The mystical dread of “the yips” causes baseball players to try anything to fix it. For Rick Ankiel, that included vodka.
The former St. Louis Cardinals pitcher famously lost his ability to throw the ball anywhere near the strikezone in the 2000 playoffs. After an outstanding regular season that earned him second place in the Rookie of the Year voting, he gave up seven runs and walked 11 batters in just four postseason innings.
Unable to throw strikes, he eventually stopped pitching altogether and rebranded himself as an outfielder. Before that, though, Ankiel tried to return to the mound in the 2001 season.
In an interview with Toronto’s Fan 590 radio station, Ankiel revealed that he drank vodka to calm himself down before his first start of that season.
“Before that game, I’m scared to death. I know I have no chance. Feeling the pressure of all that, right before the game I get a bottle of vodka. I just started drinking vodka. Low and behold, it kind of tamed the monster, and I was able to do what I wanted. I’m sitting on the bench feeling kind of crazy I have to drink vodka to pitch through this. It worked for that game.”
“It was one of those things like the yips, the monster, the disease. It didn’t fight fair, so I felt like I wasn’t going to fight fair either.”
Sports Illustrated notes that Ankiel did win his first start that season, beating Randy Johnson and the Arizona Diamondbacks. But it didn’t last long. He was sent to the minors, reworked his game as an outfielder and triumphantly returned to the majors with the Cardinals in 2007. In all, Ankiel played 11 MLB seasons and retired in 2013 as a New York Met.
The interview was a promotional event for Ankiel’s upcoming book, The Phenomenon: Pressure, The Yips, and the Pitch that Changed My Life. It’s sure to be a fascinating look at a mental phenomena that still impacts the Majors today.
The yips aren’t just something used to set up a few jokes in Major League 2. Ankiel and Mackey Sasser are perhaps two of the most famous cases of The yips, but Red Sox catcher Blake Swihart is reportedly struggling with it in spring training. For players, it’s terrifying, inexplicable, and sometimes impossible to overcome.
The problem is that trying to play drunk — like bowler on your local lanes knocking back High Lifes —only works for so long. It’s pretty crazy that Ankiel tried it in the first place, and even crazier that one bad outing on the mound essentially ruined his pitching career forever.
