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As the 2007 MLB regular season draws to a close, the baseball fan is afforded a brief opportunity to gaze back on an amazing year of baseball.  And what a sensational season it has been!  What with Barry Bonds’ swift kick to Hank Aaron’s groin and subsequent move into the record books, or baseball’s growing steroid scandal, the baseball pundits have had no shortage of doomsday material upon which to opine, in breathless and interminable opuses, about the downfall of the national pastime.

Conversely, feel-good baseball stories have been in short supply.  Aside from the Mets’ historic-but-predictable collapse, there hasn’t been much to find joy about in baseball.  That’s why when the “Rick Ankiel Returns” story broke, baseball writers jumped on it like Peter King on a danish.  It had all the elements of a tradional feel-good story: Local boy makes the big leagues, local boy flames out incredibly, local boy takes human growth hormone and re-emerges as potent power hitter.  Not surprisingly, fans ate the Rick Ankiel Revival up, giving standing ovations with every Ankiel home run or semi-competent fielding move.

 
Depicted: Alleged Quitter

But should we really be holding Ankiel up as a hero?  It’s time to acknowledge the hidden truth behind the Rick Ankiel story, something only the editors of Food Court Lunch have the courage to reveal to the American public: Rick Ankiel is a quitter.

In a tale that any casual baseball fan already knows, Ankiel came into the league in 2000 as the top pitching prospect in baseball, a fireball-throwing, 20-year-old rookie.  He posted an 11-7 record for the post-season-bound Cardinals, and earned the admiration of the Cards’ faithful, with 194 strikeouts in 30 games.  But in the 2000 NLDS against the Braves, the wheels came off for Ankiel as a pitcher.  Starting game 1 of the series, Ankiel gave up a 6-run lead, throwing 5 wild pitches in the third inning before being pulled from the game.  The evidence was undeniable.  Rick Ankiel had quit as a major league pitcher.

Ankiel’s manager, Tony LaRussa, stubbornly refused to believe that his ace pitcher had given up, and put Ankiel on the mound in several more key situations in the 2000 playoffs. But it was obvious to anyone witnessing those games that Ankiel was intent on removing himself from the game of baseball as soon as possible.  Despite several further unsuccessful attempts on the mound, Rick Ankiel would not be seen in the major leagues again until 2007.

Ankiel’s insistence on using the wild pitch as the focal point of his pitching arsenal irked the Cards’ pitching staff, and his numbers made it difficult for LaRussa to justify including Ankiel in the starting rotation.  Consider Ankiel’s stats as a starting pitcher in the years following his successful rookie campaign:

2001: 1 win

2002: 0 wins

2003: 0 wins

2004: 1 win*

(*exhibition game vs. East St. Louis Cardinals)

2005: 0 wins

2006: 0 wins

2007: 0 wins

Only one conclusion can be drawn from these numbers: Rick Ankiel simply did not want to be a major league pitcher anymore.

However, in a turn that some pundits have described as miraculous, Ankiel re-emerged on the Cardinals’ roster in August of 2007 as a power-hitting outfielder.  In his first game back, delusional fans gave Ankiel a standing ovation and he responded by hitting a three-run homer.  Ankiel closed out the season by hitting an amazing 11 homers and 39 RBIs in 47 games.  He once again became a fan favourite, and there was even talk about Ankiel being put forward as an MVP candidate should the Cardinals have made the post-season.  Ankiel quickly became the posterboy for ESPN-type feel-good montages.  Not surprisingly, the fatcats at ESPN and SI failed to mention his horrible numbers as a pitcher during the same period.  They too had been swallowed up by the Rick Ankiel phenomenon. 

Reach for the stars, Quitter

Sure, there are some who will say that Rick Ankiel’s transformation from pitcher to power hitter is an inspirational example of what an athlete can accomplish with hard work and determination.  And there are others who will say that not since the days of Babe Ruth has such a double-threat graced both the mound and the plate.  But if memory serves, Ruth was a racist who often used small illegal immigrants to take at-bats for him.  And in any event, Ruth played most of his games in the American League, so any comparison between the two players is inaccurate, as any baseball historian will know.

Depicted: Manuel Jorge Villegas

 No, the stats don’t lie: Rick Ankiel is a quitter.  And his fatalist approach isn’t limited to pitching alone.  How else can you explain the fact that Tony LaRussa, Rick Ankiel’s loyal manager, was found drunk and asleep behind the wheel in March of this year?  LaRussa publicly took responsibility for the incident, but behind closed doors rumours swirled that Ankiel had abandoned LaRussa as designated driver halfway through a promising night of drinking.

Depicted: Genius

Likewise, the recent reports linking Ankiel to human growth hormone usage shows a quitter’s mentality: Any player committed to succeeding in the major leagues knows that at the very least, a 3-year course of HGH is necessary to compete with the Bondses, Caminitis and the Grimsleys of the world.  Simply put, Ankiel quit as a doper because he didn’t have the will to win as a pitcher.

Sure, the editors of Food Court Lunch love a feel-good story.  But is it too much to ask that next time our friends in the legitimate sports press insist on a little journalistic integrity before forcefeeding fans with this kind of jingoistic claptrap?  We’ll let our learned readers decide.