The Phenomenon Page 2

  It was too loud. All those people, they’d be shouting at me, for me, and what I would hear was coming from some darkness within, from inside my head. The rushing noise was coming. I was alone.

  C’mon, Rick, play the game. You know how.

  But I didn’t know how. I did once. I’d forgotten.

  Dammit, Rick, throw the ball. Right foot back…

  It was there, in my hand. I could see it. I could not feel it. Not the seams or the muddied cowhide or the roundness of it or the weight of it. Not the familiarity of it. Like I was wearing oven mitts. Like somebody else was holding the ball for me, offering it, waiting for me to reach out.

  Take the ball, Rick. Take the ball and throw it.

  It had me. It had me again.

  It gathered, something horrible and tireless, leaving me light-headed and unsure and blinded. Defenseless. So completely defenseless. I’d laugh it off, cry it out, throw until I couldn’t anymore. I’d leave it alone, try to forget, just for an hour or two, maybe a day, then come back and find it was worse—deeper in me—than before.

  I was a young man, barely old enough to sip a beer, now in dire need of one or six. I threw a pitch, it staggered to the backstop, and everything changed. My head opened up and filled with uncertainty. My body shut down. Panic thickened my throat. My career stumbled off with a single wayward pitch and took parts of my life with it, parts I loved and parts I hated and parts I’d not even known were there. Anxiety came like a dam break, and then I was wading in it, one sodden step at a time, sloshing about and slowly… slowly… drowning in it.

  I could throw a ball once. I could pitch. Man, could I pitch. And then I couldn’t. I didn’t know why I couldn’t. More than a decade later, I don’t know why I couldn’t.

  They said I was the next Sandy Koufax, he being the greatest left-hander to ever grip a baseball. Then I wasn’t.

  I’d known where my life was headed, at least where I expected it to be headed, and then I didn’t.

  I’d known where the fight was because it was in front of me, usually sixty feet, six inches away, precisely that distance. Sometimes, in my youth, the fight had been closer, much closer, with wild eyes and boozy breath and a bear-trap temper. Those weren’t the real fights, though. Those would come later, and they would be everywhere, and nowhere, and merciless, when the boggy anxiety would rise and I couldn’t hear fifty thousand people screaming over the racket in my own head. I wouldn’t win. I’d lose and fall deeper, farther into the darkness, where the air thinned and the simplest act—throwing a baseball—became a test of my manhood. And my resolve. My goddamned sanity.

  A standard major-league pitcher’s mound is ten inches tall—just high enough to afflict me with baseball’s version of altitude poisoning.

  In the middle of it, a man at Shea Stadium held up a handmade sign. There were thousands of people up there, and the month was October, so the place was loud and edgy, as New York could be. It seemed they were all yelling at me, drawing out the final syllable. “You suck, An-keeeel!” “You’re a freak, An-keeeel!” “Mix in a strike, An-keeeel!” I never, ever looked up into the crowd in those moments. I was tougher than that. I was too sure of myself. Those people couldn’t touch me. This time I looked up.

  My career was coming apart. My team could not rely on me. I hadn’t slept in days. My father was in jail and calling me at all hours, pulling me backward again. My mother kept asking if I was, you know, all right, like maybe I’d contracted some unspeakable neuromuscular condition from the dugout floor. Reporters chased me with questions I could not answer. Nobody could. People—friends, even—would simply stare, which was bad enough. Others would say kind things, encouraging things, but they didn’t know, and it felt like pity, and that I could not endure.

  What could a few thousand strangers say that I didn’t already know?

  So I looked up.

  Above the grinning man, atop arms extended like a V, the sign announced, “Ankiel is an X-file.”

  He had no idea. None of them did.

  People were watching, so I laughed. But that was a lie.

  You should know, perhaps, that I won in the end, or felt as though I did. I surrendered finally and chose a new fight, one that didn’t spawn ritual nightmares, or chase me into a vodka bottle, or have me counting breaths backward from one hundred to one, then starting over, all day long, just to make it to game time, just to have my mind right, only to have it all fall apart anyway.

  That was the lousy part, and that’s a significant part of the story, how it began on an otherwise perfect afternoon at a ballpark in St. Louis, where the game is religion and the players its dutiful and celebrated servants. Unless one were to, say, wear the Cardinals’ sacred colors and stand in the middle of an event known as game one of the playoffs and commence to throw pitch after pitch to the backstop.

