And even when you do make it—even when the world seems sun-kissed, as Prior's world seems sun-kissed at this very moment as he mows down the Cardinals through two—something can happen, something you don't expect or could ever imagine. And La Russa knows it vividly.
III
THEY SIGNED HIM right out of high school, and pretty soon afterward the Cardinals brought him into Busch Stadium one Sunday so he could pitch batting practice, get a feel for what the big-league atmosphere was like, let him dress in the clubhouse and wear a uniform that bore his name.
A-N-K-I-E-L. It spread between the shoulder blades like neon. Rick Ankiel was eighteen. And he didn't seem to have a care in the world. The ball simply sizzled. It had that pop into the catcher's mitt, that sweet sound of a guy who was simply bringing it. And it moved—oh, man, did it move—the way it always seems to move a little bit more when a lefty is pitching. People gathered around the cage to watch this kid who had it. Sizzle. Pop. Sizzle. Pop. And nobody dared to say it then, because there's no way you say something like that about an eighteen-year-old kid. But here was Sandy Koufax.
He became the Prior of 2000, the kid with the golden arm. He came to the Cardinals, touted as the best young pitcher in the country. He was happy and carefree because there couldn't possibly be anything better than to be pitching in the major leagues at twenty-one. And he had good stuff, just like Prior three years later would have good stuff. He competed his ass off. He had a cool cockiness on the mound. And he was soaking up the game, learning it like a baseball prodigy, just as Prior would later learn it. Working almost exclusively with Mike Matheny as his catcher, he started with a fastball that smoked in the low- to mid-nineties. But then he developed a sinker that moved down and away from right-handed hitters. He threw it about four or five miles per hour slower than his other fastball. It was almost like a batting-practice fastball, but the change of speeds between the two pitches, combined with that sinking movement on the slower one, drove hitters to despair. They didn't know what was coming. They didn't know where it was coming. And they didn't know how fast it was coming. "He had a fastball that jumped up on you and he had that sinker that would get groundballs," La Russa remembered. He also had a curve ball that he wasn't afraid to use as an out pitch. With a little more refinement, the next pitch in the repertoire would have been a more consistent change, just like it would be for Prior.
In their twenty years together, La Russa and Duncan had seen their share of golden pitchers—La Marr Hoyt and Richard Dotson and Tom Seaver with the White Sox, Dennis Eckersley and Dave Stewart and Bob Welch with the A's, bulldog Darryl Kile and the eventual coming of Matt Morris with the Cards. Outward excitement is not something the two men would ever be confused with, Duncan the Quiet Assassin and La Russa always in the dark clench of his internal intensity. Riding in some Hertz Rent-a-Car together on the way to the ballpark five or six hours before game time, they spoke in short syncopation as if the other one weren't there—Duncan making some soft-as-a-feather short-sentence pronouncement as La Russa mumbled off into the windshield—yet both men understanding exactly what the other one was saying. They had the kind of relationship that men in baseball develop when they're together eight months out of the year for two decades. They spoke in the Morse code of the game: turbo sinkers, get-me-over curves, middle in versus middle away, nasty shit. They did know what each other was thinking without having to articulate it, so why bother to articulate it, and if you had to articulate it, why make some sloppy mess of it.
But when it came to Ankiel, they got excited. They got excited because of what he was doing on the mound, developing that nasty sinker to righties, watching him advance right past thrower to pitcher at such a tender baseball age. They got excited because a lefty like that comes up once in a millennium. He was the real deal, and the world, the entire world, was Rick Ankiel's, blowing away the game with that arm born and bred in the Florida sun, able to do whatever he wanted to do whenever he wanted to do it and nothing more Wild West in all of sports, a pitcher on a mound simply blessed with it.
Down the stretch run of the 2000 season in August and September, Stephenson's arm got sore and so did Andy Benes's knee. Pat Hentgen simply wore down. The rotation became a two-man show starring Kile and Ankiel, and Ankiel won his last four games to finish the year 11 and 7.
