If you’re a fan of old sports movies, as I am, you may remember the character Nuke Laloosh, played by Tim Robbins in the 1988 movie Bull Durham. Nuke is a rookie pitcher for the minor league Durham Bulls. He has a 100 mph fastball and a bit of a wild streak. He also has a screw or two loose. His erratic pitching is settled down by the character played by Susan Sarandon. She helps him get out of his head while on the mound, and into her bed while off it. Something definitely must have worked on that score, because Robbins and Sarandon ended up staying together for 20 years. They have two adult children together to show for their effort.
Alas, real life is seldom as tidy or as endearing as an old sports movie. When I heard that the Colorado Rockies had signed veteran relief pitcher Daniel Bard to a $19 million contract to be their closer, I was skeptical, but excited. After Bard went on the DL earlier this season with a diagnosis of “anxiety,” I was still skeptical, but no longer excited. It just made my estimation of the Rockies as “a decent AAA team masquerading as an actual MLB franchise” all the more justified. Somebody in the Rockies front office definitely has a screw loose. And his name is NOT Nuke Laloosh.
Then today I came across a story about Daniel Bard in the current issue of the New Yorker. You may or may not be a baseball fan. You may or may not live in Denver. You may or may not have ever heard of Daniel Bard. And you may or may not have ever had the “yips” yourself. But none of that matters. Read this story – you’ll be glad you did. If you’re a NYer subscriber, you can read it in situ, here. If not, read on. It’s long, but the ride is well worth the price of admission.
There’s an old video of the pitcher Daniel Bard that still surfaces from time to time. It’s a scorching Monday afternoon in August, 2010. The Red Sox are facing the Yankees, in the Bronx, and need a win to stay in the playoff chase. Bard, a right-handed reliever for Boston, has come into the game to replace the Red Sox ace, Jon Lester. The Sox are clinging to a 2–0 lead, but the Yankees have the bases loaded, with one out, and the superstar shortstop Derek Jeter is at bat.
Trouble is a reliever’s common condition. Bard seems undaunted. His first pitch to Jeter is a fastball inside. Strike one. He hurls another, hitting the upper nineties again. Strike two. The third pitch, captured on the video, is just shy of a hundred miles per hour, high and away. As he releases the ball, his right leg twirls behind him. Jeter swings through it, and sheepishly returns to the dugout. Next up, Nick Swisher, another All-Star.
Bard is six-four and broad-shouldered. When he stands very still, as he does between pitches, it’s difficult to see where the strength to throw a ball so hard comes from. Not from his arms or his chest: despite his height, he is not imposing. Instead, his power comes from his looseness, from the mobility of his hips and his shoulders. When he begins his motion, his right arm curls so far behind him that, from the batter’s point of view, it seems to touch second base before unfurling toward third as his legs drive his body toward home. Then the ball snaps off his fingers and his right arm whips toward first base; his tongue sticks out the whole time.
Bard starts Swisher off with two ninety-eight-m.p.h. fastballs that clip the outside of the plate: strike one and strike two. But it is the third pitch that will inspire awe for years to come. It’s a two-seam fastball that heads toward the middle of the plate, then dips abruptly and sharply toward the dirt. Swisher swishes: strike three. Fastballs typically fly on a relatively straight trajectory, compared with off-speed stuff. “That last pitch he threw at me, man—ninety-nine miles per hour,” Swisher said afterward. “It’s not supposed to move like that.”
For weeks, Red Sox bloggers posted GIFs of the pitch just to cheer themselves up. (The Yankees beat out Boston for a playoff spot that year.) Months later, big-league pitchers were still discussing it on Twitter; years later, Sports Illustrated ran a tribute to what it called “one of the nastiest, most unhittable pitches that the world has ever seen.” When I asked Bard about it recently, he shrugged. “Sometimes you just catch a seam,” he told me. Adrenaline—the pressure of the moment—had helped, he said.
Everyone figured that Bard would become a star. Instead, a year later, he lost control of his pitches. He missed spots by inches, then by feet. The ball would leave his hand travelling ninety-seven m.p.h., then bounce in the dirt, or sail toward the backstop, or drill the batter’s shoulder. Each time, he had to get back on the rubber to throw another pitch, with no idea where it would go. He blew leads. He bruised batters. He stood on the lonely island of the mound, engulfed by jeers. He was sent to the minors, where he spent five years trying to relearn what had once felt automatic. Finally, in 2017, he quit.
There are other cases, in baseball history, of players who suddenly couldn’t pitch or throw. It’s an affliction so dreaded that players sometimes refer to it as a disease or a monster—if they’re willing to talk about it at all. But Bard came to realize the necessity of facing it. Two years after retiring, he returned to baseball and became one of the most dominant relievers in the game. It was a remarkable and unprecedented comeback. It wouldn’t be his last.
