Volume 2, Issue 80: I’m the Man Who Loves You
"Stones to throw and feet that run, but they come back home, make no difference, ever known."
I don’t find athletes interesting. This is a dangerous thing for a professional sportswriter to admit, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t true. I’ve spoken to some interesting athletes — Sean Doolittle, Michael Bennett, Jennifer Capriati, Adam Wainwright, Jeremy Lin, among others. But on the whole, athletes aren’t particularly fascinating to me. This is not their fault, or it’s at least less their fault than it is mine. The nature of being an athlete is focusing, at the exclusion of all else, wholly on the task at hand. The outside world is nothing but a distraction, and therefore not worthy of much consideration or reflection. That’s fine: I get it. Being an athlete is hard and requires that level of intense concentration. But as someone who lives in that outside world and considers and reflects upon it quite a bit, that lifestyle doesn’t leave much conversational crossover for us. They’re just the people playing, you know? I’ve always considered my sportswriting to be less about the people who make up our sports than the experience of the sports; what it means, for you and me and everyone else, to watch sports and care about sports and invest so much of our time and effort into them. The players? I’m glad they’re there. They’re fun to watch. But I have a lot more to say about us than I do about them.
When you combine this with the fact that we know nothing about what our athletes are like in real life—that you never know when your favorite player is going to turn out to be a spouse abuser, or an anti-vaxxer, or a Curt Schilling—I have no real hero worship when it comes to athletes. I don’t want their autographs, I don’t want to take selfies with them, I frankly am more comfortable knowing as little about them as possible. Life is complicated enough without knowing your favorite team’s best player is an asshole. (Honestly, I’d be the world’s worst beat reporter.) I try to get this across to the children who live in this house as well. Do not try to be like Jack Flaherty or Jake Fromm, or think that they are somehow any different or better than you. Your Cardinals fandom and your Georgia fandom belongs to you, kids, not them.
But then there is Rick Ankiel.
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The story of Rick Ankiel is one of the most incredible sports stories of the last 25 years. Here’s a long explainer I wrote about him when he retired from baseball, but here’s the short version:
Ankiel was a phenom pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals back in the year 2000, a 20-year-old flamethrower who possessed the most incredible Bugs Bunny curveball anybody had ever seen. Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa said he was the most talented pitcher he’d come across, and he was the great hope for the then-fledgling Cardinals: The thunderbolt of talent that would lead us to the promised land. He was dominant upon arrival until, in a playoff game against the Atlanta Braves, he suddenly and without warning or explanation lost the ability to throw a strike. A pitcher who’d had pinpoint control was, out of nowhere, throwing pitches 10 feet out of the strike zone. It was 19 years ago this month, and it’s still impossible to watch:
Ankiel had, to put it simply, the “yips.” For no reason—he still does not know why—he could no longer throw a strike. (Speculation still runs rampant, with “tumultuous growing-up experience” still the clubhouse leader.) Ankiel’s story took a series of turns after that, with him heading back to the minor leagues, having several arm surgeries, returning to the majors only have to the yips return , before he ultimately quit and decided, on LaRussa’s encouragement, to become a hitter … which ultimately got him back to the majors six years later, in a comeback game that is still one of the happiest sports moments I’ve ever seen in person.
You can read all about Ankiel’s story in his surprisingly compelling autobiography — which I wrote about for The Atlantic — and if you’re afraid of books, a documentary called Truth Be Told: The Rick Ankiel Story is airing on Fox Sports 1 all this month. It’s quite a tale. It is the totality of sports in miniature: Talent, dedication, achievement, adversity, tragedy, resilience, perseverance, triumph, more adversity, more resilience, more achievement, more glory, more pain … and all mysterious, inexplicable, unknowable.
