By the Iron_Throne

Newsflash! The Cardinals have a new young left handed power starter for the season. He has a smoking fastball, and a curveball that breaks from the sun to the earth. His minor league statistics are peerless and his work in the majors has been almost without blemish. Is it Mark Mulder? Well, yeah, OK, there are TWO new, young, left handed power starters in the Cardinals rotation. Did the Cardinals trade for Johan Santana when no one was looking? Unfortunately, no. But the Cardinals do have a young fireballer of tremendous potential: Richard Alexander Ankiel. Projected to be the fifth starter to open the season while Matt Morris recovers from his off season surgery, Ankiel represents an enormous source of possible improvement for the Cardinals next year.

Assuming that Tony LaRussa resists the urge to make Ankiel a left handed specialist right out of the box, Rick would take over the departed Dan Haren’s spot in long relief and spot starter. Getting his first shot to join the team out of spring training following ligament replacement (Tommy John) surgery and a year lost to persistent elbow tendonitis, the Cardinals have relatively little invested in or expected of Ankiel for the upcoming season. What can we predict for his performance this season? After his nationally televised and thoroughly ridiculed meltdown in game one of the 2000 divisional series against Greg Maddux and the Braves (followed by two more disastrous outings in that post season), he only had three starts in the majors before last September. We can, of course, simply throw up our hands and say we don’t have enough information to make a prediction (and as an empirical scientist, that’s what my fingers are itching to do), but saying “I don’t know” with absolute certainty is surprisingly unsatisfying. Instead of treating him as a well publicized head case, it may be more accurate to simply look at him as if 2005 was his rookie season. While his failure on such a large scale and in front of a national audience is unprecedented in the long history of baseball, scores of pitchers have rough stretches and turned it around. Dismissing his entire future potential simply on a handful of games is foolish.

Since it figures so prominently in this discussion, a good first move would be to take a good look at the famous start. As it happens, I have a VHS of the game, and can see what happened without the haze of memory in my way. The game was the first of the 2000 NLDS, and the Cardinals were at home versus the NL East champion Braves. Tony LaRussa had famously not announced the starter for the game beforehand, either to unbalance the Braves, or to keep his young pitcher out of the spotlight. The game started well for Ankiel and the Cardinals, with Rick breezing through the first two innings staked to a 6-0 lead before starting the third by walking Greg Maddux on four straight fastballs, all called high, with the first and last being extremely close. Now Ankiel, at this point, was basically a two pitch pitcher. He had a fastball that was clocked up to 97 mph with good movement, and a wicked curveball, that alternated from being a an overhand 12-6 pitch all the way to a waist-to-dirt slider. He also rarely threw a change.

Always dependent on his fastball to set up his curve as an out pitch, he was about to have trouble throwing either for strikes. He put away Rafael Furcal on four fastballs, the last of which was on Furcal’s fists that was popped up to Will Clark. But on a 0-1 count to number three hitter Andruw Jones, Ankiel threw a curveball that started well outside, broke across the plate, and landed in the dirt between Jones’s feet. Having set up outside, the backup catcher Carlos Hernandez couldn’t corral the pitch and the ball got by him. 2000 was Mike Matheny’s first year with the Cardinals, and had drawn high marks for his defense. However, in a bizarre accident that only seemed to continue a series of injuries before the playoffs for the Cardinals, he cut himself on a hunting knife given to him for his birthday, severing a tendon in his thumb. Carlos Hernandez, playing with a bad back that had plagued him at the end of the season, was forced into a starting role. Given that Ankiel was a rather wild pitcher (Rick had 12 WP in 2000 already), and not having the defensive skills that Matheny had, compounded by his back (an injury that must be second only to bad knees for a catcher in terms of effect), and having far less experience with Ankiel than Matheny, the storm clouds were gathering.

Whether Ankiel and Hernandez mis-communicated on the pitch to come (there was no one on second, so the signs would have been simple), or if Rick’s curve had a lot more movement than Hernandez expected, the 0-1 pitch to Jones got away, and they were 1/5 of the way to history. The next pitch was a beautiful 12-6 curve, and again Hernandez looked crossed up, as he hopped straight up to catch a pitch that ended up below the top of the strike zone when it hit the mitt. The 2-1 pitch was a high fastball, that passed right through Hernandez’s glove in a Dimitri Young-esque fashion. The high strung Ankiel looked extremely upset at this, and walked Jones on the next pitch on a low breaking ball.

With two on and one out, and the heart of the Brave’s order up, Ankiel proceeded to implode on national television. After getting ahead of Chipper Jones 0-2 with two great pitches, a fastball stayed high out of the zone and seems to bother Ankiel; he’s clearly having intermittent problems with his grip or release point. A 1-2 pitch went in the dirt, but that was where his curve often ended, as it broke so much that it ended up in the dirt as often as any forkball. But the 2-2 pitch was a rainbow that ends up at the backstop, though it bounced back to Hernandez and keeps Maddux at third. Ankiel then came back with a good fastball foul followed by a wicked curve to strike Chipper out with his tremendous movement.

That confidence was short lived, tough, as the first pitch to Andres Galarraga flew high out of his grip and only a brilliant move by Hernandez saved the third wild pitch of the inning. Ankiel then got ahead 1-2 before falling behind on two good pitches that just missed. A wild pitch over Hernandez’s head finally brought Maddux home and put Furcal on third. Brian Jordan then brought him home on a rope over Renteria’s head on a first pitch fastball. The next batter, our own Reggie Sanders took the first two to him before the 1-1 pitch ended up three feet short of the plate and ricocheted up and glanced off of Hernandez’s glove for another wild pitch, the record setting fifth. Sanders watched the next two pitches come close, with ball four ending up outside with Hernandez set up inside. Walt Weiss put the nail in Rick’s coffin on a 0-1 fastball that Ankiel just threw up which ended up in left to score two more. Ironically, it was a strike.

Rick was pulled from the game, which the Cardinals went on to win 7-5, along with the series. He started game two of the NLCS, but only lasted two-thirds of an inning, with three walks and two wild pitches. A short relief stint in game five had two more wild pitches. At this point, the wildness had seemed to have stuck. The series of unfortunate events had destroyed his confidence and derailed his career.

This shouldn’t sound like an indictment of either Carlos Hernandez for his part in the wild pitches, or Tony LaRussa for his mind games. This string of events that happened to Ankiel are almost sitcom-esque in nature. The communication between pitcher and catcher had broken down, and the normal remedies of visits to the mound didn’t solve the problem. Already a wild pitcher with a lot of movement on his fastball, he had the misfortune to be thrust into the worst of circumstances, and came out a wreck. At least when Lucy Ricardo had everything go wrong for her, you knew it would all be resolved by the end of the half hour. Ankiel’s happy ending still remains to be written.

Stay tuned for part two: Rick Ankiel, a Phoenix Reborn?

Iron_Throne