Rick Ankiel looks back more than a decade later on one of baseball’s most remarkable career comebacks with a measure of evenhandedness that borders on ennui.
“I think if I looked back and somebody else did it, I would think it was incredible,” he said recently, “but because it’s me, it’s like, ‘Well, I don’t know. It’s just what happened.’”
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America loves a redemption story. America’s pastime had never seen one this surreal.
It’s one thing to experience acute anxiety. It is a nightmare of swirling, racing thoughts, uneven breathing and a stampeding heartbeat. To feel it in front of 52,500 people in Busch Stadium plus the millions at home watching on TV qualifies as a public form of mental torment.
Ankiel, the strapping Florida kid with the military haircut and a left arm that may as well have been made in Zeus’s forge, couldn’t accurately throw the baseball 60 feet, 6 inches. What made it so frustrating is it was a distance he had mastered for years, from the days he threw nine no-hitters back in high school. Suddenly, as if a switch had been flipped, he couldn’t even come close.
Catcher Eli Marrero — subbing for Gold Glover Mike Matheny, who had been injured in a freak accident while opening a gift, a hunting knife — tried to corral his pitches that night. At times he had no chance. Of Ankiel’s 33 pitches in that National League Championship Series game vs. the Mets in 2000, only 14 were strikes. His first pitch, a curveball, sailed over left-handed leadoff hitter Timo Perez’s head. Two fastballs to Mike Piazza sailed to the backstop.
“It’s one thing to be wild,” said Fox broadcaster Joe Buck. “It’s another thing to do this.”
Ankiel gets a talking-to from veteran Will Clark in the first inning of Game 2 in the 2000 NLCS. (Scott Rovak / AFP via Getty Images)
He wouldn’t make it through the first inning and everybody in the stadium, on TV and in both clubhouses knew why. In sports, we have come to call them the yips. In many cases, it’s just a snappy word for intense performance anxiety. Ankiel’s case of the yips would quickly torpedo a pitching career that many people thought would mirror that of the great Sandy Koufax. The raw stuff was nearly identical.
What nobody knew for certain at the time, even Ankiel, was that he had the sheer athletic ability and the will to prove that those embarrassing moments on the mound weren’t all that he had to offer. With great speed, the powerful arm — obviously — and an uppercut left-handed swing, he would make it all the way back to the major leagues, this time as a cannon-armed, power-hitting center fielder.
The Los Angeles Times sent sportswriter Tim Brown to St. Louis in April 2000 to write a story on Cardinals slugger Jim Edmonds, who had recently departed the Anaheim Angels. Brown had difficulty connecting with Edmonds for the interview, so he extended his stay in St. Louis by a couple of days, which allowed him to watch a game Ankiel pitched that season vs. the San Diego Padres. It was a cool, gray night, Brown recalls. Ankiel was 20.
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“I’m sort of half watching him doing his thing while up in the press box and he hits a freakin’ rocket opposite-field home run into the bullpen on this cold April night,” Brown recalls. “I was like, ‘What the hell is that? Are you kidding me?’ In the moment, I’m thinking, ‘The ball’s juiced, he’s juiced, what’s going on? A freakin’ pitcher goes oppo on a cold night at Busch?’ It turns out, he’s just a sensational athlete.”
Later, Brown and Ankiel would collaborate on the best-selling book about Ankiel’s career entitled, “The Phenomenon: Pressure, The Yips and the Pitch that Changed My Life.” Inside its covers, Ankiel opens up about his tough childhood with an addicted, abusive father who sold drugs and was in and out of Ankiel’s life. Behind most anxieties, psychologists will tell you, often lurks childhood trauma.
By the spring of 2005, Ankiel and the Cardinals had reached the decision it was time to try something new. The plan came together in a meeting with manager Tony La Russa that March. Within two and a half years, Ankiel was back in the big leagues, this time as a center fielder. The day after La Russa made the suggestion, Ankiel took six at-bats in some minor-league spring training games. He wound up with four hits, including a home run. The freedom it gave him was even more immediate.
“I walked out of Tony’s office, got in my car and drove home. By halfway home, I felt this giant weight was taken off,” Ankiel said. “I could finally take a deep breath and relax. I didn’t have to stress out and think about, ‘Oh, I’ve gotta throw a strike tomorrow.’”
Remember when Rick Ankiel completed his comeback to #MLB as a position player with the #STLCards and hit a homer in his first game? Baseball, man. (via michael61999/YT) pic.twitter.com/LdrAhnvEE3
— MLBDailyDingers (@MLBDailyDingers) September 20, 2020
There are two players in major league history to have hit at least 75 career home runs and strike out 200 batters. Both are left-handed. One is Ankiel. The other is Babe Ruth. In a way, it’s an absurd statistic, since Ruth hit 714 home runs to Ankiel’s 76. Ruth is a Hall of Famer. Ankiel had an 11-year career that produced 9.1 bWAR. But it speaks to the difficulty of the accomplishment, particularly in a more specialized age. Imagine for a moment if Ankiel had spent all those seasons honing his batting stroke rather than working on his pitching.
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Had he been born 20 years later, Ankiel thinks his comeback would have gone completely differently. Though he was allowed to serve as designated hitter when he was working his way back from Tommy John surgery in 2001 at rookie-level Johnson City — he hit 10 home runs in just 105 at-bats to go with a 1.003 OPS — nobody in baseball back then was talking about two-way players. If they had been …
“Shohei Ohtani is what I think it would have looked like,” Ankiel said. “It would have been a lot more fun, put it that way.”
There’s an epilogue to this comeback, one that might have made it even more epic. Pitching in an amateur game in Louisville in 2018, Ankiel struck out a college hitter and recognized that his big overhand curveball still had its bite and his fastball still could reach the lower 90s even though he had barely prepared for the game. He decided he would attempt another comeback, this time as a left-handed reliever. He had just turned 39.
The plan fell apart when Ankiel began experiencing elbow soreness the following spring. It eventually required a second Tommy John surgery. Now he satisfies his itch for competition chasing wahoo fish and mahi-mahi or playing in amateur golf tournaments. He says he’s a 16-handicap, but a “dangerous 16.”
The Cardinals had offered him the use of their Jupiter, Fla., complex for his comeback attempt and the team’s president of baseball operations, John Mozeliak, who has known Ankiel for over 20 years, said he thought Ankiel “had a real chance to return to the mound,” based on what he and the team’s scouts saw.
Hard to bet against someone who had come back before — and with an even greater degree of difficulty.
(Top photo: Doug Benc / Getty Images)