But I am a part of this story. There is no athlete I have written about more, and more personally, than Rick Ankiel. I was writing about Rick Ankiel before anyone ever paid me to write anything. I used to write about him for Deadspin on a near daily basis, from his second retirement to his comeback to his breakthrough to his connection to HGH to all of it. I used to wear my ANKIEL 66 jersey to every Cardinals game I went to, even before he made his comeback, even before anyone thought he’d ever try.
I wrote about Ankiel so often that one day, around 2008 or so, I got an email from a woman named Lory. She, as it turned out, is Rick Ankiel’s wife. The email was funny and lighthearted but also curious. She had heard about this website that wrote about her husband all the time, and she thought she’d send an email to make sure the writers wasn’t, you know, scary. I did my best to assure her I was at least relatively normal, and we started a correspondence that has kept up sporadically through the years. (We even bought our cars from the same dealership.) Whenever Ankiel would do anything, including eventually retiring, people would always contact me. He’s your guy. We sort of couldn’t help but get somewhat connected in the public consciousness. It became a fun in-joke.
When Ankiel’s book came out in 2017, I had him on my old Sports On Earth podcast, and a large part of our conversation ended up being about how often people kept bringing the other up to each of us. He was genuine and kind and funny and relaxed in a way the famously-media-shy player never was when he was an active player. (He even turned out to be a good broadcaster for Fox Sports, which I would have never seen coming.) I didn’t really know him. But I liked him. We stayed in touch. And considering all he had gone through … I found myself feeling real, human concern for him. He wasn’t just a player I cheered for. He, and his story, was a lot more than that. I had to admit it.
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On Wednesday afternoon, the Cardinals played the Atlanta Braves in the decisive Game Five of their National League Division Series. I’d secured some fancy seats, and before the game, I sat with my parents—no games on school nights, sorry William—in one of those clubs underneath the stadium where you can have people deliver you onion rings for free. (Sports fandom is a glamorous life.) My Dad got up to grab a round of beers for the table, and he was gone a little longer than we’d expected him to be. My parents are now both old enough that whenever they don’t return from somewhere in the same span you thought they would, you start getting antsy.
He finally returned, three beers and several artery-hardening brats in hand, with a huge smile on his face.
“You’re never going to believe who I just ran into.”
While he was waiting on his Miller Lites—no Anheuser-Busch products at SunTrust Park—he turned to his right … and there was Rick Ankiel. Dad, who never listened to the old podcast and had no idea I’d ever corresponded with Ankiel at all, of course told him that he was a big fan of his and that his son Will used to write about him all the time. (My father is the sort of person who will try to sell you one of my books if he sits next to you on an airplane. I apologize in advance if this ever happens to you.) Ankiel looked at him oddly. “Wait, Will Leitch? I’ve been trying to get in touch with him.”
That documentary that Fox Sports 1 is airing, Truth Be Told, features four talking heads: Ankiel, LaRussa, Wainwright and me. I taped a four-hour interview for this documentary when I was in NYC at the end of July—I was a little hungover, which I hope no one watching can tell—as, essentially, the film’s unofficial narrator, the one telling the 10,000-feet-up version of this story while Ankiel tells his personal side. I still have not seen this documentary, by the way; it’s actually really hard to find, because Fox Sports 1 is a terrible network with terrible people on its airwaves. But apparently Ankiel and Lory were thankful for my participation anyway, for my perspective on their story, and they were trying to find me to say thank you. Fortunately, they’d just run into my dad.
So they came over, and, for the first time after writing about Ankiel and corresponding with him and his wife for more than a decade, we met in person. They were extremely nice. Their kids are the same age as mine, both boys, both, like mine, so incredibly different from one another it’s sort of unbelievable they’re being raised in the same house. We groused about FS1’s airtimes of the documentary, we laughed about how long we had to sit for the interviews, we shared old stories about the first time I saw him play and the first time he realized there was a weirdo on the internet writing about him all the time. It was nice. It was a nice experience.
