,” I said, “that’s pretty much it.”

  She thanked us. When she turned to go, Dom looked at me and said, “Man, I sorta wish I was that kid.”

  A couple weeks later, Dom was in the locker room. He watched three teammates walk into the manager’s office, one at a time, and return having been released.

  “Hey, Dom,” one of the coaches said, “we gotta talk to you for a sec.”

  Damn, Dom thought, this is it.

  He walked in. Michael Barrett, the former big-league catcher, sat behind a desk. Three or four pitching coaches stood nearby.

  “Dom,” Barrett said, “we chose to release you.”

  He said some other stuff. Probably it was kind, reassuring Dom there’d be other chances out there for him. Dom didn’t hear much after the “release” part, because he was so relieved he wouldn’t have to throw that day.

  Dom returned to his hotel room. He had a three-hour drive ahead of him. Before that, however, he sat on the bed and, on a pad of paper, wrote down everything wonderful he’d experienced in baseball. The rest of his life waited, and he didn’t want to forget. When he finished, he found that the list was longer than he’d expected. He put the pad in a backpack, put the backpack on his shoulder, and went to his car.

  Dom reenrolled at FAU. He majored in business management with a minor in finance. He was due to graduate in spring 2017.

  “I’m OK,” he told me later. “I put in the work. I don’t sit here and think I blew it.”

  “Sometimes it just doesn’t get fixed.”

  Maybe, he said, he’d pick up a baseball in a few months, go to the park, see if his dad didn’t want to have a catch. You never know, he said. You never know. And if not, that’s what the bucket was for.

  When breakfast was over, Dom shook my hand.

  “Hey, Dom,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “I know, Ank.”

  “Stay in touch.”

  I supposed I’d try to push some of Harvey’s teachings into a new generation of players, of men. I supposed I could offer a fractured career, a crazy career, a career I am resolutely proud of, and a life that I like to think of as highly textured as credential enough.

  I did that for a year, and I still get phone calls and e-mails from people stricken with fear and uncertainty. And I tell them it’s not their fault. We start there.

  So very few people actually got it. Fewer still knew how to help. And there was only one Harvey. We didn’t slay the monster together, but we stood shoulder to shoulder and tried. Then we bandaged up and got on our feet and tried again. Some days, we had our pick of monsters. We had our pick of venues. We had our pick of reasons. Of the whys.

  The spring of 2001, months after I’d thrown a few pitches to the backstop in St. Louis and so ended one life and started another, my Little League called. Opening day was coming. Would I come? The kids would be so happy, the lady said. I drove to Sportsman’s Park in Port St. Lucie, where I’d been handed my first real uniform, and discovered there could be a place where I felt safe. The old bleachers were filled. Colorful plastic flags draped the chain-link fences. I stood near the mound and waved, the ex–Little Leaguer turned big leaguer, feeling happy to be among them and totally unnerved by having to throw out the ceremonial first pitch. I couldn’t say no. I wanted to. I couldn’t.

  I looked toward the backstop. There, behind the plate, stood a kid, maybe ten years old, in full catcher’s gear, which hung from him like a tarp. He squatted, very serious.

  Well, I thought, this could be embarrassing. I could do a lot of damage from sixty feet, six inches. Imagine what could happen from forty-six feet.

  So, with a smile, I took a couple steps closer, wound up, and flipped the ball toward the kid in the man-sized catcher’s gear. Underhanded.

  The crowd booed.

  There was a night in Houston during my final season that I think about still. Harvey was gone. I was living the career that maybe I hadn’t wanted, but it was the one I got. I was living the life I wanted. I was satisfied, other than perhaps with the strikeouts. I was still working to be a hitter.

  The Astros weren’t very good. In fact, we were on our way to losing 111 games. I’d be released after 24 of those losses. Before I was, however, we were getting beat pretty good the night after we’d been beat worse. We were running out of pitchers. The bullpen was wrung out. Another game was over but for the final score, and there was tomorrow to think about, and the next day.

