SOUTH GRAND — It was way late at night or way too early in the morning — depending on your disposition — and this was supposed to be a mixer, a posh see-me-see-you party in Miami. But that didn’t stop Rick Ankiel from talking baseball.

Specifically, the fine art of holding a runner on base.

The young, teen-idol-faced Ankiel was describing how he prefers to do it. His companion, a cigar-smoking, profanity-spewing sportswriter and lapsed minor-leaguer, was describing how he used to. Others were dancing, mingling, drinking. Not these two. They had their hands cupped to mimic the set position, their heads snapping like a cobra to get a view or craning ever so subtly to include a ghost runner in the peripheral vision.

That’s when the bar’s bouncer told the sportswriter, the eminent Pat Jordan, he’d have to leave. He knew why. It wasn’t the cigar. It wasn’t the animated debate on defense against the steal.  He never told Ankiel, but it was the gun he carried, always carried.

“He came out with me and said, ‘Well, I’ll leave, too,’” Jordan recalled recently. “He was going to leave with me. That was his attitude — if they were kicking me out, they were kicking him out, too. I said, ‘No, no, I’ll go. Give me a call. Keep pitching.’ That’s the Rick Ankiel I remember.

“Those are the last words I spoke to him.”

Jordan, a writer for magazines from GQ to Harper’s and the author of A False Spring, has collected some of his articles in a new book, The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan. And, the last article in the book, pages 424 to 434, is on Ankiel, a reprint of a story from New York Times Magazine. It’s a definitive piece, titled “A Mound of Troubles.”

Back in 2001, Jordan delved into how baseball’s youngest and hottest pitcher had so spectacularly lost his command, oh-so publicly, and was on his way to getting it back. Just a few paragraphs into the article and it’s clear that Jordan may have had the last, in-depth, door-open interview with Ankiel before he and others constructed a personal cocoon that he is reluctant to leave even now.

(”Do you blame him?” manager Tony La Russa once asked me.)

Jordan had an in with Ankiel. He could empathize.

As Jordan writes early in A False Spring, describing a failed comeback in a semi-pro league a few years after … well, that thing Ankiel knows … gripped him:

I left the game in the first inning. So many runs were scored, so many batters walked or hit, so many wild pitches bounced in front of the plate or flung over my catcher’s up-stabbing mitt, that I have retained only fragments from that day.

It was when I stumbled upon Jordan’s newest in a stack of books at KMOX that I recalled the story he wrote about Ankiel. This was a few weeks ago, and I thought who better to ask about Ankiel: The Sequel than the writer who not only wrote one of the best articles on the first incarnation of the player, but a writer who understood like no other.

“He’s hitting well,” Jordan said from his Florida home in a conversation that darted from baseball to writing to politics to gun laws to blogs (not at all bad, he says; others – ahem — disagree). “I think it’s great for him. I’m a Rick Ankiel fan. I knew I could help. That’s why I told him to call. It wasn’t mechanics it was all mental problem. I just never talked to him again.

“I have followed his career.”

In “A Mound of Troubles” (the article the above photo is from), Jordan chronicles Ankiel’s arrival as a phenom, from the high school fields of Florida to the playoffs of the National League. He writes about the wind sprints Ankiel’s father had him do if he swung at a bad pitch. And get this: Ankiel was a switch-hitter back then. In so many pitch-perfect lines, Jordan describes Ankiel as a “hothouse flower”, ruminates on on how Ankiel told him he was “afraid to mess up”, and gets him to open up about what he later would become so closed off about.

“Last fall,” Ankiel told Jordan about the wild pitches in the playoffs, “was my first test with adversity. …. I’d go blank before I’d throw the ball.”

Jordan sees easily how the kid he wrote about then is the hitter we see now.

“Hitting is so much more instinctive than pitching,” Jordan told me. “Pitching is cerebral. Hitters don’t get (fouled) up in the head. You don’t find any hitters who are head cases because you don’t have time to think. The ball is there in 1/10th of a second. You just react. That’s it. As a pitcher, you’re standing there, out on the mound, all you have is time. All you do for 30 seconds is think.”

As detailed in Rick Hummel’s game story today, Ankiel is stirring from his mini-slump, and as we’ve seen before he tends to get his production in bunches. Ankiel’s first three homers of this season came in six games; he had a five-homer, seven-game jag last season.

The search for comparisons to Ankiel continue, and with the exception of some over-the-top links to Babe Ruth, there aren’t many.  One scout likened Ankiel to Texas outfielder Josh Hamilton because both years of baseball only to come out swinging — Ankiel missed his as a pitcher; Hamilton’s road back from addiction has been well-chronicled. Most of the comparisons have been fictional.

There’s Roy Hobbs.

There’s also the lesser-known Luke Gofannon, from The Great American Novel. Gofannon is the best player ever to hoist a bat for the Port Ruppert Mundys in Philip Roth’s classic sendup, and he’s described purposefully Ruthian:

The iron man came up in 1916 as a kid pitcher, and then played over two thousand games in center field for the Ruppert club, scored close to fifteen hundred runs for them, and owned a lifetime batting average of .372 — the fella who was the Mundys to the three generations of Rupe-it rootas! … In his prime, they’d give him a hand just for striking out, that’s how beautiful he was, and how revered.

Well, Jordan found a better comparison, a real one, a tangible one.

A Cardinal one.

In 1957, Max Von McDaniel signed with the Cardinals and joined his brother there, Lindy. That season, Von went 7-5 with a 3.22 ERA for the Cardinals while his brother went 15-9 with a 3.49 ERA. After 1957, Von McDaniel made just two big league appearances. A young Pat Jordan wanted to be a ballplayer like Von, knew of Von — and also knew of his fall, how he tried to return to baseball as third baseman, a power-hitting third baseman. The “Mounds of Trouble” article links all three, the writer, the former Cardinal and the rising Cardinal.

It does not tell the rest of Jordan’s story.

In his 50s, Jordan attempted to throw again, to get over the mental block that kept him from throwing strikes and cost him his baseball career despite what he said was the description of his big fastball — “the unfair one.” His attempt is recalled in A Nice Tuesday though it took several not-so-nice days to get there.

“I was filled with the fear of not being able to pitch,” Jordan told me. “I think it took me six months to throw a ball. I was so terrified of anybody seeing me. Bums and drunks would come by where I was trying to practice and watch and they would scare me. I would throw wild. But I knew I had to do it. I needed to pitch my way through it.”

And that was going to be Jordan’s advice to Ankiel.

If they had talked after that night in Miami.

The description of that evening are in the book, too, sans the detail about carrying a concealed weapon (he has a permit). Jordan tells Ankiel that he “forgot how to pitch” and that thinking about forgetting was the whole problem. He needed not to think. Ankiel has found an alternative solution. He’s not thinking about pitching.

He’s swinging.

“He was a great kid,” Jordan said. “One of those rarest of athletes that you just really like. I like to remember him being that way. If somebody said, ‘Would you do Ankiel (as a story) now?’ I’d do it to see if he’s still the nice kid. Tell me he is.”

More from writer Pat Jordan is available at PatJordanStories.com.

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