The Cardinals won the Central division. Their opponent would be the Braves, and before the playoffs started, La Russa made a decision that perhaps haunts him more than any he has ever made. Aware that he had only two healthy starters and wanting to maximize their appearances, he discovered a potential edge in the play-off schedule. Ankiel needed four days' rest in between starts, but by pitching him in Game 1, he could still pitch Game 4 if necessary, whereas Kile, able to go on three days' rest, could go in Games 2 and 5. It meant giving two pitchers four of the five starts, and it meant that Ankiel would pitch that first game even though Kile, a twenty-game winner and the clear ace of the staff, would ordinarily get that honor. It also meant that Ankiel would be facing Maddux, who had gone 19 and 9 and would be starting his twenty-fourth playoff game, more games than Ankiel had started in his entire life.
Aware also of what that would mean in terms of media exposure and not wanting to subject Ankiel to any more pressure than there already was, he pulled a bait-and-switch with reporters the day before the series began. He had Ankiel do his pitching work and then got him out of the clubhouse. He then told Kile to go into the interview room to take the obligatory questions from the national media, as if he were pitching in Game 1. And Kile played the role perfectly, because although he acted as if he were pitching in Game 1, he never explicitly said that he was or wasn't. It was only after the interview ended and the reporters had left for the day that La Russa announced the switch. He did it to protect Ankiel, keep him away from the self-evident questions that are the bane of the professional athlete: What about the pressure of facing Maddux in Game 1? How does it feel as a rookie to go against the best pitcher in baseball in Game 1? Any butterflies, Rick, any butterflies? La Russa knew the media were pissed and had a right to be pissed. But his responsibility was to his team. And he had protected Ankiel. He had reduced the pressure on him, so all he needed to do was go out and pitch. Everything seemed to line up in Ankiel's favor, except for Mike Matheny's birthday.
The Thursday before the end of the regular season, Kile had won his twentieth game in San Diego. It was a strange and wild affair. La Russa got thrown out when he protested a balk call, throwing down his glasses and stepping on them, to the disgust of the umpire and the adoration of his players. He was in the runway behind the dugout, trying to manage with the Cards down by a run in the eighth, 6–5. He sent up three pinch hitters and each of them got hits and the Cards went ahead 7–6 and Kile, for the first time in his career, got to the twenty-game-win plateau.
It was a joyous moment, and it lasted until the next morning when La Russa was on his way to the ballpark and got a call from Barry Weinberg—always a bad sign when the trainer called like that. Matheny had cut his hand with a hunting knife he had gotten as a birthday gift. He would be out for the rest of the regular season and the playoffs.
The first playoff game took place in Busch Stadium. Right away, the crowd of nearly 53,000 could tell that something stunning was unfolding.
The Cardinals got all over Maddux in the first. Staying back on the ball, they countered the movement on his pitches by hitting to the opposite field: nothing fancy, no heroics trying to pull the ball for a home run. It was one of those days when the ball simply knew where to go, a grounder by Fernando Vina to the right side hitting the bag for a single, a broken-bat single by J.D. Drew, the usually seamless Andruw Jones muffing Edmonds's fly to left center, singles to center and right center by Will Clark and Placido Polanco. The score was 6–0 after the first. Six runs against Maddux. Could you believe it? Six, what La Russa called the "crooked number" when runs explode on the board rather than the usual trickle.
Ankiel had given up
two walks in the top of the first to the Braves, as well as a single, but he got out of the inning when Brian Jordan popped up to Clark in foul territory. He began the second by striking out Reggie Sanders. Walt Weiss doubled on a 1-1 pitch, but then Edgar Renteria made a spectacular play on Javy Lopez's liner and flipped to Vina to turn the double play.
