Rick Ankiel's Comeback from Baseball's 'Yips' Phenomenon

Coming back: Rick Ankiel's "Yips"
and the Power of Perseverance
April 6, 2018
Ottawa University
Ottawa KS

Great team comebacks from perennial
mediocrity (Astros, Cubs) and player
comebacks from personal setback or
slump (Moustakas, Holland) are
commonplace and even cliche, in
baseball, though pundits never tire of
marveling at them.

The Major League Baseball Comeback Player of the Year Award is presented by Major
League Baseball (MLB) to the player who is judged to have "re-emerged on the baseball field
during a given season." The award was developed in 2005, as part of a sponsorship
agreement between MLB and Viagra…
Not to be confused with the Sporting News Comeback Player of the Year Award...
Major League Baseball announced its final
award winners for the 2017 season with its
Comeback Players of the Year. The
National League winner is Rockies closer
Greg Holland, while the American League
winner is Royals third baseman Mike
Moustakas… (cbs)

Perseverance & resilience
Rick Ankiel was a starting pitcher for three seasons
and a reliever for a brief time in 2004 before returning
to the minors, where he spent 2002 and 2003.
He returned to the Cardinals in 2007 as an outfielder
and had a few very good seasons. In fact, it could be
up for debate whether he was better as a pitcher or
an outfielder, especially defensively. 15 inspiring
comebacks
“It’s about (getting) back up and
dusting yourself off. You’re going to
get knocked down.” Ankiel’s
monster…
“...it's the psychological that does cause the mechanical
breakdown, but it does start in the mind… You know
exactly what you want to do and how you want to do it
and your body and brain will not let you do it.” An Unusual
Comeback-Fresh Air

Phenomenon =
appearance
Noumenon = reality
The German Enlightenment
philosopher I. Kant (1724-1804), the
most stable of philosophers (pace
Monty Python), gave us that
distinction.
Ankiel appeared, in his rookie
season, to be well on his way to a
HOF pitching career. He was
phenomenal.
Then reality set in.

2000 NLDS Gm1: Ankiel throws
five wild pitches
10/3/00: Cardinals pitcher Rick Ankiel throws five wild pitches in the
bottom of the third inning against the Braves

In Kant’s metaphysics, the
reality and the appearance
of things depend on the
categories of our peculiarly
human form of thinking-
unity, plurality, possibility,
causality, limitation,
negation and the like.
“Yip” is not a Kantian
category. Perhaps that
was an error.

There's never been a comeback
like Rick Ankiel's, after
plummeting from a perch of
highest expectation - "the next
Koufax" - to Steve Blass
Syndrome, aka The Yips, in a
sudden surreal flurry of wild
pitches on the postseason stage
(Cards-Braves) in 2000. It
happened to Blass near the end
of a long and successful career.
Ankiel was a 21-year old rookie
phenom.
Ankiel went down to the minors,
hooked up with a sports psychologist,
and eventually made it back up to the
Cardinals as an impressively-armed
outfielder.
“For no explicable reason, Blass
suddenly became plagued with
chronic wildness, and never fully
recovered, even during a return to the
minors in 1974. He retired after being
released by the Pirates that same
year.”

The shrink, the lifesaver-Harvey
Dorfman
Harvey's usual response to an obstacle was “So what are you
going to do about it?... He was honest. He asked that I look
inward, away from baseball and mechanics and what I owed—
or didn't owe—the Cardinals and my teammates. He asked
what I owed to myself. “What are you doing?” he’d say. “What
do you want to change? What are you doing to change it?”
I’d start to answer, and Harvey would say, “Tell me tomorrow.
Think about it, then tell me.” He talked a little like a ballplayer,
which reflected his upbringing but also the years he'd spent in
ballparks, in clubhouses, in bars...

The final hour, we drove in darkness and a heavy downpour as we ascended into the Great Smoky
Mountains. Harvey lives on the top of a mountain, I thought while squinting through the rain and
windshield wipers. Of course he does. gurus
Harvey knew he was dying. I knew he was dying. I went to say thank you.