I don’t have much in common with Rick Ankiel. I don’t like crossbow hunting, for example, and he doesn’t like Bong Joon-Ho movies. Any political conversation between us, I suspect, would end in yelling, punches or both. (Or me just running away.) I actually think it’s possible he was cheering for the Braves on Wednesday. We’re not friends.
But we are connected. And his story is one that is a universal human one, one whose lessons can be applied to one’s life whether you care about sports or not. Just because I don’t want his autograph and probably couldn’t carry on too much of a conversation about Lars Von Trier movies with him doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot I can learn from him, and, hopefully, from each other. I don’t find athletes all that interesting. But it’s probably just because I don’t know them very well. Everybody’s interesting when you get to look close enough. It’s just a matter of getting the opportunity to do so. It’s a matter of being willing to get out there and try.
Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality. You may disagree. It is your wont.
The NBA’s China Stance Is Indefensible and Inevitable, New York. Yeah, this story provided all sorts of juice this week. It continues to.
All Managers Exist To Get Fired, MLB.com. I’ve deeply enjoyed writing the daily postseason columns — I think of these like the NYmag columns, but on MLB now.
Postseason Managing: Very Different Than Regular Season Managing! MLB.com. The baseball postseason’s insane schedule has me so disoriented that it feels like I wrote this a year ago rather than a week.
The “Pay for Fair Play” Bill Changes Everything and Nothing, NBC News. Remember this story? Remember when we could keep up with things longer than a week?
Old Guys Are Owning the Postseason, MLB.com. By “old guys,” I of course mean several years younger than me.
Golf Magazine Instructional Column No. 10: Heading to Medinah, GOLF Magazine, print only. Only one of these left. I’ll sort of miss them!
Will Smith Movies, Ranked and Updated, Vulture. We put Gemini Man in there.
DC Movies, Ranked and Updated, Vulture. We put Joker in there.
Every LDS MVP Ever, MLB.com. Not about Latter Day Saints. That’s an entirely different acronym.
The Best Game Fives Ever, MLB.com. Cardinals-Nationals 2012! Never forget!
The Thirty: Every Team’s Offseason Need, MLB.com. As if I’m thinking about the offseason at all right now.
Debate Club: Best ‘80s Horror Movies, SYFY Wire. Second reference to The Fly in three weeks.
PODCASTS
Grierson & Leitch, Grierson and I did a deep dive into Joker. He also soloed on Pain & Glory and Lucy in the Sky.
Seeing Red, Bernie and I are doing daily shows throughout the playoffs.
Waitin' Since Last Saturday, we reviewed the Tennessee game and previewed the South Carolina game.
GET THIS LUNATIC OUT OF HERE 2020 POWER RANKINGS
I like Elizabeth Warren and would happily vote for her. But I wish my mind weren’t as increasingly set as it is? Biden has barely responded to the Trump stuff at all, Harris has imploded entirely, Bernie’s having heart attacks and Beto is starting to spin off into the land of the desperate and weird. (And unconstitutional.) Everything’s falling perfect for Warren right now. I hope she’s ready.
1. Elizabeth Warren
2. Cory Booker
3. Amy Klobuchar
4. Kamala Harris
5. Pete Buttigieg
6. Joe Biden
7. Bernie Sanders
8. Beto O'Rourke
9. Steve Bullock
10. Michael Bennet
11. Andrew Yang
12. Julian Castro
13. Tim Ryan
14. Mark Sanford
15. William Weld
16. Marianne Williamson
17. Tom Steyer
18. Tulsi Gabbard
19. John Delaney
20. Joe Walsh
ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!
Write me!
Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603
CURRENTLY LISTENING TO
“Fastest Horse in Town,” Sturgill Simpson. I’m brushed up on the new Wilco enough to have an opinion—it sounds a little like “Warmest” to me, but I like it—but I keep coming back to this album anyway.
GO. CARDINALS. It’s OK to get a base hit every once in a while.
Have a great weekend, all.
Best,
Will