108 Stitches

by Ron Darling

  Remember those old Mr. Magoo cartoons, where Magoo would “blindly” cross the street and there’d be these ten-car pile-ups all around him while he continued to move about oblivious to the commotion he was causing? Well, Mackey Sasser was like that. We were all jumping through hoops to accommodate his condition, and he didn’t even seem to notice.

  On top of all that, he wasn’t the most responsible teammate in the world. He was the kind of guy who wouldn’t get his rest before a game. He could be out until five o’clock in the morning when we had a day game the next afternoon—not exactly the best way to endear yourself to your teammates who were already scrambling to clean up your messes on the field.

  No, it wasn’t Mackey’s fault that he came down with the yips. It’s a terrible hardship I wouldn’t wish on anyone. And no, same way it wasn’t like me to make fun of someone like Junior Ortiz for a simple stutter, it wasn’t like me to begrudge someone a nervous tic he couldn’t control. And yet I came away from this episode thinking Mackey had somehow made a mockery of the game. To have a guy behind the plate who couldn’t even get the ball back to his pitcher … that’s not the way the game should be played. The optics are all wrong. The message we’re putting out to our young fans, who come to the ballpark looking for players to root for, to put on some kind of pedestal, is completely off. I suppose on some level it could have been seen as inspiring, for a guy like Mackey to power through this kind of turmoil and still find a way to contribute, but his limitations invariably seemed to cancel out his contributions. His performances needed to be judged with the baseball equivalent of the plus-minus stat they keep in hockey: you drive in two runs, you let in two runs, and you’re treading water.

  For all these reasons, and a few more that I won’t share because I don’t want to come across as completely unsympathetic, I was always looking for ways to get back at Mackey for diminishing the game in this way. One night in Atlanta, I found a way to give him his comeuppance. A group of us were out at a club, and Mackey was making eyes at this beautiful Asian girl across the way. He kept going on and on about how gorgeous she was, asking some of us if we thought he stood a chance with her. This went on for a while, until I excused myself to go to the bathroom, and who should sidle up to the urinal next to mine but this beautiful Asian girl—who, alas, was a dude.

  In all fairness to Mackey, this guy was probably the best-looking guy I’d ever seen. His makeup and hair were killer, and his little cocktail dress looked like it had been painted on. But all of that seemed to fall away when he lifted his skirt and whipped himself out and started taking a piss.

  He caught me staring—said, “You okay?”

  I said, “Oh, I’m fine. But my friend’s in for a surprise.”

  The guy laughed and said, “Don’t I know it.”

  I went back out to join our group and started chatting up Mackey, told him I’d just run into that beautiful Asian girl on my way to the bathroom. I said, “She’s even prettier up close.”

  That was all he needed to hear. And then, when my bathroom buddy sauntered over to our table, I stood and made an introduction.

  They ended up leaving together, and for all I know they went back to Mackey’s room, but I never asked, and I never said anything. It would have been too easy to bust his chops about it the next day, but I chose to walk the high road on this—or, at least, the road a notch or two above the gutter. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that I’d set him up in this way, or that it was even worth it to me to mess with him.

  It was enough for me to know … and, now, for everyone to know.

  * * *

  I can’t write an entire chapter about the yips without spending some time on one of the most surprising, most inspiring stories I’ve had a chance to witness as a broadcaster … and as a fan. The story actually found me at first in my living room, watching Game 1 of the 2000 National League Division Series between the Atlanta Braves and the St. Louis Cardinals. The Cardinals’ brilliant rookie pitcher Rick Ankiel was on the mound, facing Greg Maddux—a marquee matchup that had baseball’s attention.

  Of course, I tuned in. And like millions of caring, feeling fans, I cringed when I saw Ankiel begin to struggle with his control in the third inning. Actually, to merely suggest that this young man was struggling doesn’t get close to the size of his troubles on that mound. It was a complete breakdown: four runs on two hits, four walks, and five wild pitches, before being pulled from the game with two outs in the inning.

