Suddenly, Ankiel could no longer pitch. He threw four more wild pitches in the inning, along with four walks. He left the field with, as he puts it, “one psyche forever hobbled.” A friend of mine who was at Busch Stadium that day said the crowd’s reaction was akin to 50,000 people reacting as one to the sight of their child being punched in the stomach, five times, by a bully. In subsequent seasons, Ankiel attempted comeback after comeback. But he couldn’t recover the old command.

How could this happen? In Off Speed: Baseball, Pitching, & the Art of Deception, the reporter Terry McDermott quotes Hank Aaron saying, “The pitcher has got only a ball. I’ve got a bat. So the percentage of weapons is in my favor and I let the fellow with the ball do the fretting.” We’re all waiting on the pitcher, and nobody knows that better than he does. Much of McDermott’s book—which features chapters on fastballs, changeups, and spitballs, and a discussion of one game in particular, the Seattle Mariners pitcher Félix Hernández’s August 15, 2012, perfect game against the Tampa Bay Rays—focuses on the power the pitcher has to dictate all that surrounds him. That power, as McDermott understands, involves the brain far more than it does the arm.

McDermott’s deeply felt portrayal of the men on the mound is informed by an awareness of how much of what they do takes place in their head. A pitcher’s job is to upset a hitter’s timing, to get him off his rhythm—which means entering his mind. Jamie Moyer, who pitched for the Phillies and many other teams too, could not throw a 90-mph fastball but thrived on his ability to fool hitters into thinking that one was just around the corner. Give them a slow pitch, and he could count on them to overestimate the speed of what he threw next. “I would never have had a career if it wasn’t for the pride of major league hitters,” he tells McDermott. “They were determined to never get beat by a fastball.”

Pantheon

A hitter’s job is, essentially, to guess what a pitcher is thinking—which means that a pitcher needs time to think. Imagine if he had to throw on the run, or before he was tackled by a rushing linebacker. The mental battle staged between the mound and home plate is the catalyst for every other contest on the field. No wonder batters try to steal signs or find a pitcher’s “tell,” like a poker player’s. (McDermott reports that when Babe Ruth was a pitcher, he would stick out his tongue slightly before throwing a curveball. That giveaway was one of the reasons he became a hitter.) But when a pitcher is in peak control, physically and mentally, as Félix Hernández was on that day in August 2012, he can be virtually unhittable.

And then comes a day like that one in October 12 years earlier. Ankiel didn’t suddenly lose the ability to throw hard, or to make his curveball move as if controlled by a string. He still had all the talent that made Cardinals fans like me so excited. But in an instant, he ceased to be able to summon it. Ankiel calls his affliction—one shared by various haunted souls in baseball history, perhaps most notably the former Pirates pitcher Steve Blass—“The Thing.” He doesn’t know why it decided to attack him, and he spends most of the book earnestly searching for answers. He talks to sports psychologists and former managers, to fellow pitchers, even to Blass. He talks to his therapist and his family. (His father was a two-bit criminal who abused his mother and made Ankiel’s childhood a series of nightmares suffered in public, at times on a youth-league pitching mound.) Their insights are no more helpful than his ultimate conclusion: There was no reason. Ankiel offers the analogy of dealing with a rabid dog.

If a boy had reached to pet a large dog and that dog had bitten him, he’d think of that pain every time he put his hand near a dog again. That’s what pitching had become for me, even when I was pitching well enough to keep pitching. Every time I picked up a baseball, I was reaching out to that dog. Its ears were back. It was growling. My heart raced. The blood drained from my head. I reached further and hoped it wouldn’t bite and waited for the pain.

In his surprisingly open and compelling memoir—a standout in the motley genre of athlete autobiographies—Ankiel details his many efforts to cope with the problem, from drinking to drugs to a brief retirement to deciding that he’d rather forget pitching altogether, returning as a hitter and an outfielder instead. “I couldn’t recall being in higher spirits,” he writes of that turning point. His victory is understanding that no matter how much talent you have, no matter how much will and determination you might muster, you will always be constrained by the limits of your own mind. Ankiel doesn’t know why he can’t pitch anymore. All he knows is that he can’t.