  Bo Porter, our rookie manager, was desperate.

  “Ank,” he said.

  I looked up.

  He nodded toward the mound. “Can you give me anything?”

  Porter seemed a good man. A solid baseball man. He’d been around the game forever, maybe even seen his share of cases like mine.

  “You serious?” I asked.

  “I’m serious,” he said.

  I was not stunned, exactly, but surprised. I didn’t do that anymore. More than that, I couldn’t do it anymore.

  “Bo,” I said as the whipping continued in front of us, “I would have to go to winter ball and pitch. And pitch. That’s not as easy as it looks, to just go out there and jump on the mound. Not for anybody. And especially not for me.”

  I wanted to be a team guy. I didn’t want to let him down. This, though, I just couldn’t.

  He shrugged. “I had to ask.”

  I sat on the bench and watched the final couple innings. Even the people in the game, I thought, have no idea what this is about.

  Just pick up the ball and throw it, Rick. C’mon, Rick. Just throw it. How hard can it be?

  Had I blown out my shoulder, they’d get it. If there were a scar, a medical report, an X-ray, then maybe they’d get it. Could I have restarted, stood again on a mound, retaken a bygone fastball and the courage to throw it? Maybe.

  But at what cost? So the nightmares could return? So I could spend my days drowning, burying, denying, and fighting again? So I could summon the monster? Get a rematch? Best two out of three?

  No.

  I had the life I wanted. It was this one. I’d make the best of that.

  EPILOGUE

  Going on fifteen years after I’d completely fouled up that playoff game along with my career—and, it seemed for a long time after that, my life—my phone rang, a 314 area code, so St. Louis. A man named Joe Pfeiffer was on the line. Joe was in corporate sales and ran the fantasy baseball camps for the Cardinals. I liked Joe.

  “What’s up?” I greeted him.

  “Hey, Ank,” he said.

  Joe asked about the family, life down in Jupiter, my golf game, whether the fish were biting. Good, good, depends on the day, and occasionally, I reported.

  “So Ank…,” he said.

  “Yeah, Joe,” I said.

  “Come throw out a first pitch,” he said. “You think maybe?”

  Joe was asking me to throw a pregame ceremonial first pitch at Busch Stadium, a topic he’d raised before. The job entailed having your name announced, waving to a full ballpark, walking to the pitcher’s mound, standing on that pitcher’s mound, maybe waving again, then throwing a baseball sixty feet, six inches to a man crouched behind home plate. Wave again, shake the catcher’s hand, go home. That’s about it. I was going to be in St. Louis anyway, he figured, signing autographs at Busch Stadium. Chris Carpenter, who’d won 144 regular-season baseball games as a pitcher, 95 for the Cardinals, not including the 10 more he’d won in the playoffs (3 in the World Series), had once told me he’d never been more nervous than he was while throwing out a ceremonial first pitch. I hadn’t forgotten that conversation.

  “Joe…,” I said.

  “Fans would love to see you again, Ank,” Joe said.

  “Joe…”

  “I know.”

  Truth
was, I would’ve loved to see them too. I’d been a Royal, a Brave, a National, an Astro, and a Met. I was a Cardinal in my soul, where it mattered. I still felt special in St. Louis and in that ballpark, because both had accepted me in sickness and in health, and those kinds of bonds stay bonds forever, especially in baseball-mad St. Louis.

  But of course I couldn’t do it.

  “No, Joe. Sorry.”

  Joe was a good man. The request was more than reasonable. And it wasn’t even so much a request as it was a friendly offer. I’d left St. Louis and the Cardinals after the 2009 season, but I would remain one of them, no matter the uniform, no matter that I had retired four years later and would in time take that job with the Nationals. I still hoped to represent the spirit of the place, which would remember me as the young man who’d failed so spectacularly and the slightly older man who’d returned when maybe no one else could’ve. It didn’t hurt when that was pretty spectacular too.

