The yips are an exercise in loneliness. Until you overcome them. Maybe.

March 7, 2019 11:15 AM

Luke Hagerty, standing 6-foot-7 and throwing left-handed, was unique, and he could throw a 94 mph fastball. The Chicago Cubs chose him with the 32nd pick in the first round of the 2002 draft and gave him more than $1 million to sign, in his junior year of college. Then he got the yips, and faded from baseball. Later, he trained other young pitchers, then he trained himself, and started working with Dr. Debbie Crews, who studied the brains of golfers (Golf Science Lab article + podcast), another sport where players might get the yips. It's all part of 37-year-old pitcher Luke Hagerty's improbable comeback story (Jeff Passan, ESPN).
posted by filthy light thief (13 comments total)

Apparently the yips means paralyzing anxiety that ruins your sports performance.

Interesting article, thanks.
posted by medusa at 11:53 AM on March 7, 2019 [2 favorites]

Good article. The yips, in my experience, are real. I have held onto reports, communications, actions for too long...while fully aware that I was...but couldn't let go. Frustrating situation. Hope he does well.
posted by zerobyproxy at 12:16 PM on March 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

The most recent episode of Bob's Burgers was about the yips.
posted by rikschell at 12:30 PM on March 7, 2019 [4 favorites]

I have the guitar yips. Lost my mojo...
posted by j_curiouser at 12:58 PM on March 7, 2019 [2 favorites]

It takes on a whole different dimension in road cycling, where the yips means either wariness going downhill or sprinting. In golf a bad shot is a bad shot, but the best descenders have been clocked at up to 130 km/h or 80 m/h, which can be terrifying if you're doing it in nothing but lycra and a helmet that covers 2% of your body on a road that might have potholes or loose gravel. I really felt for Thibaut Pinot, who just couldn't get his head right in the biggest race of the year. Or Andy Schleck, who probably lost the 2011 Tour de France due to the number of stages ending on technical descents, after his teammate was killed on a descent in the Giro only 3 months earlier.
posted by kersplunk at 1:15 PM on March 7, 2019 [2 favorites]

Apparently the yips means paralyzing anxiety that ruins your sports performance.

Sorry for that bit of mystery. Here's how Luke put it:

"I usually tell people it's like your signature," Hagerty says. "You know how to write your name. Someone gives you a piece of paper and a pen and you can write it. Maybe there's variance. It was like someone gave me a pen, and it was scribble all over the paper. It made no sense."

As I understand it, it's when you can do something more or less automatically, but once you start thinking about it, you are completely unable to do it.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:34 PM on March 7, 2019 [6 favorites]

I remember when Rick Ankiel, pitcher for the Cardinals, got the yips. It was in the postseason and he suddenly lost control, throwing wild pitches repeatedly (five in an inning! and then he did that AGAIN two games later.) Fortunately, he was able to change positions and did fairly well, and stayed in the game for over another decade. But man, hated not being able to see him throw that curveball.
posted by azpenguin at 2:42 PM on March 7, 2019 [2 favorites]

Episode 7 of the Anthropcene Reviewed podcast covered the yips and how they affected Rick Ankiel.
posted by nubs at 3:12 PM on March 7, 2019 [5 favorites]

“Markelle Fultz, the Yips, and What He Can Learn from Baseball”—Foolish Baseball, 19 November 2018
posted by ob1quixote at 7:28 PM on March 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

Chuck Knoblauch, 2nd baseman, had a famous case. And Alex Gibney directed an ESPN 30 for 30 short film called "Fields of Fear" about catcher Mackey Sasser's struggle with the phenomenon.
posted by theory at 8:29 PM on March 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

Pirates pitcher Steve Blass has his career ended by this.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:04 PM on March 7, 2019 [2 favorites]

Azpenguin, I've always been fascinated by Steve Blass disease, and I was in a bar with a fellow baseball aficionado to watch game 1 of the NLDS in 2000 specifically to watch Rick Ankiel because he was supposed to be the next Steve Carlton. To see him catch the yips right in front of my eyes was the single most painful thing I've every seen happen to someone on television.

My friend and I were the only ones obsessed enough with baseball history to know what had happened and that all he'd promised and been promised was probably done forever. I felt awful for him.
posted by Quindar Beep at 7:14 AM on March 8, 2019 [1 favorite]

I got obsessed with the yips to the point where they figure prominently in my first novel.

The amazing thing, to me, is that they still don't really know. Anxiety is in there somewhere, but there are also people who absolutely believe that it's partly a completely physical, neurological problem with communication from the brain to the limb. (David Owens has a great piece in The New Yorker from, I think, 2014.)

Rick Ankiel is such an interesting case, because he was unbelievably unlucky to have this happen, but very lucky he was so young -- it's more common in somewhat older players. (Especially true, it seems, in golf.) He was also lucky he could hit.

The Mackey Sasser short referenced above is interesting, too -- he believes it's partly trauma-related, but not everybody does. He also thinks it happened partly because of an injury at the plate that caused him to have to shift his stance behind the plate, which just threw off the whole shebang.

It remains fascinating part because it's been studied, and studied, and studied, and while they understand it up to a point, they aren't certain. And while some people can recover, many don't. There's no happy ending for most of these prominent cases; it's an awful thing. Knoblauch woke up and couldn't make throws he could probably make in high school. In Little League. I cannot imagine. (It reminds me of the idea of writer's block, which might be the other reason I was interested in it.)
posted by Linda_Holmes at 1:22 PM on March 11, 2019 [3 favorites]