Before he sat down to learn about Cuba and have some food and just after he discovered there was, in fact, no birthday party waiting for him in Mr. Hand's first period history class, Ridgemont High's favorite stoner Jeff Spiccoli surveyed the classroom before declaring, "Whoa, I know that dude!"

I imagine a great many fans at last Thursday's St. Louis Cardinals' game might well have said the same thing.

In 1999, Rick Ankiel was all promise, a wicked 19-year old lefty who had rocketed through the Cardinals farm system all the way to the big leagues.  In 33 innings with the big league club, the rookie phenom struck out 39, had a 3.27 ERA, and for all the world looked like the Next Big Thing in baseball.  In 2000, he won 11 games with a 3.50 ERA and helped St. Louis to the division title.  Cards' manager Tony LaRussa was so confident in his prized young pitcher that he gave Ankiel the Game 1 start in the NLDS against the Braves.  It was supposed to be Ankiel's grand entrance to the national spotlight, the first shining moment in a blossoming career.

What happened next was like something straight out of the "Twilight Zone" or the "Zone Out Zone" or some kind of other worldly zone.  Whatever it was, it sadly had nothing to do with the strike zone.  In Game 1 of the 2000 NLDS, Rick Ankiel went from burgeoning superstar rookie pitcher to the baseball equivalent of a straight jacket and padded cell in the span 2 2/3 innings.  And in the span of those eight outs, he uncorked five wild pitches.  And by "wild", these errant offerings were not of the garden variety waywardness.  Some flew all the way to the backstop, others bounced feebly short of the plate or veered so wide that the on-deck hitters had to raise an eyebrow.  If such a thing can be impressive, it was one of the most impressive displays of wildness that most had ever seen.  By the time LaRussa came out to get his fully-melted down young star, his promise had practically turned to dust.

And just like that, the well went dry.

Some will tell you that the baseball gods can be cruel, and seeing what happened to Rick Ankiel in 2000 might just be enough to make one believe it.  Now, the story could have ended there, a sad parable about the cruelty of fate and the brutal reality of athletic Darwinism.  But it didn't.  And how the story continued is a rather remarkable journey in and of itself.

So what do you do if everything you've worked for, if all of your professional promise gets smashed to pieces?  If you are Rick Ankiel, you simply pick them up along with a bat and start hitting home runs.

Yogi Berra once said, supposedly, that baseball was 90% mental, and the other half was physical.  Given that, Ankiel's ability to reclaim his shattered psyche is noteworthy, indeed.  If he'd made it all the way back as a pitcher, people would have applauded but, at the same time, been somewhat nonplussed by it.  That Ankiel somehow re-shaped his career by taking on an entirely different discipline and succeeded to the point that he legitimately merited consideration at the highest level of the game is what turned a good story into a great one.  And he bought his ticket back to the big leagues with power - 21 homers in 321 AB's between A and AA level ball in 2005 and 32 bombs in 389 AB's at AAA in 2007.

As if that weren't enough, just being back on a big league ballfield, being able to kick around some dirt in the batter's box and settle in at the plate as major league hitter, even for just a single at-bat, would have been a triumph.  Instead, he was able to turn on a pitch in that first game back and hit a three-run bomb, helping to ice the Cards' 5-0 win over San Diego.  As if on cue, he took a curtain call two nights later by hitting a pair of homers against the Dodgers.

Whether Ankiel eventually develops into a star MLB hitter or if he fades after his storybook comeback debut is somewhat irrelevant.  The greater point has already been made.  Rick Ankiel, one-time pitching prodigy, stared down defeat and embarrassment to earn his place back at the MLB table.  One home run at a time.

And Jeff Spiccoli and Mr. Hand might both agree that watching Ankiel's story unfold has, in fact, been a very productive use of our time.

Stats

http://www.baseball-reference.com/a/ankieri01.shtml

http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/playerGameLog?categoryId=85805

http://www.thebaseballcube.com/players/A/Rick-Ankiel.shtml

Other Sources:

http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/27220.html