Even More TKA "Notes & Outrageous Spoilers"

The Knuckleball Artist: A few final thoughts on a story that turned into a novella, derailed six months of my life, wiped out my subscriber numbers, and a brief explanation of why I would do it again.

The usual warning on “Notes & Outrageous Spoilers:” everything below is an extended spoiler, from top to bottom.

RICK “THE YIPPER” ANKIEL

The following video snippets and the story of Rick Ankiel are too fantastic to hide behind a paywall. Click through to make your morning.

This is a very real problem in sports: the sudden, crippling ability to do the something you have done effortlessly for years.

Watch Rick Ankiel get stricken with them in real time here. It’s brutal.

Rick Ankiel, by the way, kicks ass. He was a huge inspiration for this. He never could pitch again after the Yips took hold, surprise, surprise. His pitching went from bad to worse, up and down from the minors. He was finished, washed-up, and humiliated.

Except he wasn’t finished, washed-up, and humiliated. Rick didn’t give up and he didn’t move into his Volkswagen Beetle and park in a Little League parking lot. He came back as an outfielder (with an insanely good arm) and went on to have a very successful career. Undoubtedly, he lived with the constant worry the yips would attack him again, but they knew what they were up against at that point.

Here’s, The Yipper, Rick Ankiel:

Click here and bow to Rick Ankiel. Yipper God.

The guy is a legend, and like most legends, what they went through to get there is not very appealing.

Okay, one more thing, before Free Subscribers hit the paywall:

Here’s Reginald’s “bee dropping into a tulip.”

“It was the Knuckleball Artist’s masterpiece. It was a bee pulling up his landing gear and dropping inside of a tulip. It was the pitch in the Sleepmobile’s hood ornament. It was the Greatest Pitch Thrown in the History of Baseball.”

It’s a little “soft” I think for a cover photo compared to its AI brother above, but I’m curious on your thoughts. Change photo? Stick with dusty, old Beetle in its AI fever-dream of a baseball field?