Life Coach
The secret to Harvey’s success was simple: He heard what you
were saying and also what you weren’t saying. Born in the Bronx
in 1935, he spoke plainly in a broad New York accent, part
cabdriver, part Upper West Side intellectual, and tolerated no
excuses. He made you see that living a life of make-believe
would eventually expose you as a fraud. Professional athletes
were especially vulnerable to self-delusion since they’d been
treated like demigods much of their lives. By the time people
opened up to Harvey, they’d usually come most of the way to
admitting to themselves that they’d reached a dead end: They
had to change or they were in jeopardy of losing themselves…
1/2

Typically, pitchers are the best athletes on the field, but the trick is to marshal an
awesome physical talent whose nemesis is fear. What if I make a mistake, the
pitcher’s psyche asks,a mistake on this pitch, and then the next one, or on any
pitch? What if I’m embarrassed by the hitter beating me? What if I don’t fulfill the
promise of my gifts? What if I let down everyone who loves me and counts on me?
The way Harvey saw it, ballplayers enacted the same sort of struggle we all do in
our regular lives—the effort to seek success, fight our demons, resolve our pasts,
and map our futures against the fates—except ballplayers do it in front of lots of
people. The world is full of those who, like minor league washouts, almost made it,
thwarted near-successes… (2/2) L. Smith Weekly Standard10.26.15

"I'm not a shrink; I'm a stretch. I don't
diminish - I expand."

Mar 3, 2011 - Harvey Dorfman, 75, who sharpened minds
and beefed up egos in baseball's major leagues as a sports
psychologist to the game's top athletes, died Feb. 28 at his
home in Brevard, N.C.… Among his list of star clients, he
advised American League MVP Alex Rodriguez, sluggers
Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco, and Cy Young Award-
winning pitchers Roy Halladay, Greg Maddux and Bob
Welch… WaPo
A vast majority of baseball fans never heard of Harvey Dorfman. But for 30 years until his death in
February at 75, he had a profound effect on hundreds of major league players. Dorfman was hired by the
Oakland Athletics in the mid-1980s to serve as their mental performance coach, and worked his magic …
nyt

...Players like Roy Halladay, Brad Lidge, Mike Pelfrey, Rick Ankiel, Jim Abbott, Al Leiter, Bob Welch,
even Greg Maddux — and on and on — had quietly worked with Dorfman.
...He was not a psychologist. He did not have a doctorate in psychology. Rather, he combined hard-
core common sense with a mixture of tough-love confrontation and compassion. In his gruff,
profanity-laced way, he regarded traditional sports psychology approaches like “take a deep breath”
or “think only positive thoughts” as nonsense.
Rather, Dorfman’s style was confrontational, or as he would say, “I hold a mirror up to your face.”
...His approach was all about the ballplayer’s taking responsibility and being accountable. Force him
to find his own way back to success. And by doing so, he will be even stronger than before.
...Although he grew up in the Bronx, he became a beloved English teacher in Vermont, where he
settled with his wife, Anita, and their two children. Dorfman was conversant in the current best
sellers and would routinely quote chapter and verse from famous philosophers about life’s
challenges… Rick Wolff 5.7.11

1999-2001, 2004: 13-10, 3.90.
2000: 11-7, 3.50
stats
2007-2013: 76 HR…
2008: .264, 25 HR, 71
RBI
“Only two players to win at least 10
games and hit 50 HR…”

One on One… 30”: 5.6.08 Coors Field cf Willie Taveras/LaRussa: “outstanding, don’t ever do it again”...1’30” 10.2000: 5th wp… ‘01 vodka,
RJohnson… ‘04 “blinders”/damaged frelationships, not healthy... 18”: 8.9.07 “button-hooked it, walking the dog, one-hand”/Hrabosky: “people need
to have patience… he’s still not a polished major league hitter”... “Re-markable!” YouT: “The Phoenix”
“It’s not about the
result, it’s about
having the
courage to try.”

“Yip is such an innocuous word. It
sounds like a hiccup, an affirmation,
the noise your Pekingese makes
when she wants a bite of your
steak.
No one knows for sure where the term came from, which seems appropriate,
since no one knows for sure where the curse it describes comes from,
either…
(⅓)
Yip?

