Tips for beating the yips
Sax says Altuve will get past throwing issues the sameway he did— with practice
Regardless of what you may be hearing today from your Facebook friends, Twitter correspondents or fellow amateur psychologists, Jose Altuve does not have a mental block. He does not have mechanical issues. He is not paralyzed by guilt or remorse.
“Jose Altuve has a temporary loss of confidence,” former major league infielder and MLB Network Radio analyst Steve Sax said Wednesday. “Depending on how deep this confidence loss is, when he gets it back, all this stuff will go away.
“His throwing issues are just a symptom of the confidence loss, and the way it gets fixed is through practice. When he grinds this thing out and gets his confidence back and transfers it to the game, this thing is going to go away and never come back.”
As old-school baseball fans are aware, Sax knows all about “the yips” — the sudden inability to make a throw from second base to first, fromthe catcher to the pitcher, or from the pitcher to first base.
Based on events this week, Altuve has the yips. He’s committed three throwing errors in the past two games of the American League Championship Series, and they’ve contributed to eight runs for the Tampa Bay Rays.
Sax came down with a bad case of the yips in 1983, a year after he won the National League Rookie of the Year award with the Dodgers. He had 24 errors before the All-Star break that season and had plunged into the depths of self-loathing.
“I would come off the field cursing myself,” Sax said. “It’s the worst thing you can do to yourself.
“I can see it in Jose’s eyes. No one feels worse than he does, and this is happening to him at the worst time.”
Sax overcame the yips through hours of practice, transferring the confidence of being able to throw the ball while blindfolded to the first baseman to being able to do it again in live action. After shaking off the yips, he made three more AllStar teams and in 1989 led the American League in
fielding percentage among second basemen.
“This is a blip on the radar for Jose,” he said. “He has to get out of his own way and not think. People say, ‘Just do that,’ and then you say, ‘OK, how do I do that?’ That’s the whole thing. It’s like telling you not to think about a pink elephant for the next two seconds.
“I’m sure Jose has a deep commitment to get over this. If he does, he can get over it pretty quickly.”
How quickly? That’s the question.
Wracked by guilt?
Opinions onthe yips vary among those who have been affected by the malady. Mackey Sasser, a former Mets catcher who in 1990 began experiencing the yips while throwing the ball back to the pitcher, suggested in an e-mail that the cheating scandal might be wearing on Altuve’s mind.
“Yips are an end result of things that happen which the athlete holds in, and does not want others to know, kind of like keeping things under the car hood,”
Sasser wrote.
“All we know thus far is the scandal and the unseen impact it has on Altuve. However, Altuve took NO responsibility, nor did any players. He did say he ‘felt bad.’ So certainly, understandably, if he has lingering remorse or guilt … he would never share tomedia or others.”
Sasser, who now is a coach for Wagner Community College in Dothan, Ala., was charged with 14 errors in 1990 and was moved to the outfield and first base formost of the rest of his big league career through 1995.
In terms of suggestions on how to cure the yips, Sasser wrote, “Take a step back, take some deep breaths, kinda get off the treadmill of what everyone is saying.
“It’s probable he is too far in it to turn it around. His nervous system already (is) in overwhelm. He is a great player over-trying hard.”
Unlikely defender
Given the polarizing nature of the Astros these days, Altuve’s situation was
fertile ground for social media speculation Wednesday, much of it derisive.
Buthe drew a sympathetic series of tweets from an unlikely source: Brandon McCarthy, a 13-year major league pitcher who played for the 2017 Dodgers team that lost to the Astros in the World Series.
“I feel terrible for Altuve. That feeling is just suffocating,” McCarthy wrote. That drew a response from former Astros pitcher Collin McHugh, who wrote, “There’s no lonelier feeling out there.”
After one fan noted that Altuve played for a team that was found to have cheated during the 2017 season, McCarthy replied, “The yips poisoned my career in irreparable fashion. Me not wishing it on anyone (even if they cheated me) is my prerogative.”
McCarthy, who now works in the Rangers’ front office and who took the loss in the Astros’ Game 2World Series win over the Dodgers, replied to other readers who expressed surprise that he sympathized with
Altuve.
“I don’t wish cancer on people who wrong me in some form or fashion. This is baseball cancer,” he said in response to one tweet.
In another response, he said, “0-20 with 10k’s and a sweep? Wouldn’t care. But this is a whole other thing and I refuse to find joy in it.”
A common problem
Sax, who appears four times a week on MLB Network Radio, said he has consulted over the years with players seeking his advice on dealing with the yips, sometimes speaking with them in the most unlikely places.
“I’ve ducked into closets in major league stadiums and talked to players who didn’t want the writers to see them talking to me and suspecting what they were going through,” he said.
Sax and Altuve aren’t the only All-Stars who have suffered throwing issues. Another prominent victim of baseball yips was Chuck Knoblauch, the former Bellaire High School and Texas A&M infielder whose prom-
ising career was derailed in 1999 when he had trouble throwing from second to first.
He had 26 errors in 1999, themost infamous of which involved an errant throw that struck the mother of sportscaster Keith Olbermann as she sat in the stands behind first base at Yankee Stadium.
Knoblauch, who was the 1991 American League Rookie of the Year, a fourtime All-Star with the Twins and a 1997 Gold Glove winner, played through 2002, mostly in the outfield, before retiring.
Sax said he knows that Altuve’s teammates have his back, as expressed Tuesday night by Astros shortstop Carlos Correa.
Sax’s teammates were rooting for him back in 1983, too, as evidenced by the famous comment from Dodgers outfielder Pedro Guerrero, who said he once prayed, “Please, God, don’t let them hit it to me, and please don’t let them hit it to Steve Sax.”