  I was the pitcher who’d contracted the yips at about the worst possible time, spent nearly five years fighting that with a determination that bordered on obsession, and turned up the hitter who could put a ball in the top deck and the outfielder whose arm was again golden. It was all so marvelous and strange and, to the folks in St. Louis, damned lovable, so, yeah, bring back Rick Ankiel and put him up on that humpbacked stage so they could show him again how they would forever honor his courage.

  It’s just… I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.

  “Thanks, Joe. How about this: I throw it from center field?”

  I laughed. He laughed.

  “One day maybe,” I said. “See ya, Joe.”

  “Take care, Ank.”

  I thumbed off the phone.

  It doesn’t go away. Not with time or age, not with a change in job description, not even with a decade of not really having to think about it anymore. Not in retirement. Not for Wiffle Ball in the backyard. Not for a ceremony. Not because, aw, hell, it’s just a sixty-foot toss; how hard could that be?

  Honestly, it’s really hard.

  I’d have to practice that throw. A lot. I’d have to stand in my backyard across from some other guy wearing a glove, a ball in my hand, and conjure tens of thousands of people watching, waiting for me to make that throw from the top of a freshly raked mound to the pocket of a ceremonial catcher’s shiny mitt. I’d have to live that throw over and over, feel my stomach coil and hear the blood being drawn from my head, to create those things from nothing but the sound of my breath in my own backyard before I could know I was ready for that city and that ballpark again.

  I held the phone for a time and thought I could probably pull off that pitch, given time. I could still smile in the face of anxiety, the casual way I carried myself to portray I don’t give a fuck, so nobody would have to know that this would be hard. I could muscle something passable across sixty feet of trampled grass, probably. Sure, I could, I thought.

  Oh, but what if I couldn’t? What if the dumbest and most meaningless throw ever—the one city councilmen and heads of sales departments and pop singers and den mothers make in hundreds of major- and minor-league ballparks every night—what if mine went to the backstop?

  I finally let go of his call, but the conversation gnawed at me. I hadn’t had to consider the monster in so long. I hadn’t had to confront it. I’d often said, when asked, that I’d be afflicted forever, that it sat right here—and I’d tap the place on my shoulder where people carry their fears and burdens—and that it had a permanent home there. But, gone from the game, out from under the microscope, away from the questions and the what-the-hell stares, the monster was irrelevant and therefore likely restless, so off to seep into the skull of some other unsuspecting mope who’d rear back and make a perfectly ordinary throw and think, Huh. That didn’t feel quite right.

  A year passed. My sons grew. Those young men I spoke to, the ones who were sure they were going to be big-league pitchers and yet could not bear to throw a pitch, drew up the nerve to make pitches anyway and live with whatever dusty result followed.

  I grew too. My mother was helping to raise my boys. I liked to listen to her read to them and tell stories about her father, who’d given me my name and my eyes. Mom and I had some rough patches, as the years of drama—in the house, on those baseball fields, within the family—had served to push us apart. Maybe I simply could not bear her pain along with mine. Maybe she reminded me I should’ve done more than I had. I should’ve protected her. I should’ve tried. Now she cooked for the boys and sang them funny songs that sounded familiar, like something out of a childhood I’d buried a long time before. She’d get this do-over, this chance in the peace of a house that would not fall down around her. I was happy for that, happy for her. Probably it hadn’t been the life she wanted, and I remembered how that could wear on a person. She’d suffered more than one heart attack in her later years and, waiting on a new kidney, three times a week underwent dialysis. Even in the worst of it, she was present for Declan and Ryker, the lives she got. Sometimes I’d loved her desperately for trying so hard, and sometimes I’d wondered why she hadn’t tried harder, and usually I’d just tried to survive on my own. I liked that we had a chance to live some of those years over, as much as we could, or at least live them better.

  It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t mine either.