“Baseball men go to great lengths to avoid the subject. They shy away
from even the word, calling the yips “it” or “the monster” or “the thing.”
What if it’s contagious? What if you’re next? It’s as if naming the
condition—or even thinking too hard about it—can summon it, the sport’s
Voldemort.” SI

Golfer Tommy Armour is thought to
have coined the term half a century
ago to refer to the last-second
hesitation that inexplicably yanked
his putts wide. The yips have
afflicted dart throwers, archers,
cricketers, billiards players. And
baseball players. The most famous
victims are Steve Blass, the Pirates
righthander who suddenly could not
throw a strike starting in 1973;
(⅔)

Steve Sax, the Dodgers second baseman who
briefly lost the ability to throw to first after an error
in ’83; Mackey Sasser, the Mets catcher who
was forced to retire when he became unable to
get the ball back to the pitcher following a ’91
collision at the plate; Chuck Knoblauch, the
Yankees second baseman who had to move to
leftfield because, starting in ’98, he could no
longer make short infield throws;
Sax
YouT
and Rick Ankiel, the Cardinals phenom who lost
the strike zone in 2000 and reinvented himself
as an outfielder.” (3/3) SI 5.17.17…

Jon Lester beats the yips (video)
Jon Lester cannot throw to first base.
This seems ridiculous. He can paint the black
with the game’s fiercest cutter, which heads
for the lefthanded batter’s box before making
a sharp right turn. He can curl a curveball
past a bat, mix and locate his offerings with
precision, and make them all look identical
coming out of his hand. Lester is one of the
best pitchers of his generation. So why can’t
he turn 90 degrees to his left and do the
same thing he does toward the plate?
Better to miss low than high, so in spring
training he practices one-hopping the ball to
first. When he can, he runs it partway and
underhands it. And twice in two years he
tucked the ball into his glove and tossed the
whole thing to Rizzo.
“He just doesn’t let something that
doesn’t matter matter.”

Here at last is the secret. A persistent inability to put the
ball where you want it as a professional baseball player is
usually the first step in a long journey of quick hooks,
teeth-gnashing and last-ditch, try-anything remedies.
(Someone once wrote to Blass
suggesting the cure was looser
underwear. He gave it a shot.)
For Blass and Sax and Sasser and
Knoblauch and Ankiel, there were two
choices: recover or retire. But those
players were failing at a critical element
of their job.
For Lester, it's incidental. So his trick for conquering his
weakness has been to do what may seem simple but is
in fact the hardest task of all: He decided not to care. SI

In a storybook return debut he
homered, and went on to round out
a more-than-respectable career as
an everyday player. In the process
he conquered the oppressive ghost
of a dysfunctional childhood, an
overbearing prison-bound father,
and an un-reflective disposition
extreme even for a jock. (He says
he'd never read an entire book in
his life, prior to being introduced by
his shrink to Cormac McCarthy.
His oral reading skills can still use
some work - he recorded the
audiobook himself - but as he
says, with the greatest credibility,
what matters is having the
courage to try.

I'd never read a book before, not front to back,
not even in school. Harvey handed me a copy
of All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy,
his go-to introduction to himself and the world
as we would try to bear it together.
“You either stick or you quit. And I wouldn’t quit you
I don’t care what you done.”
Well suppose you were ill at ease and didnt know
why. Would that mean that you might be
someplace you wasn’t supposed to be and didn’t
know it?”
“He lay in the dark thinking of all the things
he did not know about his father and he
realized that the father he knew was all the
father he would ever know.”

● “Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
● “Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”
● “Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd
always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself
that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.”
● “He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but
that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.”
● “The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even
where we will not.”
● “My daddy used to tell me not to chew on something that was eatin you.”
● “If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to
hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what.”

...maybe there was a message in All the
Pretty Horses for me—[Harvey] wouldn't
really say—and maybe the message was
that there was no message. Not everything
had to mean something.
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost
any how.” Nietzsche
“Everything can be taken from a man but one
thing: the last of the human freedoms—to
choose one’s attitude in any given set of
circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” ―
Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must
recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can
only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being
responsible.”
“Man does not simply exist but always decides what his
existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By
the same token, every human being has the freedom to
change at any instant.”

Years later, I learned this was the book he'd first prescribed
for Jim Abbott, another pitcher with challenges, and others
he'd helped.
Jim Abbott was born September 19, 1967, in Flint, Michigan
without a right hand… threw a 4-0 no-hitter for the New York
Yankees versus Cleveland (September 4, 1993)... ended his big
league playing career in 1999.
“I knew how far a little boy or girl
could run with 50 words of
reassurance.”

