Evvie Drake Starts Over(17)
On June 17, 2000, struggling Yankees second baseman Chuck Knoblauch tried to make a throw to first. Instead, he threw the ball into the stands and hit Keith Olbermann’s mother. If it were possible to take everything currently known about the yips and reduce it until only its very essence remained, the result might be Knoblauch in this moment, unable to manage a throw he’d been executing for many years.
Twitchy golfers, tennis players who suddenly can’t serve, aces who lose their touch at darts and cricket, basketball players who go up on their toes and freeze, unable to complete a free throw: they can all have the yips. Coinage of the term is most commonly credited to golfer Tommy Armour, who came down with the condition in the 1920s.
For a long time, in baseball, they called it Steve Blass Disease, after a pitcher for the Pirates who lost all ability to throw accurately after the 1972 season. He later wrote a book called A Pirate for Life. “It got to the point where I didn’t want to go to the grocery store, didn’t want to go out, because I was so humiliated,” he wrote. There was a time when they called it Steve Sax Syndrome, after the 1982 Rookie of the Year—a second baseman, like Knoblauch—who also lost his throw to first. At least in baseball, whoever had it last gets to carry the yips as his personal codenamed whammy. Mets catcher Mackey Sasser lost the ability to throw back to the pitcher, so for a while, they called it Sasseritis. And now, they called it Dean Tenney Disease.
A 2014 New Yorker article by David Owen rounded up the latest research in the field of head-case-ology, which holds that the yips are a complex soup of psychological and neurological ingredients. Maybe anxiety, maybe something physical, maybe more like an injury than a curse. But you’d be hard-pressed to watch somebody with the yips and not think the most likely explanation is that he once annoyed a vengeful demon, who then pointed a long, bony finger and said, “You.”
Evvie watched Mackey Sasser on YouTube as he triple-pumped trying to throw back to the pitcher. She watched throws from Sax and Knoblauch pull first basemen off the bag, force them to leap, or sail right past them, a foot or ten feet out of reach. She watched Knoblauch hit Olbermann’s mother.
And then, for the first time, she watched Dean Tenney pitch in a professional baseball game, in a low-quality bootleg video, where he threw two wild pitches and walked three batters in an inning against the White Sox. Caught in close-up, he clenched and unclenched his jaw. She noted in passing that he’d had a bit of a scruffy beard at the time and that she was against it. The announcers pitied him openly, and one speculated that maybe it was this rumored romance with this Hollywood actress—he wasn’t saying she was a jinx, he was only saying this was the kind of situation where fans often said she might be a jinx.
“Sexist asshole,” Evvie muttered.
She stopped the video. She found another that was called “Tenney Strikes Out the Side.” Pitching against the Orioles before his troubles started, Dean mystified, puzzled, and confused three batters in a row. The first swung wickedly at two pitches and let two go by, and then it was like he was in slow motion as he watched the next pitch thunk into the catcher’s mitt, and he knew instantly that he had made a terrible mistake, even before the umpire threw his arm and bellowed. The next batter struck out after gamely trying to put his bat on a pitch that dropped like it had been suspended over a dunk tank. The last guy hung in for a while, but then Dean stretched, wound himself up like a spring, and hurled the ball. There was a swing like the guy wanted to hit it all the way to Philadelphia—a swing so hard he almost knocked himself over. And then there was just Dean, walking to the dugout, wearing exactly one-third of a smile.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, EVVIE HEARD someone pull into the driveway and cut the engine. She went to the window and saw a low-slung black Miata, from which a woman in khaki pants and a green sweater-coat was coming into view. Evvie waited, and sure enough, there were five quick knocks on the door, which Evvie’s ear heard as I-don’t-have-all-day.
But when she opened the door, the woman was smiling rather warmly, clutching a leather notebook in one hand. “Can I help you?” Evvie asked her, suddenly feeling stumpy and lumpy and like she wished she’d thought to pull her hair back.
“I’m Ellen Boyd. I’m with Beat Sports.”
It didn’t mean a lot to Evvie, but she’d seen the name. She knew enough. “Can I help you?” she repeated.
“I’m looking for Dean Tenney. I understand he lives with you.”
It wasn’t a secret that Dean was renting here; he’d been in town long enough to be greeted at the gas station and the grocery store, and he had a flock of admirers among the girls who sat around the coffee shop all day, drinking sugar bombs with whipped cream and never seeming to gain an ounce. A few people had even gotten up the nerve to tell him how much they’d liked watching him pitch. When she’d seen it happen, he’d smiled and said thank you and followed with, “What do you do?” or “What are you shopping for?” or “Do you think it’s going to rain?” Or, if he got desperate, there was always, “What’s your favorite way to cook a lobster?”
But it wasn’t a secret. He lived there. So she said it: “Yes, he does.” But almost immediately, she rewound the question and her answer in her head. “Well, I mean, yes, he lives in the house. He doesn’t live with me. Like, he doesn’t live with me, we don’t live together. There’s an apartment in back.”