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Mariners vs. Yankees |
Mets vs. Cardinals
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Friday, October 13
Ankiel's October torture chamber strikes again
By Jayson Stark
ESPN.com
ST. LOUIS -- In the end, he was only a wild and crazy subplot. In the end, Rick Ankiel was just a rocky line in the box score, full of numbers as crooked as the pitches he threw.
But in the beginning, Rick Ankiel was a horror flick, a carnival ride and a crazed sniper rolled into one.
|  | | Ankiel unleashed five pitches to the backstop in the first inning. |
In the big picture of St. Louis Cardinals postseason history, the world will barely note Ankiel's now-you-see-him, now-you-don't start Thursday in Game 2 of the National League Championship Series. Ultimately, he wasn't even the pitcher of record in the Cardinals' crushing 6-5 loss to the Mets, a loss that left them behind in this series, two games to none.
But in the little picture -- the picture that examines where the Cardinals go from here -- it's time to start worrying about the future of a 21-year-old prospect so bright that only two pitchers in the National League held opposing hitters to a lower average than Ankiel's .219: Kevin Brown (.213) and Chan Ho Park (.214).
Over the two starts Ankiel has made in this postseason, he has practically made Steve Blass look like Greg Maddux. He has made Mitch Williams look like Dennis Eckersley.
Last week, in Game 1 of the Braves series, he didn't make it out of the third inning, leaving behind a messy trail of five wild pitches, six walks and dazed statisticians.
But Thursday night, he might have been worse, if that's possible. He didn't survive the first inning. His first pitch almost conked Timo Perez in the head. He threw five balls off the backstop on the fly. There were two more wild pitches, three more walks.
Of the 34 pitches he fired up there, the Mets swung at only six of them. At a couple of points, he was so desperate to throw a strike, he took 5 mph off his fastball. This exhibition got so absurd that Perez actually appeared to be taking all the way on a (gulp) 3-and-2 pitch to lead off the game.
"After the first pitch, I thought, 'Maybe that slipped,' " first baseman Will Clark said. "But after he did it a couple of more times, I had to go out there and tell him, 'Hey, you know that backstop's not a pitch-back.' "
It was humor intended to lighten the mood. But nothing helped Ankiel on this night. Not humor. Not visits from his pitching coach. Not advice from his catcher. Not the long week he spent in between starts trying to correct the worst October glitch in pitching history.
"I kept telling myself to just relax and throw strikes," Ankiel said afterward. "But it just wasn't happening."
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It's a tough thing to watch. I'm sure the guys in Atlanta have seen it when Mark Wohlers was pitching and balls were going all over the place. What causes that? I'm sure a little bit of it is that he's out of whack mechanically. But the biggest thing is, you start thinking about it. ” |
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— Andy Benes |
He denied he was nervous. He bristled when someone asked if even part of his control problems was mental.
"No," he said sternly. "It's mechanical. I'm just not keeping my left shoulder in."
He headed for the video room after he left the game, he said, and watched the gruesome replays. And his problem, he said, "was obvious. It's a joke, it was so obvious. I just didn't finish my pitches. And balls were sailing all over the place."
If a guy throws one pitch that almost clanks off The Arch, it's just a blooper tape to be played later. But when he does it this many times over two starts -- and in a forum this public -- it becomes more than that. Way more.
Let's review what Ankiel has wrought so far in this postseason. In two starts, he has thrown 100 pitches -- and gotten 10 outs. Only 46 of those 100 pitches were strikes. But seven of them were wild pitches. And seven more were called ball four.
"It's probably the worst feeling you could have," Ankiel said, "especially at a time like this. I just need to dig deep and do better next time."
But will there even be a next time after these last two nightmares? Just over the last two innings he was out there, Ankiel has been a one-man Stephen King novel. In those two innings, he threw 72 pitches -- and exactly 13 were swung at. He threw almost twice as many wild pitches (seven) as he got outs (four).
And the people with the bats in their hands weren't exactly hitting. They felt more as if they were standing at the wrong end of a shooting gallery.
"The thing that's most surprising," Clark said, "is that the last two months, since I've been here, his last 11 starts he's been so dominating. To all of a sudden, out of the clear blue, just lose command the way he has and start throwing his best pitch to the screen, I don't understand that. I've seen guys lose it, left-right, or a little up-down -- but not to the point where the catcher needs springs in his shoes."
In those last 11 starts, Ankiel allowed only 46 hits in 66 innings, striking out 76 and running up a 2.59 ERA. Over his last seven starts, he was 4-0, with a 1.97 ERA. And by the way, he threw 12 wild pitches all year in 175 innings.
But now that his radar is this badly on the fritz, those numbers are as meaningless as a WB sitcom. How does he fix this? Is it really just mechanics, or do the Cardinals need to send a search party to his inner psyche? And most significantly for the moment, how do the Cardinals use him from here?
His manager, Tony La Russa, didn't answer that question Thursday night. But his cryptic words seemed to suggest that we may have seen the last of Rick Ankiel in this particular postseason.
On two different occasions in his visit to the postgame interview room, La Russa tried to shift the responsibility away from Ankiel's shoulders and onto his own.
He said at one point: "The manager's responsibility is to put guys in the right position. I blame myself. I don't blame Rick Ankiel. He's too special."
Asked later if that meant he felt he shouldn't have used Ankiel, La Russa went into almost the same speech.
"Well, I think that my responsibility is to put players in the right position to succeed," he said. "And before anybody starts kicking Rick around, I think the blame is on me for putting him there. That's where it ought to end. This guy's too special to look at any other way."
Ankiel's reaction to those comments was a simple: "He can't take the blame. It's all my fault."
But if the manager is blaming himself for sending this guy to the mound Thursday, it would be hard to foresee him inflicting any more self-torture and sending him out again.
When you reach the depths that Ankiel has reached, you don't start on-the-job training in October's unique pressure chamber.
"Guys were talking about it on the bench," said fellow pitcher Andy Benes. "It's a tough thing to watch. I'm sure the guys in Atlanta have seen it when Mark Wohlers was pitching and balls were going all over the place. What causes that? I'm sure a little bit of it is that he's out of whack mechanically. But the biggest thing is, you start thinking about it."
Yeah. Him and the rest of the free world.
"I hope to get another start," Ankiel said. "But I'm here to do whatever they want me to do."
What he meant was that he was there to pitch again in the postseason. But at this point, all the Cardinals really want him to do is show up in Jupiter, Fla., next spring and forget all of this ever happened.
Jayson Stark is a senior writer at ESPN.com.
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