Yankees: The mysterious world of baseball’s lost and found skill set

The Yankees have seen several players this season, including two major components of the team, inexplicably lose “something,” before finding it again. No one knows where it went. All we know is it’s been found again. What’s up with that?

Yankees fans will recall earlier this season when Tyler Clippard was run out of town after a slew of ineffective relief appearances that left Joe Girardi and others scratching their head, wondering if this is the same guy who made the All Star team twice and we drafted all the way back in 2003.

What happened overnight to cause a slide that continues even to today when the Houston Astros claimed Clippard from the trash heap in a deal with the White Sox in late August?

There was never any concern about injury with Clippard, and he never gave the Yankees any indication of something being “off” in his delivery or pitching mechanics. His skill set just vanished in mid-air.

More recently, the Yankees were confounded by a stretch of games in which Aroldis Chapman was a mere shadow of himself, the flamethrower who regularly topped 100 on the gun. Pronounced healthy following shoulder surgery, Girardi was forced to turn the closer’s job over to Dellin Betances.

Just as suddenly, Chapman is back to his old self, recording his 22nd save of the season and 200th of his career yesterday in a nail-biter against the Tampa Bay Rays, striking out all four of the batters he faced.

The secret life of pitchers

In the May 2017 issue of Atlantic, Will Leitch attempts to explain the phenomenon in a piece he titles, The Secret Life of Pitchers. It’s a compelling piece of journalism that features Rick Ankiel‘s story of how he lost, but never found, his pitching skill set.

In an excerpt, Ankiel can recall the exact moment when everything fell apart and vanished. He explains:

"Ankiel notes the exact moment that everything fell apart: “Forty-fourth pitch of the game. Third inning. One out. A one-strike count to Andruw Jones. Greg Maddux at first base. Cardinals 6, Braves 0. Throw strikes, keep the ball in the big part of the park, nothing crazy, we win. I win. The future wins.” He winds up.Everything was fine. I wasn’t tired. Not too hot, not too cold … Head was clear. No thoughts of anything other than a curveball, so natural there’d be no need to consider the mechanics of it.He released the pitch a little late. Just a little late, but it went awry, a wild pitch, far away from the catcher, Carlos Hernández. “I stood near the front of the mound and watched all of it happen, sort of curious.”"

Soon later, Ankiel would need to recreate himself using a different skill set as an outfielder, playing mostly for the St. Louis Cardinals.

But again, there’s the haunting and unanswered question about what is contained in that “secret life” of a pitcher that makes these events so familiar, particularly, in baseball.

Imagine you are standing on the mound at Yankee Stadium with 45,000 screaming fans looking for you to a hold a precious one-run lead the team has scrapped and scraped for. All eyes are on you. Nothing, in baseball, happens until you deliver a pitch to the batter.

These are the high moments of drama in baseball, and they escalate exponentially with each successive pitch until there’s an outcome which determines a winner and a loser. Yesterday, the Yankees and Chapman came out on top, striking out Lucas Duda on a 3-2 pitch to end the game.  Today, he can throw the same exact pitch to a different hitter and it gets sent over the wall. Go figure.

A sport built on failure

We’re all familiar with Yankees Hall of Famer Yogi Berra‘s euphemism that explains, “Ninety percent of baseball is mental, the other half is physical”. As usual, though, Berra is spot on in describing the sport he excelled in, as well as providing more than an inkling to answer our question.

Tyler Clippard, Rick Ankiel, and Aroldis Chapman may all have different results, but the common thread between them remains the ability (or inability) in adjusting to failure in a game built on failing.

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The best players in the game reside in Cooperstown. And after all, the best hitters in the game fail seven out of every ten times they come to the plate. Aaron Judge can be the second coming of Mike Trout for three months, only to turn around becoming Dave Kingman, and setting records for strikeouts instead of home runs, although now he has done that too.

It helps when a player has a manager like Joe Girardi, who has played the game and understands how challenging and mentally trying the sport of baseball is. Still, he wins some, and he loses some. In the cases of Clippard and Chris Carter, after repeated tries to put them in situations where they could succeed, he could only go to Brian Cashman asking for relief in taking them off his hands.

Chapman and Judge are the reverse stories. But it’s a funny game, and there’s still that mystery which can live years later so vividly in the mind of someone like Rick Ankiel when he delivered that one pitch that changed everything, lost everything, never to be found again.

Next: Clint Frazier: The maturation of a young man

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