  I watched what was happening with a heavy heart. I knew what it was to have one of those moments. Every pitcher has experienced it—at one time or another, in one fashion or another. Usually, it’s just a fleeing moment, there for a couple seconds, maybe a couple pitches. Maybe it lasts a little bit longer, but we’ve all been there. We’ve all had that terrifying sensation where the ball feels foreign and you think, Whoa! Or, Holy shit!

  Somehow, the Cardinals managed to hold on to win the game, and Rick Ankiel was able to joke about his blip of a performance in the press conference afterward, talking about how it felt to tie a record that had stood for over a hundred years and had been thought unassailable—throwing five wild pitches in a single inning. For the time being at least, those of us who cared about such things could tell ourselves Ankiel’s third-inning performance was an aberration and that he would return to form the next time he took the hill.

  Surely, Ankiel was telling himself the same thing.

  But that’s not exactly what happened. Ankiel’s next start came the following week in Game 2 of the National League Championship Series against the Mets, and this time he didn’t even get out of the first inning. His very first pitch of the game went straight over the head of Mets leadoff hitter Timo Perez, and right away it was clear that Ankiel was still stuck, and that the pitcher he was wouldn’t be returning to the mound anytime soon.

  My old skipper Tony La Russa, now managing the Cardinals, trotted Ankiel out again in Game 5 of the series, this time in a relief role, and here again the kid couldn’t throw strikes. The ball must have felt so completely unfamiliar in his grip, and I ached for him, to see him so hopelessly lost at such a young age, on such a grand stage. I mean, it’s not like he was pitching on some random Tuesday night in Pittsburgh in a meaningless game. No, this was the postseason. This was everything. The eyes of the baseball world were upon him. That’s quite a lot of pressure to put on a set of young shoulders.

  Just to be clear, nobody knows if it was the weight of all that pressure that got to Rick Ankiel during those postseason games. No one can say if the youngster was battling the kind of personal demons that got in the way of his game plan, and messed with the mechanics he’d developed over a lifetime.

  All we know is what we saw, and what we saw were the yips … on full display. From out of nowhere.

  Years later, in Buzz Bissinger’s excellent book Three Nights in August, chronicling a three-game series between the Cubs and the Cardinals, La Russa allowed that starting Ankiel in Game 1 of the Atlanta series was one of the deepest regrets of his career, for the way it put him in a spot that was perhaps too big for his résumé. La Russa blamed himself for Ankiel’s meltdown.

  Ankiel, to his great credit, wasn’t buying it. This was on him, he always said, not La Russa.

  Ankiel would go on to write his own book about his experiences—The Phenomenon: Pressure, the Yips, and the Pitch That Changed My Life, written with the baseball journalist Tim Brown. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read—about baseball, about life, about anything. In it, Ankiel confronts those dark days when he lost the ability to pitch, and that agonizing off-season after those dreadful October games, when he was left to wonder if he would ever pitch again.

  He did, but not effectively. He suffered through another few miserable outings to start the 2001 season, before the Cardinals put him on the disabled list to try to get his head right. After that, he was out of baseball for a couple years, before fighting his way back to the big club for a ha
ndful of nothing-special appearances as a September call-up.

  And that was that … except it wasn’t. You see, Rick Ankiel happened to be a tremendous athlete, and an outstanding hitter. As good a hitter as I thought I was, he was ten times better. Plus, he had a fire inside him like you wouldn’t believe. He got it in his head that he would reinvent himself as a ballplayer, and find a way to make it back to the bigs as a position player—something no one in the game could remember having seen since the transformation of Babe Ruth from one of baseball’s preeminent pitchers into the stuff of legend.

  (Of course, this was long before anyone in the United States had ever heard of Shohei Ohtani, the Angels’ sensational two-way player, but that’s a whole other story.)