On a drizzly morning in February, outside Greenville, South Carolina, Bard sat on the dingy turf floor of a baseball facility and did some stretching. It was early, and the batting cages were empty; he had just dropped his kids off at school. A few other local pros trickled in, and he joined them to gossip and to train. After some rapid pullups and other strength exercises, he and another player grabbed their gloves and went to spots on opposite ends of the facility for a game of long toss. Bard warmed up by pausing his leg at various heights in his throwing motion before connecting the movements and letting his body flow.
Bard was never really taught how to pitch—for a long time, it seemed like he was born to it. His maternal grandfather was the baseball coach at M.I.T., and his father, Paul, made the minor leagues as a catcher. Growing up in Charlotte, North Carolina, Bard, the oldest of three boys, played catch in the back yard, learning by instinct and imitation. “From the time he was two and three years old, he had excellent throwing mechanics,” Paul told me. Bard’s brother Jared played college ball; the youngest, Luke, also made it to the majors. Bard says his parents always told him that he could stop playing if he was no longer having fun. But he had a sense of calling, and his parents, who were religious, understood.
When Bard got to high school, he made the team but sat on the bench—he was gangly, less muscular than some of the other boys. Paul told him that he’d be the best of all of them once his frame filled out, and Bard believed him, or at least kept working as if he did. “Daniel has always been very cerebral and very responsible,” his mother, Kathy, told me. “He liked to please. He was a typical firstborn.”
After Bard’s sophomore year, his grandfather helped get him into a New England showcase for scouts and college recruiters. Paul told him that he should try to throw ninety miles per hour, something he’d never done. He hit ninety-one, faster than anyone else. His grandfather draped his arm around his shoulder and introduced him to the newly eager scouts and coaches. “Like, ‘This is my grandson,’ ” Bard recalled. Everyone wanted to talk. “I had never felt that before. It’s a weird feeling. But it was a pretty good feeling when you’re an insecure fifteen-year-old kid.”
He went to showcases down South and kept throwing hard. He transferred to a small private school to get more playing time. Pro scouts came to watch him, and he got several college-scholarship offers. He accepted one, from the University of North Carolina, and became an All-America starter. “I did the bare minimum to get by in school, which is the part I regret,” he said. But it was a deliberate choice: he didn’t want to have anything to fall back on.
In his junior year, he led U.N.C. to the finals of the College World Series. Afterward, he was drafted by the Red Sox in the first round. He reported to the instructional league, in Arizona, where prospects train with less pressure and scrutiny than they face in the minors. He threw three innings, and nearly every pitch went a hundred miles per hour. “I was, like, Oh, if I can do that, I’m going to move,” he recalled. “I’m not going to be in the minors very long.”
Bard showed up at his first spring training, in 2007, with his confidence overflowing. He pitched well in two bullpen sessions. Then he was asked to throw a third. “They had, like, seven pitching coaches watching this bullpen, which is six more than you’d usually have,” he said. He’d barely warmed up when one coach suggested that he try a different grip for his fastball. Another said, “We think your leg kick is a little big. We just kind of want to calm that down.”
Bard had never thought about how many inches his leg rose or about the degree of his arm position—he’d always focussed on the movement of the ball, not the movement of his body. He took the coaches’ advice eagerly, but it had a negative effect: his velocity dropped; his command disappeared. Thinking about his motion disrupted his muscle memory, and when he made mistakes self-doubt crept in. He thought about the opportunity he was blowing, and about how much money he’d been given. Anxiety tenses the body—attempting to control a motion can limit the degrees of freedom in a joint. The tightness made Bard pitch worse, which aggravated his anxiety, setting off a negative-feedback loop. The Sox assigned him to their High-A club, a typical spot for a new first-round pick. But he couldn’t find the plate. He was demoted to Low-A, in Greenville, and didn’t fare much better. The beauty of baseball, people say, is in its daily repetitions: you get a lot of second chances. But when things aren’t going well the failures pile up. Every morning, Bard would get out of bed and head to the field for another day of disaster.
After the summer, the Red Sox sent him to Hawaii for winter ball. He continued to pitch badly, but he was in Hawaii; he surfed and wore flip-flops to work. The pitching coach there, Mike Cather, saw the tightness in Bard’s delivery and on his face, and Bard remembers him promising to send a positive report to the Sox no matter how he pitched. “I think I went out and I added three or four miles an hour instantly,” Bard recalls. He didn’t wonder why he’d snapped out of his funk; he just let it happen. The Red Sox told him that he’d return to Low-A in the spring and pitch in relief.
He went back to Greenville, pitched well, and met a student at a local college who knew nothing about baseball. Her name was Adair, and she could talk about life in ways that Bard had never found possible. They started to date. He was called up to Double-A, in Maine, and she came to visit. His life gathered momentum: he began the 2009 season in Triple-A, and, after a month, he made his big-league début, shortly before his twenty-fourth birthday. He lived out of a hotel room in Boston for a while, then decided to get a place in town—an apartment across the street from Fenway Park, the team’s nearly century-old stadium.