  That was eleven days before the guy with the sign sought entry into my psyche and before at least a dozen pitches that might as well have been sprayed from an untended fire hose. If he’d really wanted inside my head, he would have needed an affinity for crowds—there was a lot going on in there.

  Still short of my prime, and bulletproof, and just then coming upon manhood, still out in front of all that pursued me, I would not be great, not in the way anyone might have foretold. I should have pitched forever.

  I didn’t pitch forever. I never really pitched again. I survived for a while, just barely. I told myself I was pitching, and that would have to do.

  They call it “the Thing” because there’s no diagnosis and no cure, and so they kick it around and try not to look at it and do not become so friendly as to actually give it a name because “anxiety disorder” is not the kind of phrase one slips into a baseball conversation. Just the Thing. Basically, it turns a regular guy with a physical gift into the jackknife in the corner surrounded by dog-eared self-help books, one eye on the clock, trying to get his head straight and nerves settled by game time.

  I’d seen them before, the poor souls. And what I’d think was Damn, man, get ahold of yourself and just throw the baseball. Then the Thing came for me.

  I swore it would not beat me. I’d worked too hard for too long to be anything other than the next Koufax, or the first Ankiel, or whatever was going to come of it. I would throw precise, relentless, plain mean fastballs past men who could do nothing about it. I would stand on a thousand more pitchers’ mounds, grow old on them, and smart, and rich, and I would be special. I’d earned that. I would become what I’d dreamed myself becoming when I was a boy, when the car would pull into the driveway in the dead of night, and the front door would slam, and the shouting would start, and the violence would come, and I would have nowhere to go but a ball field on a summer’s morning. That was the vision I’d sleep to, or try to, beneath the racket. I would take hold of whatever I came up against, and I would cast it aside and keep going, and I would put another mile between me and wherever my father was.

  I would be better. I would win. I would be fearless.

  But that was a lie.

  Never would I understand if the Thing had simply happened upon me, or if I’d somehow summoned it in a particularly vulnerable patch, or if it had hunted me for years—waiting, plotting, and taking aim. It would not speak to me. It would not explain. What I knew was that it came for me. Just, it seemed in those lonely days, for me.

  It would not drag me into my youth, into the terrible truth of where I’d been and what I’d seen and where I’d failed. But it did, because that was a lie too. Why hadn’t I stood up to him? What kind of man—what kind of person—had I left back there? Who was I hiding?

  Fifteen years later, I know where it sent me, and what it made of me, and most days I accept that. True, sometimes I wonder what would have come had the Thing never been, or if it had been coming for me all along and this was the life I was supposed to have instead of the one I made the best of. But not often anymore. See, I feel like I won. Like I found a cure. Not a cure, exactly; a way around it. All
I had to do was look up. All I had to do was stop the fear from rising.

  Take the ball, Rick. Take the ball and throw it.

  “Ankiel is an X-file.”

  That’s funny. Today, it is honestly funny.

  This is why.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  It’s a long story, really, about baseball and me, about baseball saving me and then leaving me on my own. It’s about my father and me, I suppose. It’s about the monster that came to get me, and a man named Harvey Dorfman and me against the monster, and how a monster built over a lifetime cannot be killed with a single pitch or a thousand or in a day or over a baseball season or maybe ever. It’s about living with the shame of a monster that’s big enough to fill the world and small enough to fit inside one’s head, that’s invisible and plain as a man’s pitching line, that has no voice and yet screamed me awake in the night.

  That’s how I saw it. Of course, most of the time I was the only one who could, which was a relief and a curse. I lived with it, denied it, hid it, treated it, and swung swords at it until I couldn’t.

  Then morning would come, as would the new struggle, same as the old struggle.

  The rest saw not the monster but its casualty, that being me and whatever shrapnel was in the box score. That’s not to say I was an innocent bystander. It was my brain, after all. My body. My arm. My fear. It was mine to bear and so mine to slay. And, hell, at the end of the day it was just a baseball game, just… a… freakin’… baseball… game, that was all, and I’d shrug and smile and move along, except it meant everything to me and I didn’t want to shrug or smile or move along. I wanted blood, which was life as both the monster and its casualty, and the blood that was shed was always mine.