  Jump ahead to August 2007, and Ankiel’s transformation was complete. A supportive Cardinals organization gave him every opportunity to succeed as a position player, and Ankiel earned himself a roster spot. He homered in his very first game—a three-run blast to right in the bottom of the seventh against the San Diego Padres.

  It was the shot heard ’round the world, revisited. Ankiel’s redemption—if, indeed, that’s what it was—was played and replayed on ESPN’s SportsCenter, and on other sports highlight shows across the country, until he came back two games later and hit another couple dingers. He finished the season batting .285, with 11 home runs and 39 RBIs in just 47 games.

  Not bad for a pitcher.

  Not bad for a twenty-eight-year-old rookie slugger.

  Not bad at all.

  What I loved about Rick Ankiel’s story was the courageous way he would not let himself be defined by a series of low, low moments when the game ran away from him. It was a remarkable thing to see—amazing, really. I suppose, if Ankiel’s comeback had been a bust and he never made it as a bona fide position player, the albatross of those 2000 postseason games would have stamped him a failure, a victim of the yips, his promising career cut short before it every really got under way.

  He was not about to let that happen.

  I had a chance to see this young man’s renaissance firsthand the following season, when the Mets finally drew the Cardinals on the calendar during the first week in July. By this point, Ankiel had chased the skeptics who might have thought he was some sort of flash in the pan and locked down a spot as the team’s everyday center fielder. That he could play the field well enough to man one of the most demanding positions on the diamond was … something.

  That he could also hit the hell out of the ball was something else again.

  I was anxious to see this kid play, and he didn’t disappoint. He homered in the first two games of the series, and I stood and cheered. It was a good and thrilling thing to see, because in these moments of Ankiel’s resurrection and triumph there was the wistful, chilling thought that the wildness or the nerves or the whatever that had nearly cost this kid his career could have very easily happened to me … to any of the hundreds of pitchers I’d played with and against in my career. It was one of those there but for the grace of God go I moments, and I reveled in the fact that this courageous and gifted young man had somehow clawed his way back from ignominy with his iron will, his mighty bat, his supreme athleticism.

  I found some time to talk to Ankiel before the Mets left town. I skulked around the Cardinal clubhouse the next day, and roamed the field during batting practice, looking for a moment where I might catch him alone. I didn’t want to embarrass him in front of his teammates or anything. I just wanted to shake his hand, maybe congratulate him on his turnaround.

  When I finally caught up to him, I made like a broadcaster and engaged him with the usual small talk. It was just a quick conversation. But then, as we made to part, I turned back to him and said, “Hey, man. Just want to let you know, we’re all proud of you.”

  And we were. The collective baseball we. The game itself.

  8

  “Z” Is for “Zimmer”

  To be clear, we’re done with the alphabetically themed portions of the book, but I had it in my head that there’d be an “Aase to Zimmer” element on the contents page, so I’m sticking with the “A is for…” construct for the title to this chapter—a look back at some of the managers I’ve encountered on my baseball journey. Some of them, I’ve played for. Some of them, I’ve played against. Some, I’ve merely encountered … but I’ll shine a light on them here for the various ways they’ve enlightened me, infuriated me, or amused the hell out of me.

  Let’s start it off with Don Zimmer, who already made a cameo early on in these pages, just as he did early on in my career. Recall, he was the Texas Rangers manager when I went to my very first big league spring training camp, and almost from the very moment he watched me pitch he let me know that I had graduated to a whole other level of the game. The first time I appeared in a spring training game for the Rangers was against the New York Yankees, in Fort Lauderdale, in front of a packed house. In those days, you didn’t always see big crowds at our Grapefruit League games, but the Yankees were always a big draw.

  You might think an exhibition game, with nothing on the line beyond getting your feet wet against big league ballplayers, is a no-pressure situation. But I was feeling jittery, tense, and looking back I think the big crowd played into that. Still, I managed to pitch three or four clean innings. I no longer remember how many hits I gave up, how many base runners I allowed, and there’s no surviving box score, but I was generally happy with my performance: nobody scored, and I’d retired a bunch of big league hitters, so I counted it a successful outing.

