The first four pitches of Blair Henley’s major-league debut—Monday in Texas against the Rangers—were balls. The first one was a sinker, over the plate with good movement but a little low. The catcher tossed that ball to the Astros dugout so Henley could store it in a closet. The second pitch was a sweeper that bolted way left. Henley brought his throwing hand to his mouth and blew into it. The third pitch was another sinker but this one was well inside. Henley tugged a little uncomfortably at his left sleeve. The fourth was a four-seamer that was supposed to be outer half; he missed inside.
Henley flicked his throwing hand. Maybe out of frustration, maybe just to get some feeling in it. Some pitchers will say their limbs went numb in their first major league innings. “I couldn’t feel my hands,” Bryan Hudson said after his big-league debut with the Dodgers last year.
Henley takes a short stroll behind the mound, checks in with his middle infielders to see who will cover second base, stares at the ground listening for his Pitchcom signal, then pitches to Corey Seager.
It’s a ball. Wide to the arm side. That gets your attention. The Texas crowd gets noticeably louder. We have an inexperienced pitcher with a history of control problems who has literally never thrown a strike in the major leagues and is getting wilder. We become alert for signs that he might be falling all the way apart.
He’s starting to speed up. He throws his next pitch with 10 seconds still on the pitch clock. A changeup. It misses. He jerks his head angrily in the direction of right field. This is his most visible sign of frustration so far. His catcher has to hold the ball a split second because Henley isn’t looking.
Only 7 percent of Henley’s pitches in Triple-A this year had been changeups. The fact that he threw it here, behind in the count to Seager, seems to suggest he’s just looking for something that will feel right in his hand. He missed with all three sinkers, his primary pitch; he missed ugly with his sweeper, his main secondary pitch; he was on the wrong side of the plate with his four-seamer; so try a changeup? But it wasn’t close.
And then, on pitch seven, he throws the changeup again. Oh man. By now his mechanics are starting to wander. His leg kick isn’t nearly as high on pitch seven as it had been at the start of this inning; his upper body is hunched over a little bit in a way it hadn’t been. Pitch Seven is way outside. He flicks his throwing hand again, jerks his head in frustration again, and as he takes the throw back from the catcher he turns his back on home plate and circles the mound a little bit. He’s behind 3-0, and he’s 0-for-7 as a big leaguer. If you’re anything like me you’re wondering if the next five balls are inevitable, and if he’ll never throw a strike.
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A few years ago, we had the big-league pitcher Ross Stripling on Effectively Wild. We asked about his major-league debut. “Numb is a good word. It looks like I’m just going through with my motion, but if you could be in my head and feeling what I’m feeling there—it’s like, how does it look like that, when how you felt at the time is totally different?”
We asked him when he started to finally feel calm out there—when he threw his first strike, when he got his first out or when he finished his first inning?
“Getting out of the first inning’s got to be the biggest one. Get three outs and then go sit on the bench in the dugout and take a deep breath, like, ‘Okay, I just got three outs in the big leagues, I can get guys out, I can compete.’”
Also, though, he noted that he was always a control pitcher. “As a guy who throws strikes I never thought I was going to go out and throw 12 straight balls and get pulled, so that was never in my head.”
Henley, though, has always been a little wild, so you could imagine it might have been in his.
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But with his eighth pitch, on 3-0 to Seager, he threw a strike!
It was a four-seam fastball. It was perfect. Right down the middle, with Seager taking all the way.
How did he do that?
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About a year ago, I mentioned a quote from Louisa Thomas’ great profile of Daniel Bard, an accomplished pitcher who beat the yips. As Thomas wrote:
I thought of something the cognitive scientist Sian Beilock, who has written about the yips and performance anxiety, told me: “We have to get away from the idea that the goal is to feel comfortable.”
As I said at the time, it had been stuck in my head because I wasn’t sure how Beilock meant it—did she mean that comfort leads to complacency, or just that it’s unrealistic, or?
At one point in my life1, I had panic disorder. Panic disorder can mean you’re having panic attacks, or it can mean you’re so worried about those panic attacks that you avoid certain activities for fear that a panic attack will be triggered. The latter was the bigger problem for me—I abandoned about a dozen healthy, everyday activities because I’d correlated them with panic episodes. Not that avoidance was at all helpful; I was constantly alert to the threat of new triggers, so any new discomfort would just convince me an attack was coming, and that’d be something new I couldn’t do anymore.
I started seeing a therapist to quit having panic attacks. After a very brief period, though, she told me that we’d reached the point where the goal had changed. The goal now was to go get some panic attacks. She told me—I wrote this down so I could carry it around with me—“any discomfort is something that we welcome.” The goal now was to get bored of panic attacks, so that my brain wouldn’t treat them—or treat the threat of them, or treat the merest whisper of them—as catastrophic, and I could keep functioning.
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