...my mind lit up. It hadn't occurred to me that
there would be books I would enjoy, that I'd
learn from, that would offer a moment away
from the noise. That experience —not only
did I read every word, cover to cover, but I
was sad it had to end—led me into
bookstores, to James Patterson, to
Dan Brown ...
“Everything is
possible. The
impossible just
takes longer.”
“Sooner or later we've
all got to let go of our
past.”

Pitchers and Catchers (Book) Report: What did
players read during the offseason?
Rich Hill (Dodgers)
"Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," a New Yorker article by John Updike
I was sent this article and, until I read it, I didn't realize that Ted Williams had two stretches in
the military, in the prime of his career. The year after he hit .406, he hit .356. Then, he's in the
military for three years (WWII), and comes back to hit .342. And he goes back to war [in Korea]
and, in his first full year back, hits .345. ... It was an amazing story.
That’s as good as it gets, and he kind of misses the whole elegiac point of Updike’s literary home run.
We shouldn’t expect athletes to be intellectuals. Or vice versa. Obviously.

Ankiel's comeback represents a triumph of growth, self-overcoming,
and self-knowledge that offers both inspiration and circumspect
cautionary humility. It transcends sport. He still doesn't know what
happened to rob him of his athletic gift and confidence, but his
perseverance gives the lie to F. Scott Fitzgerald's bromide: there are
second acts in American life.
(Fitzgerald didn’t really believe that himself, btw. He was an optimist,
forever seeking “the green light.”)
Ankiel’s improbable life,
anyway, is one that invites
reflection on the philosophies
of Nietzsche (“what doesn’t kill
me”) and Emerson (“up again
old heart”) and almost defies
reduction to cliche.

To those human beings who are
of any concern to me I wish
suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-
treatment, indignities — I wish
that they should not remain
unfamiliar with profound self-
contempt, the torture of self-
mistrust, the wretchedness of the
vanquished: I have no pity for
them, because I wish them the
only thing that can prove today
whether one is worth anything or
not — that one endures. WP B’p
Examine the lives of the best and
most fruitful people and peoples
and ask yourselves whether a tree
that is supposed to grow to a
proud height can dispense with
bad weather and storms; whether
misfortune and external
resistance, some kinds of hatred,
jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust,
hardness, avarice, and violence
do not belong among the
favorable conditions without which
any great growth even of virtue is
scarcely possible. GS 19

But here’s the thing: It
won’t break you. It
won’t defeat you. And
you’ll actually be a
better man for it.
And that’s what I want
you to take away from
this part of your life.
You are a strong
person. Always
remember that.
What does not destroy me, makes me
stronger…
All truly great thoughts are conceived
while walking…
Without music, life would be a mistake…
Freedom is the will to be responsible for
ourselves…
If we possess a why of life we can put up
with almost any how…
Man does not strive for happiness; only
the Englishman does that….

“We dress our garden, eat our dinners,
discuss the household with our wives, and
these things make no impression, are
forgotten next week; but in the solitude to
which every man is always returning, he
has a sanity and revelations, which in his
passage into new worlds he will carry
with him. Never mind the ridicule, never
mind the defeat: up again, old heart! — it
seems to say, — there is victory yet for all
justice; and the true romance which the
world exists to realize, will be the
transformation of genius into practical
power.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential
Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson -
Experience
Up again, old heart!
[He] sought to instill
confidence and
courage in his
democratic audience…
He knew how the
world eats at our
attention.
John Updike, Big Dead
White Male

“Even in the mud and scum of
things, something always,
always sings.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If you are going
through hell, keep
going.”
― Winston S. Churchill
“
Never, never, never give
in!”
“It is not enough that we
do our best; sometimes
we must do what is
required.”
“Continuous effort - not
strength or intelligence
- is the key to unlocking
our potential.”

Return of the Natural
In the fable, the farm boy phenom makes
his way to the big city to amaze the world
with his arm. At a stop at a fair on the train
ride to Chicago, he strikes out the Babe
Ruth of his time on three blazing pitches.
Enter the Dark Lady. Before he can reach
the stadium for his tryout, she shoots him
and leaves him for dead.
It is 16 years later and Roy Hobbs returns,
but now as a hitter and outfielder. (He can
never pitch again because of the wound.)
He leads his team to improbable glory,
ending the tale with a titanic home run that,
in the now-iconic movie image, explodes
the stadium lights in a dazzling cascade of
white. (⅕)