  Before that, I was a kid with a fastball, a curveball, a future, and a way of smirking at the world. It couldn’t get to me. Nothing could. I’d already taken the world’s best shot: my dad.

  The monster—the yips, the Thing, the phenomenon; it had a few aliases—arrived on a Tuesday afternoon in October, the end of my rookie year. I’d made 30 major-league starts, won 11 of them, struck out 194 batters in 175 innings, was the winning pitcher in the game that clinched the National League Central Division title, and would be runner-up for National League Rookie of the Year. I felt like I was getting better as the season went on, thanks to Dave Duncan, the pitching coach, and Mike Matheny, the veteran catcher who could call a game and soothe a rookie’s occasionally jumpy heartbeat. I even hit .250 with a couple home runs.

  Then I had a bad day. A very bad day.

  I was not hurt. I was not afraid. I was not sick or distracted or particularly anxious. There was no terrible accident. That said, days on ball fields generally don’t come much worse. In game one of the National League Division Series, on a warm and sunny afternoon with a slight cross breeze, in front of exactly 52,378 people, including my mom, I stood on the mound at Busch Stadium, convinced I would be great. That it was my destiny.

  And then I was not great. I don’t know why. I only know what happened and what it did to me (or what I did to it, as I’m sure there’s a conversation to be had about that), where it led me and where it left me.

  The date was October 3, 2000, a box on a calendar page. Innocent enough. I was twenty-one years old and enjoying a life fresh to the big leagues.

  I wasn’t the trusting sort. My childhood had wrung that out of me. I wouldn’t apologize for it. Hell, I was in some ways grateful for it, for the toughness it inspired. Nobody could touch me. But I had begun to feel like I belonged. I had begun to trust tomorrow.

  These were the St. Louis Cardinals of Mark McGwire and Darryl Kile, of Jim Edmonds and Will Clark and J. D. Drew, and of Tony La Russa. To plenty in the ballpark that day, they remained the Cardinals of Bob Gibson, Stan Musial, Ozzie Smith, and Lou Brock. The Cardinals were hardball royalty.

  But this day was to be mine. Game one, the Atlanta Braves in town, the Cardinals a generation removed from their last World Series title, a touch-the-sword-to-my-shoulder occasion. They’d give the ball to their future, to their present, and he—that being me—would oppose the masterful Greg Maddux. For hopeful Cardinals fans, the coming three hours were to preview the next twenty years.

  Instead, I threw a pitch that missed the catcher’s mitt, that didn’t look like it should but did, and I wondered how that had happened, and I narrowed my eyes and clenched my jaw and threw another pitch, defiant, but it was already too late. In that moment, my career had ended, only without the compassion of old age or the finality of a blown shoulder, the way other careers end, and then without the benefit of a veteran’s reflection. I would walk away humiliated. But that was a long way off, after I’d walked off dozens of ball fields, humiliated.

  A single unremarkable pitch, one I’d thrown countless times before, would launch countless more pitches remarkable for how each drew me sixty feet, six inches closer to an inevitable and inglorious and sweat-stained end.

  Maybe there’d be a thousand reasons for the pitch, why I threw it, how I threw it, how it ended up at the backstop, and why—even as it bounded away—I never could let it go. More, why it never would let go of me.

  The forty-fourth pitch of the game. Third inning. One out. A one-strike count to Andruw Jones. Greg Maddux at first base. Cardinals 6, Braves 0. Throw strikes, keep the ball in the big part of the park, nothing crazy, we win. I win. The future wins.

  The catcher was Carlos Hernández. He’d been around. Good guy. Solid backup. And not Mike Matheny, who’d sliced his hand with a hunting knife he’d received for his birthday about a week before. Mike had caught my games for most of the year, because I was a rookie who believed in every pitch Matheny ever called and every word he ever spoke. His voice was deep and possessed a low rattle, something like Clint Eastwood’s, which was reassuring. Except now I was on the mound, and Dirty Harry was hanging over the dugout rail.

  Hernández put two fingers down. A curveball. He leaned to his right, away from Jones, who batted right-handed and had hit thirty-six home runs in the regular season. Curveball away sounded good to me. I blinked my approval, came set over the rubber, let my eyes drift to Maddux at first base, then turned to narrow in on Hernández’s mitt.

