It’s a play I’d made hundreds of times in my career as a softball pitcher.
Field a ground ball, fire a strike to first base.
As with many sports, I’d taken hundreds of thousands of ground ball reps over the years so that during games, the play was made from muscle memory. Catch, turn, throw.
Routine.
Until one day during my junior year of high school when I fielded a ground ball, turned towards first base, and fired the ball 10 feet over the first basemen’s head.
I was not nervous, I was not anxious, I was not injured.
But from that point forward, something inexplicable happened to me every time I fielded a ground ball on the mound.
I had developed a case of the yips.
The yips, for those of you who don’t follow baseball or golf (though it happens in other sports) is defined as the sudden and unexplained loss of fine motor skills in athletes. Perhaps the most famous case in history is that of Steve Blass, a former pitcher for my beloved Pittsburgh Pirates. After a very successful 10 year career in the major leagues, he developed a case of the yips that was so severe, he was out of baseball within two years after his first wild pitch.
He was 32 years old. (Now when this happens to a pitcher, they call it Steve Blass disease).
In 2000, I was watching a playoff game between the Atlanta Braves and the Saint Louis Cardinals when Rick Ankiel, a phenom drafted by the Cardinals only one year before, threw a pitch in the dirt.
And he never recovered his pitching career.
Even though my experience with the yips wasn’t life altering, it was by far one of the strangest phenomenons I ever experienced. I could no longer trust my body, or trust my skills.
Field a ball and throw it home? Sure. Turn to throw it to first base, and my arm would suddenly feel almost disconnected from my body and I couldn’t predict the result. I no longer had control over something that I had always had control over.
As I recently listened to an interview with Ankiel, I was struck at the sheer terror he must have felt at his body and mind’s inexplicable betrayal of his gift. And I was thinking of how often that happens to so many of us - outside of the sports arena.
I think of the mental health struggles - the crippling anxiety that keeps a lonely person from meeting new people. The devastating depression that hijacks your belief system about your talents, your skills, and your worth.
I think of the physical deterioration of our bodies that leave us standing in a pile of “used to’s” instead of focusing on our “can do’s.”
Many of us have our own yips on this journey in life. We don’t get a say in our genetics that leave us in need of new knees and hips before we turn 60.
But we do get a say in how our story goes.
Rick Ankiel, the phenom that he was, set out to write the story of a successful major league pitcher, with all of the accolades that go with it. Instead, he wrote a different tale.
Ankiel spent the better part of six years trying to solve his pitching woes. But in 2006, when he threw only three strikes in 20 pitches during a spring training game, he re-invented himself. And in 2007 he returned to the major leagues as a right fielder, and is the only player besides Babe Ruth to have homered as both a pitcher and a position player.
He went on to play another seven years in the pros as an outfielder.
It wasn’t the story he set out to write. But I’m not sure he would have actually written the book that he did write (called The Phenomenon), if not for that one pitch that changed his life forever.
Sometimes we have to stop fighting what we want to do and start doing what we were meant to do.