Can You get Parenting Yips?

I Don't Want to be the Chuck Knoblauch of Dads

The one truly unique thing about my 2013 wedding, obviously aside from the generational love story of the bride and groom, was that we had a ceremonial first pitch. Both my wife and I are huge baseball fans, and it seemed like a fun touch. Even better, it appears to have been the first, and perhaps the only time in history that a wedding has featured a ceremonial first pitch. This is the sort of thing that could have made me money back then if I’d been a powerful Instagram influencer Substacker with a modest following back then like I am today.

There have been first pitch proposals, weddings at ballparks and even in-game weddings, but even today, I see no indication that anyone has ever had a ceremonial first pitch at their tasteful, barn wedding, and there was even less indication in 2013.

My wife threw out the first pitch. Some of this was that she was not going to squat in her white dress. More of it is that I have the yips.

The yips is a well-documented phenomenon wherein a baseball player suddenly loses the ability to do basic aspects of the game. I guess it can exist in golf too, but golf is a stupid game for rich *$$holes, so I don’t care. The yips most often presents as a pitcher suddenly losing the ability to get the ball anywhere near home plate or to make routine pickoff throws to first. It happens from time to time, but there are two really famous pitching cases. The first is that of Steve Blass of the Pirates, who went from superb pitcher to ball-throwing head case, in a single season. The second, which was even more dramatic, was Rick Ankiel, a young flamethrower who inexplicably threw five wild pitches in a 2000 playoff game’s third inning and basically never stopped throwing wild pitches. Ankiel left the majors for the better part of five years before remaking himself as a respectable outfielder. (Note: Years later, I got to ask his catcher for that game, Mike Matheny, about it. As manager of the Cardinals, Matheny came to the State Department to give a talk on “building great teams.” It was a lot of normal sports BS, and he’d taken over a good Cardinals team rather than building it, so I thought it was kind of self-congratulatory, so I asked him about managing failure—specifically Rick Ankiel’s failure. He gave me back some sympathetic pablum about how hard it was to watch someone lose a capacity that had been like second nature. It wasn’t a horrible answer, but it didn’t suggest that I was talking to the baseball equivalent of Dwight Eisenhower.)

The other position that seems to inspire the yips is second base. With baseball’s shortest throws, you’d think second base would be easy—that’s why I play second base in softball—but Yankees second baseman Chuck Knoblauch lost his ability to throw to first, famously airmailing one and hitting broadcaster Keith Olbermann’s mom in the face. He had to move to the outfield. Dodgers and later Yankees second baseman Steve Sax also had a nasty case of the yips. His story appeared to have a happy ending when he rebounded from 1983’s 30 error season. But in 1992, he was arrested in the U.S. town of Springfield and was charged with every murder in New York City over the course of a decade.

And then there’s catcher Mackey Sasser, who lost the ability to throw the ball back to the pitcher.

I have had the yips as long as I can remember. I simply cannot reliably make a baseball go anywhere near where I want it to go. Sometimes, I imagine myself having to throw out the first pitch at a major league game and break out in a cold sweat. If I’d been George W. Bush at the first ballgame after 9/11, there’s a pretty good chance we would have had to surrender to Osama bin Laden after my ceremonial pitch. This is why I don’t run for office.

Thus, if I had thrown out the first pitch at our wedding, we would have ended up with a concussed guest in addition to the one who broke her ankle on the dance floor and the two-year-old who grabbed an electric fence.

There is an argument, however, that I do not have the yips.

It goes like this: I just suck at baseball. I literally got cut from Little League when I was in the fifth grade. The bone spur in my right shoulder doesn’t help either. So can one really have the yips if one had no capacity for even the most basic elements of the game to begin with?

The rest of my sporting career would suggest yes. I am not a good tennis player, but I don’t completely embarrass myself like I do playing baseball. Yet, any time I build up a lead, I start sailing the ball or hitting it into the net. This has also happened in volleyball and beer league bocce.

To really assess whether I have the yips—that is to say psychological vulnerability rather than mere physical incompetence—I think you have to look at the things that I’m really good at.

For example, I’m a really good writer.

Right?

Right?

And, while I’ve had the occasional case of writer’s block, I get better under time pressure, not worse. That’s a big case against the yips.

And I’ve never gotten the yips on the other thing I’m really good at either.

But what about parenting? Parenting is a case where I don’t think I’m a natural—I’d never changed a diaper until the day my first child was born, but I think I’ve done a really good job. I give myself the highest grade to which a normal person can aspire—a B+. On the other hand, I’m an anxious person, and parenting causes anxiety, so it would seem to be an environment ripe for the yips.

So let’s review my track record.

• Dropping one of my children when they were small. This was a massive worry of mine before I had kids. I’m clumsy; I trip on things; I have either hands of stone or butterfingers, depending on your metaphorical framework. But I have never dropped one of my kids. Heck, I’ve even fallen while carrying one (note: weak ankles) and not let him hit the ground. No yips.

• Forgetting to pick a kid up from school or daycare. I worried about this some in DC, but given the challenges that a lot of parents in the DC schools face, I knew there would be redundancies built into the system. In Switzerland, however, I worry about it a lot. I know that if I am literally three minutes late, the daycare will call to see if I’m dead and it’s possible they will send my child home by himself with a pocket knife, a hunk of cheese, and a bar of chocolate. (Note: Not really. They’re neutral, not evil.) I spend half of my life setting alarms to remind me to get my kids, but I have never even been late. No yips.

• Leaving my kids in the car. Newfangled cars will remind you to look in the back seat, so this must be an issue. And I get it. Once, I forgot to unbuckle C from his child seat, and I made it into the house before my daughter asked me where he was. Maybe yips.

• Forgetting to pack something for school. This is where I’m suspect. I have forgotten to pack snacks, lunches, water bottles, stuffed animals, library books, gloves, mittens, hats, sweaters, jackets, and homework on various occasions. It doesn't happen constantly. Most days, I’m fine. No one has called child services or sent me to play left field because of it, but it’s not great. It’s not Rick Ankiel yips, but it might be Steve Sax yips. If you want to make a case that I have real life yips, this is probably where you go—this is basic parenting stuff, and I repeatedly, though not constantly, screw it up. That said, the case against it being the yips is that none of these things has particularly serious consequences, and I don’t think I’m screwing it up because I have anxiety or a mental block. I think it mostly happens because I haven’t had my coffee when I pack the kids’ bags.

Have you ever had a parenting or other real life case of the yips? Let me know in the comments or answer the survey.