In real life, the kid doesn't look like
Robert Redford, but he throws like
Roy Hobbs: unhittable, unstoppable. In
his rookie year, appropriately the
millennial year 2000, he throws it by
everyone. He pitches the St. Louis
Cardinals to a division title, playing so
well that his manager anoints him
starter for the opening game of the
playoffs, a position of honor and -- for
21-year-old Rick Ankiel -- fatal
exposure. (⅖)

His collapse is epic. He can't find the
plate. In the third inning he walks four
batters and throws five wild pitches
(something not seen since 1890) before
Manager Tony La Russa mercifully
takes him out of the game.
The kid is never the same. He never
recovers his control. Five miserable
years in the minors trying to come
back. Injuries. Operations. In 2005, he
gives up pitching forever.

Then, last week, on Aug. 9 [‘07] he is called up from
Triple-A. Same team. Same manager. Rick Ankiel is
introduced to a roaring Busch Stadium crowd as the
Cardinals' starting right fielder. (4/6)

In the seventh inning, with two outs,
he hits a three-run home run to seal
the game for the Cardinals. Two days
later, he hits two home runs and
makes one of the great catches of the
year -- over the shoulder, back to the
plate, full speed… (⅘)

Ronald Reagan, I was once told, said he
liked "The Natural" except that he didn't
understand why the Dark Lady shoots Roy
Hobbs. Reagan, the preternatural optimist,
may have had difficulty fathoming tragedy,
but no one knows why Hobbs is shot. It is
fate, destiny, nemesis. Perhaps the dawning
of knowledge, the coming of sin. Or more
prosaically, the catastrophe that awaits
everyone from a single false move, wrong
turn, fatal encounter. Every life has such a
moment. What distinguishes us is
whether -- and how -- we ever come back.
(Krauthammer/WaPo 8.17.07 5/5)

Rick Ankiel homers in his debut game as an outfielder

Before we go any further, let’s acknowledge a possible
elephant in the room: “I was in the [Dec. ‘07] Mitchell
Report… from January-December 2004… I bought
HGH and injected it.”
“Four years before, I’d undergone Tommy John surgery… a guy I knew at my
gym suggested HGH… I went home and looked up HGH. I read through
MLB’s list of banned substances. No HGH… In 2005, when MLB banned
HGH, I stopped using HGH… A couple years later, in September 2007, the
clinic where I received my HGH got busted.”

“So, on what otherwise was one of the best nights of my baseball life--I’d hit 2
home runs and had 7 RBI in Pittsburgh and was as of then batting .358 with 9
homers and 29 RBI across 24 games--a clubhouse attendance sidled up to me in
the dugout and said, [GM] ‘Walt Jocketty’s on the phone .. So that sucked.”
Sucked for him at that
moment, for sure. I leave it
to you to decide if you
believe him, and if you
think it detracts from his
achievement. My view: with
or without HGH, Ankiel’s
perseverance and
resilience was astonishing
and is inspiring.

Richard Linklater’s movie
Everybody Wants Some!! follows
the lives of college baseball
players over a weekend in 1980,
as they attempt to define
themselves en route to adulthood.
In one pivotal scene, Jake, a
freshman pitcher, talks about his
college admission essay, which
compares baseball to Sisyphus
from Greek mythology… Crooked
Scoreboard
“The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

“We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

Letter to My Younger Self
...By 2000, you’re going to already be a
top-of-the-rotation major league starter
for the Cards. You’ll be 20. Living your
dream. Doing what you love...
But here’s the thing about that….
You cannot allow baseball to become
your entire life, your complete identity. As
wonderful as the game is, and as much
as you love this sport, you also need to
work on developing yourself as a
person...

October 3, 2000.
It’s going to be a Tuesday. The
weather will be perfect — almost
too perfect for early fall in St. Louis.
Eighty two, with a slight breeze.
Blue skies and sunshine.
You’ll be starting Game 1 of the
NLDS at Busch Stadium against the
Atlanta Braves and a future Hall of
Famer named Greg Maddux.
I know, right? Unreal...

You’re going to be staked to a 6–0 lead
in the first inning, and you’ll be cruising
along. Then, in the top of the third you’ll
throw a cutter to Andruw Jones. It will be
off the inside corner a bit, and maybe a
little low. It won’t be a terrible pitch, but
it’ll get past the catcher for a wild pitch.
It happens. No big thing, really.
Except.…
For some reason, your mind will
immediately go to this thought:
Millions and millions of people just saw
me throw a wild pitch on national
television...