The score was still 6–0 when the Braves came to bat in the top of the third. The line score for that half-inning tells what happened:
Braves 3rd: Maddux walked; Furcal popped to Clark in foul territory; Ankiel threw a wild pitch (Maddux to second); Ankiel threw a wild pitch (Maddux to third); A. Jones walked; Ankiel threw a wild pitch (A. Jones to 2nd); C. Jones was called out on strikes; Gallarraga walked (Maddux scored on wild pitch by Ankiel; A. Jones to 3rd); Jordan singled to Lankford (A. Jones scored, Gallarraga to 2nd); Ankiel threw a wild pitch (Galarraga to 3rd, Jordan to 2nd); Sanders walked; Weiss singled to Lankford (Galarraga scored, Jordan scored, Sanders to 2nd; JAMES REPLACED ANKIEL; Lopez popped to Vina; 4 R, 2 H, 0 E, 2 LOB. Braves 4, Cardinals 6.
With Matheny out with those torn tendons, Carlos Hernandez was catching. He wasn't the defensive force that Matheny was, and he also had a bad back, further limiting his mobility. Matheny's strong and quiet presence had done wonders for Ankiel, as it had for many pitchers. Despite his quiet, self-effacing exterior—no bluster to be seen anywhere—he didn't take crap from pitchers. He knew their foibles and petty pouts, how to a certain degree they were spoiled prodigies who in truth had a far worse idea of what they should throw and when they should throw it than he did. Or sometimes they didn't pay attention to the signs he gave but instead threw whatever the hell they wanted.
There had been slight bouts of wildness before from Ankiel, as in the game against Cincinnati, when he had thrown four wild pitches in five innings, or the time, two months later, when he had thrown three in five innings, once again against the Reds. But Matheny's superb coverage behind the plate—nobody in baseball could block the plate better—had minimized the impact of Ankiel's wildness and helped settle him down. They had a rhythm together, the same rhythm that Tim McCarver had when he caught Steve Carlton with the Phillies and the same rhythm that Jorge Posada had with Orlando Hernandez with the Yankees, even though they seemed to be arguing most of the time.
But Matheny wasn't in the first game of the playoffs. And La Russa, in trying to explain what will be forever inexplicable, wonders whether Ankiel began to panic without Matheny there to reel in some of his errant pitches. And in panicking, Rick Ankiel began to think about what he was doing and how he was doing it. What had always seemed such a natural gift now seemed forced, as if he had never done it before. The terror of self-consciousness set in and drowned out muscle memory. Because of the situation he had been thrust into—a rookie in the first game of the playoffs—he also had no experience to carry him through, no keys to draw on to determine whether what was happening was mechanical or emotional.
He laughed off the performance against the Braves at first, noting that, if nothing else, he had set a record for most wild pitches in a game in the history of the postseason with five, a record that he had actually broken in that one half-inning in the top of the third. He was loose and relaxed as the first wave of media buzzards started rubbernecking, smelling the burning rubber of a really juicy car wreck on the mound. And they were clearly enjoying themselves. There had been other mound meltdowns in baseball. Steve Blass with the Pirates. Mark Wohlers with Atlanta. But nothing this public, right smack in the playoffs. Nobody knew, or perhaps really wanted to know, the extent of what was happening yet.
The Cardinals ended up sweeping the Braves, and La Russa slated Ankiel to start the second game of the National League Championship Series against the Mets. His first pitch was a 91-mph fastball to Timo Perez that just missed beaning him. Of the twenty pitches he threw before he was taken out, five went to the backstop. And it was then that Ankiel, two weeks before described as a phenom and a wonder, began to have other labels applied to him by the media: meltdown, crazy tosses.