  A man I hardly knew asked if I’d come to Springfield, Missouri, sign some autographs, meet some clients, throw a first pitch at a minor-league game, and make a few thousand dollars. It was the summer of 2015. Something they called the Mobil Super Baseball Tour was passing through town. A decade before I’d had 136 at bats for the Springfield Cardinals on my way back to the major leagues, about half at Hammons Field. I knew the place. I knew the people a little.

  Before I said no, I thought about the players I counseled. How many I’d told there was no trick to beating this thing, and hell, there might be no beating it at all, but there was no shame in trying. Trying was the only way to find out. Trying required courage. Trying meant allowing for failure. Trying was hard and lonely. So yeah, I recommended trying.

  I thought about Harvey. What would Harvey say? “Go on, Ank, what the fuck”? Or, maybe, “What’s the point, Ank? What do you have left to prove? Don’t do it for the money. Don’t do it for any reason except that you want to.”

  I told the guy sure, I’d see him in Springfield.

  They set up a table in an auto-supply store, somewhere between the oil filters and Turtle Wax. There was a DJ. I signed some autographs. Not a lot of people showed up, so I talked to the employees and hummed along to the music and thought a little about that night. My pitch.

  You’ll be fine, I assured myself. Just one pitch. You can do this. Right? Just pick up the ball and throw it.

  Hammons Field is redbrick and green steel and minor-league charming. A long time before, it seemed, I’d spent some nights there sorting between the fastballs and the sliders and the cutters that would be part of my new life as a hitter. I’d run that outfield. I’d returned to that clubhouse on every one of those nights feeling four or five at bats closer to the big leagues, those same four or five at bats further out in front of the Thing. It couldn’t catch me there. Couldn’t touch me in the batter’s box.

  A man greeted me, told me his name, thanked me for coming, and handed me a glove. Absently accepting it, I asked, “What’s this for?”

  “We figured,” he said, “you might want to catch the first pitch.”

  I smiled and handed it back.

  The clubhouse was beyond the right-field fence. Beside the clubhouse, in a structure the size of a small warehouse, minor leaguers toiled in batting cages. The sound of batting practice, young men searching for perfect swing paths and then lives in the big leagues, echoed in my head. About a hundred people, many in Cardinals shirts and caps, gathered around buffet tables in what I assumed to be a sponsors’ event. Some glanced over, and I saw that they recognized me, and they returned to their plates of fried chicken and coleslaw.
>
  A net had been strung into which batters hit baseballs from a tee. A bucket of baseballs was nearby. I took one of those balls and tossed it ten feet into the net. Then another. And another. I looked over to where the party was breaking up. A few of the folks had stopped eating and socializing and were watching this curiosity of the guy who was going to be Koufax psyching himself up for a single pitch that wouldn’t count. I heard the ceremony beginning and walked across the field to the dugout. The team’s catcher introduced himself.

  “I’m throwing a knuckler,” I said. “If you miss it, you owe me five bucks.”

  He looked at me and laughed.

  “Seriously,” I said.

  We walked out together. The PA announcer introduced me. I waved on my way across the infield, climbed the dirt mound, and set my left foot parallel to the rubber. I could almost hear the mound whisper, “Ah, the prodigal son…” The catcher squatted behind the plate. I looked in.

  Who cares, man? Nobody cares what happens here. You’re telling all those kids to go face their demons. So go face yours. Here you are. Can you feel the ball in your hand? Yes, you can. Can you throw a baseball sixty feet? Yes, you can. Does it scare the shit out of you? Hell, yes.

  All right, Rick, right foot back…

  My heart fluttered. Something heavy landed in my stomach. I was nervous but in control. I could see the people and hear them. The blood stayed in my head, where it belonged.

  Nothing could ever be as bad as some of those days were, back then. So I wouldn’t fight this. I’d allow it to make me feel afraid, and so feel alive. I’d swing that sword. I’d never, ever find something that would put me back in a big-league ball game. It doesn’t exist. But I could do this. I could throw this one pitch and live with the result. If the people laughed, they laughed. If they cheered, I’d be good with that too. If the ball hit the backstop, hey, somebody would just go pick it up.