  Everything was fine. I wasn’t tired. Not too hot, not too cold. The crowd was into it, in a swirl of colors and clamor and belief in me and a six-run lead. Arm felt good. Strong. Head was clear. No thoughts of anything other than a curveball, so natural there’d be no need to consider the mechanics of it. Just let it go, hit the glove. Already I could see the path the ball would take when it left my hand, a moment’s clarity, a promise of the future. For an instant a tunnel would form in my mind’s eye. The ball would leave my hand, pass through that tunnel, and land with a thwack. That’s what I saw. It’s what I always saw. I took a breath, relaxed, felt the ball in my hand, the power in my legs, imagined the tunnel, and set about delivering that pitch.

  I’d learned the basics of that curveball early in high school from an extremely patient pitching coach named Charlie Frazier, then honed it during tryouts and practices for the Junior Olympics in Joplin, Missouri. Bill Olson was the pitching coach. He’d kneel between the mound and the plate, and I’d throw dozens of curveballs over his head toward the catcher. “Nope,” he’d say. “Nope. Nope. Pull down the shade. Nope. Wham, that’s it! Throw another, just like it. Nope. Yes! There!” He’d turned my curveball from a flabby backyard ruse into a big-league weapon. I loved that pitch. I trusted it. And if it ever got sloppy I’d remember those days flipping curveballs over Bill Olson’s head, the way he’d talk me through them inch by inch, how they felt so perfect out of my hand, until it was part of me again.

  Then, I don’t know. I held on to the ball too long. Tried not to hang the curveball. Didn’t exactly trust it. Rushed it. Instead of flicking the outer inches of the strike zone, I launched the pitch too far right. It came out of my hand, off my fingers, all wrong. Hernández lunged to his left. The ball bounced near Jones’s feet a
nd past Hernández’s shoulder, and Maddux loped to second base. The ball hit the backstop. Hernández chased it. And I stood near the front of the mound and watched all of it happen, sort of curious.

  There’d actually been a pitch before that. Something weird. A fastball that didn’t sit quite right. A fastball I’d wanted to throw inside to a right-handed hitter. And, well, here’s the thing about me throwing a fastball inside to right-handers—I didn’t want to leave it over the plate and anywhere near a bat barrel. In meant in. So, and it seemed subconscious, almost defensive, I’d let my wrist turn ever so slightly, and my fingers would fall to the left side of the ball, and that would change the rotation of the ball and therefore its path, and that pitch, just about every time, would run a few inches toward the hitter right at the end. It got a lot of strikeouts in there. It broke a few bats. Matheny knew about this because he had seen it hundreds of times. The ball was going to run that way. In a playoff game on national television by a rookie with a six-run lead? Maybe an inch or two more than usual. So I threw that, and it beat Hernández on the glove side, flat beat him, and skipped to the backstop, and I’d been wondering about that pitch, hanging on it emotionally maybe a little longer than usual. It didn’t register anywhere else, just a ball, nobody on base, maybe a cross-up in signs, an unremarkable pitch at an unremarkable moment to which no one else gave another thought. Maybe it was trying to tell me what was coming, the only warning I’d get, and maybe it was nothing until I made it into something, until the curveball, and the groan from the crowd, and the game beginning to shift, and when I wanted to throw a fastball would I get that fastball again, the impertinent one? I waited for a new ball, held up my glove, waited to get back at it.

  Huh, I thought. I just threw a wild pitch.

  My mom was in the stands that afternoon. My father wasn’t; he was serving a six-year federal prison sentence for conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute cocaine and marijuana. He’d lightened the sentence by rolling over on the guy who ran the smuggling ring—his boss, basically—which sounded about like my father. His term had begun a few months early because sometime between being sentenced and actually reporting for the sentence, he’d been picked up for carrying a pistol. Well, for flinging that pistol out of a window of a car the police were following, shortly after he’d brandished that pistol at a fellow traveler. This sort of development might have unhinged a normal family. For us, the hinge had always been squeaky. We’d learned to live with it, ignored it, figured a colicky hinge was better than no hinge at all. Besides, sometimes the authorities would come fix it, at least temporarily.