It was over after that. He came back the next season, and La Russa and Duncan did what they could to shield him from the rubberneckers determined to document every pitch of his ongoing disintegration. They had him work out at sunrise in spring training in the Cardinals' compound in Jupiter when it was cool and quiet and empty. Early in the regular season, they had him warm up in a tunnel underneath the stadium so no one could watch. Ankiel, who had initially reacted to his predicament with humor, now became hard and defensive and reticent. He turned down most interview requests, because who in their right mind would want to talk about something like that, but there seemed to be a joy among certain writers in goading him, seeing whether they could get to him: C'mon, Rick, just a few questions about what it's like to crack up on the mound. And there was also a certain school suggesting that Ankiel had only gotten what he deserved—signing for too much money out of high school, hiring an agent in Scott Boras who always went for too much money, floating through life without the requisite suffering that they went through—You want to know what pressure is, Rick, try writing for peanuts on deadline —too damn golden for his own good with that fat contract and all those threats that he was going to go to the University of Miami if he didn't get the money he wanted.
In the Thursday afternoon sun at Busch in May 2001, Ankiel threw the final pitch he would throw that season against Pat Meares of the Pirates. The ball went to the screen, and Duncan went out of the dugout. Ankiel hung his head as he made the baseball equivalent of a perp walk, and then he put on his jacket in the dugout and headed down the tunnel toward the clubhouse.
He went to spring training a year later but was put on the disabled list with a sore elbow and did not pitch the entire year. He came back to spring training the season of 2003 with La Russa's hope that he could make the team as a reliever. It created yet another media deathwatch, the careful chronicling of his every pitch: how many were strikes and how many were balls and how many sailed wild and how many almost hit someone.
On a Thursday morning at the end of March in the clubhouse in Jupiter, Duncan came into La Russa's office to tell him that a decision on Ankiel's fate had been made by Walt Jocketty: how he would stay with the club until spring training broke and then go down to the minors where those in charge of minor-league development for the Cardinals would take over and determine the best course.
"How much influence do we have on where he's sent?" asked La Russa.
"I assume we'll have input," said Duncan.
Duncan wanted him to go down to Double-A, where there would be less pressure, but La Russa worried about the bus trips.
"He'll be fine," said Duncan. "There's less travel in Double-A than in Triple-A."
And then he added something else, perhaps what—in the best of worlds, where there is time to develop young pitchers physically and mentally and the economies of the game don't demand immediate results—should have happened all along.
"He's twenty-three years old. He should be in Double-A."
Two days later, the team left Florida to make its way north. There was a delicious sense of renewal and anticipation to it, the slate wiped clean, the arduous tedium of spring training over with its rote drills and games that don't count, every team in both leagues starting off fresh in first place with exactly the same record, each of them still believers in the beautiful delusion that it will come together. Two Bekins moving trucks pulled up outside the Jupiter clubhouse, and soon they were filled with the tools of the game: satchels crammed with batting helmets, canvas cylinders built for bats, red bags virtually overflowing with baseballs like a slot jackpot in Vegas, the trunk containing Duncan's pitch-chart binders.
The players and the coaches got onto two buses that would take them to the airport in Palm Beach, then off to St. Louis for the opener. La Russa was the last to get on. He was dressed in a black sport coat and blue jeans, a pair of sunglasses hanging by one of its stems out of the breast pocket. There was a
smile on his face because it was finally going to start now, the season, the regular season, every question and anxiety about his ballclub to be answered now. In the rigid hierarchy of the team, he took the first seat of the first bus, and then off the team went. A clump of loyalists clapped as the caravan rolled through the black metal gate, and it was as American as America ever gets.
The clubhouse, relieved of its occupants, suddenly seemed sodden, flooded with the sad, slow weight of south Florida humidity, the constant chirp of ballplayers replaced by the void of departure. Lockers—once filled with uniform shirts and practice jerseys and bats and fresh batting gloves in shiny plastic packets and virginal hats without a crease and baseball cards to be signed and packets of protein powder—were now virtually empty, except for white plastic hangers and the nameplates of those who were now on their way north:
Robinson Renteria Pujols Drew Fassero Rolen Edmonds Martinez Girardi Matheny Eldred Marrero Palmeiro Painter Tomko Hermanson Perez Morris Cairo Isringhausen Simontacchi Delgado Springer Stephenson Williams Taguchi
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