That October 3rd nightmare is
going to hit you like a ton of bricks.
After the game, you’ll blame
everything on a mechanical hiccup.
“This is nothing,” you’ll tell the
reporters gathered around your
locker. “It will never happen again.”
That’s what you’ll say.
But … you won’t be sure, really.
Because you will have no idea what
the f*** happened to you out there
on that mound against the Braves.
When you take the hill next, for a
second-round matchup with the
Mets, and proceed to throw the ball
over Timo Perez’s head, toss five
pitches to the backstop in the first
inning and get pulled after getting
only two outs….
That’s when you’ll know...

You’ll talk with a sports psychologist for
hours and hours about your childhood, and
how your dad called you terrible names and
didn’t show you the love you deserved as a
kid. You’ll drink beer and smoke weed.
You’ll throw hundreds of pitches —
thousands, maybe — at a particular spot on
a brick wall to show yourself that you can
still be precise with your pitches. You’ll
read articles about Steve Blass and Steve
Sax and Chuck Knoblauch, and all the other
guys who never got back to their former
level of success after they ran into throwing
problems.

And when you come back to camp the following
spring, there will be 30 cameras on you anytime
you go out on the field and play catch…
Every day will be a struggle, and before
you know it you’ll have gone from that
invincible kid who blazed his way
through the minors to someone who has
no idea where the ball is headed when
he releases it from his hand.
And you’ll have no idea how to fix it.
“I'd like you to visualize yourself giving me
the ball and returning to the dugout.”

They’ll send you down to the minors —
all the way down … Johnson City, rookie
ball…
When the throwing problems continue
during several seasons in the minors —
and the nightmares persist and the injuries
begin to mount — be open to another way
forward…
At one point, in 2005, you’re going
to retire from baseball.
But when your retirement is only
four hours old, you’re going to get a
phone call.
“Are you ready to go play?”

Be willing to reinvent yourself … and then dive in with all you’ve got. Become an outfielder, kid.

That first at bat back at
Busch, pay attention to
your front leg.For a split
second, you’re going to have a
thought that will remind you
of something that crossed
your mind during that playoff
outing against the Braves in
2000.
People are going to see my
leg shaking. Everyone
watching this game on TV
can totally see my leg
going crazy right now.
But then, just like that, the thought
will disappear.
And even after you pop up the first
pitch you see, the Cards fans will
still clap like crazy.
With that applause, they’re going to
be telling you that they’ve got your
back. That they always did. That
you’re someone they care about.
Seven innings later, you’ll reward
that loyalty with a moment so
special and surreal that it almost
seems too good to be true.

Two outs in the bottom of the
seventh, runners on second and
third.
At that point your redbirds will be
up 2–0 over the Padres. Two–1
count.
You’re going to take a curve on the
outside of the plate and yank it out
towards right field.
When it crosses over the fence,
that stadium is going to go nuts.
It’s going to feel like you’re floating
around the bases, and it will all
happen so fast, but as you’re
making your way home be sure to
look up into the crowd.
Look at the joy on all those faces.
Feel that happiness…
There are going to be so many points along
the way where they could have bailed on
you. The Cardinals, though, and the whole
city of St. Louis really … they are going to
stick with you.

...raise your own kids as Cardinals
fans and have a blast sharing your
mutual love for the greatest
baseball franchise in the entire
world… Tell them about the yips,
and all the other things that could
have gotten the best of you during
your life.
Tell them about how you never let
any of those things defeat you, and
about how you are living, breathing
proof that they can do anything they
put their minds to.
The moral here is clear, isn’t it?:
persevere, for yourself and for your team.
But if your kids refuse to be Cardinals’
fans - mine chose the Yankees and the
Cubs - give them a pass. They’re your
kids.
The Players’ Tribune, 9.28.17

Epilogue, 4.18.17.The Phenomenon ends with Rick finally reclaiming the mound, for a ceremonial first
pitch in Springfield, MO. But he did it again, in St. Louis, with his old catcher Mike Matheny behind the
plate and his boys at his side. I think more than a few of us here will concur: perseverance doesn’t end with
publication. Or retirement.

“Most of the people my age is
dead. You could look it up” was
the way Casey Stengel put it.
He was seventy-five at the time

“We gotta play 'em one day at a time.”