  I sat down on the dugout bench after what would turn out to be my last inning and Don Zimmer walked over to me—said, “That’s it for you today, kid. I got someone else coming in.”

  I nodded—said, “Okay, Skip.”

  (By the way, this was the first time I’d addressed Zimmer, other than to nod hello or to smile stupidly, and I’d been going back and forth in my head over whether to call him Skip or Mr. Zimmer or maybe even Sir. Now that I had a couple clean innings under my belt, I guess I decided to lean toward the familiar.)

  With this, Zimmer turned to go, but then he doubled back—said, “Stick around for a sec. Something I want to talk to you about.”

  I nodded again—only this time I was thinking, What did I do? I thought maybe I’d screwed up in some way, and that I was about to be called to the woodshed for my first big league dressing-down.

  When our guys took the field for the next inning, Zimmer came over to me again and sat himself down. He asked to see my glove. I thought that was strange, but I handed it to him—because, hey, when you’re at your first big league camp and your manager asks to see your glove, you show him your glove. He looked it over and set it down. Then he turned to me and said, “You were an infielder in college, right?”

  I said, “Yes, sir.”

  He said, “You were pretty good, right?”

  I said, “Oh, I don’t know about that.”

  He said, “And you could hit some, too, from what I hear?”

  I had no idea where Zimmer was going with this, was starting to feel a little embarrassed, so I tried to turn the conversation away from my hitting and my fielding—said, “That didn’t exactly work out for me.”

  He handed my glove back to me—said, “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” Then he pointed back to my glove and said, “This glove right here. You gotta get rid of it.”

  Hadn’t seen that one coming. I loved that glove. I’d had it in college. It was like an old friend. But Don Zimmer slipped his left hand into it and flipped it over, palm down. It had an open back, of course, like most infielders’ gloves. I was in the habit of resting my index finger on the leather outside the finger slot, like most infielders. Today’s infielders have a protective leather covering that rests atop the glove leather, to shield that stray finger, but back then we had no such luxury.

  With his right hand, Zimmer pointed to the exposed part of his left hand in the glove and said, “Get yourself a closed glove, so
n. No opening in the back.”

  I nodded—wasn’t about to go against my manager, even though I had no idea what he was talking about. But then he explained himself and it all came clear. He said, “See this open back? Every time you throw a curveball, you move your finger. You’re letting the hitter know.”

  That’s the astonishing thing about a baseball lifer like Don Zimmer. He could spot a tell from a mile away. He’d watched me pitch for just three innings, from about a hundred feet away, and he very quickly picked up that I was giving away my curveball.

  Welcome to the big leagues, huh?

  * * *

  The first manager I actually played for as a professional was Tom Burgess—a Canadian-born first baseman who (weirdly) had a couple cups of coffee in the bigs. The first was a brief stint with the Cardinals in 1954, when he was twenty-six years old. The second was a full season with the Angels eight years later, in 1962, when he was thirty-four. You had to admire this guy’s perseverance, right? And yet it wasn’t until Tom Burgess started managing in the low-level minors that he found his true calling in the game—and he stuck around a good long while after that, eventually coaching third base for the New York Mets, under manager Joe Torre, and for the Atlanta Braves, under Bobby Cox.

  Tom was managing the Double-A Tulsa Drillers of the Texas League, where I was sent following the 1981 amateur draft—just a couple months after I’d thrown my last pitch for the Yale Bulldogs. I joined the team in Shreveport, where the upper deck of the stadium was roped off because it had been condemned by the local building department. That was my “Welcome to Professional Baseball” moment. Didn’t exactly feel like the big time, I’ll say that. There was a guy outside the stadium selling weed, and a straight-up Baseball Annie brazenly pimping out her daughter outside the players’ entrance … all told, nothing to indicate that I had arrived.