“Remember to look up at the stars and
not down at your feet. Try to make sense
of what you see and wonder about what
makes the universe exist. Be curious. And
however difficult life may seem, there is
always something you can do and
succeed at.
It matters that you don't just give up.”
― Stephen Hawking

Roger Angell on “Getting Old”-every
day is a comeback, and a bonus
“It must be this hovering knowledge,
that two-ton safe swaying on a frayed
rope just over my head, that makes
everyone so glad to see me again.
‘How great you’re looking! Wow, tell
me your secret!’ they kindly cry when
they happen upon me crossing the
street or exiting a dinghy or departing
an X-ray room, while the little balloon
over their heads reads, ‘Holy shit—
he’s still vertical!’”
This Old Man-Life in the nineties

“...a majority of us people over seventy-five
keep surprising ourselves with happiness.
Put me on that list. Our children are adults
now and mostly gone off, and let’s hope full
of their own lives. We’ve outgrown our
ambitions. If our wives or husbands are still
with us, we sense a trickle of contentment
flowing from the reliable springs of routine,
affection in long silences, calm within the
light boredom of well-worn friends, retold
stories, and mossy opinions…” Angell

“The thoughts of age are short,
short thoughts. I don’t read
Scripture and cling to no life
precepts, except perhaps to
Walter Cronkite’s rules for old
men, which he did not deliver
over the air: Never trust a fart.
Never pass up a drink. Never
ignore an erection.”

...old age takes many men almost
by surprise: it sneaks up on them,
and is all the more disturbing for
that. In contrast, women are all too
aware of aging, starting with their
first gray hair or wrinkle. By the
time they’re in their fifties, they’re
well accustomed to the losses that
come with age. That may make
them better able to help and
support their husbands as the men
find that having been a master of
the universe is no protection
against old age… Marcia Angell

The Mariners treated their fans to a rare sort of rally. On June 2, 2017 at San Diego,
the Mariners fell into a 12-2 hole after five innings, the sort of deficit that usually leads to
a position player on the mound for mop-up duty by the ninth. Instead, Seattle roared
back for five runs in the sixth and nine in the seventh.
On Aug. 5, 2001, with Seattle in the midst of a 116-win season, it scored eight runs in
the third inning at Cleveland to jump ahead, 12-0. Game over, right? Not so fast. With
the Tribe trailing, 12-2, it chipped away with three runs in the seventh, four in the eighth
and five with two outs in the ninth. Omar Vizquel ripped a game-tying bases-loaded
triple, and Jolbert Cabrera singled home Kenny Lofton with the walk-off run in the 11th
in a 15-14 game.
More great comebacks...

“A good half of the art of living is
resilience.”
“One's doing well if age improves even
slightly one's capacity to hold on to that
vital truism: "This too shall pass.”
― Alain de Botton

“Each one of us is more than the worst
thing we've ever done.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, Option B: Facing
Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding
Joy

Ankiel didn’t write his book, he had
a ghost, but he reads the
audiobook… until his sports shrink
gave him Cormac McCarthy’s “All
the Little Horses” he’d not read a
book. Ever.
Beware, baseball lit-culturists, the
overintellectualization of sport.
There’s overthinking as well as
underthinking...

Self-overcoming, will to power,
power of will, free will, attention,
habit, daily-ness, persistence,
perseverance, +psych, “nature
fix”… Aristotle, Nietzsche, WJ, SoL

The Only Way to Keep
Your Resolutions
...our social emotions. These are
the emotions — things like gratitude
and compassion — that support the
positive aspects of social life. For years
I’ve been studying the effects of these
emotions on decision-making and
behavior, and I’ve found that unlike
reason and willpower, they naturally
incline us to be patient and
persevere. When you are
experiencing these emotions, self-
control is no longer a battle, for they
work not by squashing our desires for
pleasure in the moment but by
increasing how much we value
the future. nyt

Dillard observes with a kind of nihilistic buoyancy, we calibrate to everything — our triumphant resilience to the most
sundering tragedies and our tragic habituation to the most joyful stimuli stem from the same root. Joy and sorrow are equally
transient. Even transcendence is transient. She writes:
We were born and bored at a stroke… Enough is enough.
One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief.
From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of
splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of
home. (Teaching a Stone to Talk, quoted by M. Popova)

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