He and Adair got married a year later. On summer evenings, she’d put Red Sox games on the television and then run across the street if she saw Bard warming up, so that she could cheer him on. They made close friends on the team; Bard became a mainstay of the bullpen. When the 2011 season began, the Red Sox were the favorites to win the World Series. That spring and summer, from late May to the end of July, Bard appeared in twenty-five games and didn’t give up a single run. It was a record for the Sox, a franchise that has been around since 1901.
He was pitching a lot, though, and his arm began to tire. He struggled, too, with all the attention he was getting. He wasn’t a celebrity, but it was Boston, and he was on the Red Sox. “When you’re there, it feels like you could go to a restaurant in India and get recognized,” he said.
In early September, the Sox were in first place, and nine games ahead of the Tampa Bay Rays for the final American League playoff spot. They lost eighteen of their final twenty-four games—one of the worst collapses in major-league history—and Bard gave up twelve earned runs in just ten and a third innings. His pitching wasn’t actually terrible: there were balls that could have been called strikes, a few hits that nearly went foul or for outs. Still, something was off. Later, a doctor would diagnose him with thoracic-outlet syndrome, which affects the flow of blood to the hands.
During the off-season, the Sox traded for a star closer, apparently filling the position that Bard had thought would be his. There was an opening in the starting rotation, and he took it. Reporters swarmed him in the clubhouse after bullpen sessions and batting practice. He’d have to ask them to back up so that he could put on his pants. “I couldn’t go to the bathroom without ‘How’d it feel?’ ” Bard said.
The pitching, at least, felt awful. The Red Sox sent him to the minors and told him that he would become a reliever again. “I think it’ll be a real quick turnaround,” the team’s manager at the time, Bobby Valentine, told the press. Each morning, Bard would wake up to the sight of Fenway Park out his window, then drive an hour through traffic to Rhode Island. He wasn’t recalled to the majors until the end of August, and he didn’t pitch well when he got there.
He began the next season in Double-A, then was demoted to Single-A. His once smooth delivery had disintegrated. After one outing, in September, the crowd booed him, and Adair, who had come to watch him, ran out of the stadium in tears. The next day, the Red Sox let him go.
That was when Bard Googled “the yips.” He had known what was happening for a while—everyone did. But everyone, including him, had avoided saying it out loud.
Many baseball players have minor control issues at one point or another. Sometimes it happens after an injury, when a player is relearning how to throw, over-attending to discrete motions that used to feel fluid and natural. “Overthinking” is the simple way to put it: the brain’s prefrontal cortex trips up the sensory cortex and the motor cortex. In other cases, the mind can essentially go blank. Players usually snap out of it, the way Bard had years before. But the brain can get stuck in certain patterns, and the yips can take over in a way that no one fully understands. Years ago, Roger Angell published a piece in this magazine about Steve Blass, a Pittsburgh Pirates ace who won two complete games in the 1971 World Series against the Baltimore Orioles, then lost his skill a year later. Baseball players sometimes call the yips “Steve Blass disease.”
Anyone whose work involves the repetition of refined motor skills—surgeons and musicians, for example—can get the yips. (The term was popularized by a golfer, Tommy Armour, who played on the P.G.A. Tour in the nineteen-twenties and thirties.) Some small percentage of the afflicted suffer from a neurological condition called focal dystonia, which is linked to abnormalities in the neural pathways of the brain and leads to involuntary muscle contractions. Other cases seem to have a psychological basis.
When treating athletes with the yips, sports psychiatrists try both to alleviate their anxiety—with breathing exercises, therapy, and the like—and to fool their brains into accessing deep working memory rather than the misfiring part of the brain. A golfer might try putting with the opposite hand or distracting himself by counting backward from three before swinging. A tennis player struggling with her toss might do little math puzzles just before serving. Debbie Crews, a sports psychologist who has published several studies about the yips, told me that the goal often is not to eradicate the yips but to outsmart them. This turns out to be very hard to do.
In 2000, Rick Ankiel, a star rookie for the St. Louis Cardinals, lost his control on the mound during a playoff game. He spent a few years trying to regain his form before he reinvented himself as an outfielder. “Clinically, I believe, what happened is this: I dunno,” he later wrote, in a memoir. “And neither does anyone else.” While Bard was with the Red Sox, his teammate Jon Lester found that he couldn’t throw the ball to first base anymore. Runners started taking big leads when he pitched; eventually, he tried bouncing the ball to first. Lester has been reluctant to talk publicly about his difficulties. Steve Sax, a second baseman for the Dodgers in the eighties, has said that when he began struggling to throw he became “the laughingstock of the league.”
In the sports world, there’s still a degree of stigma about mental-health issues, partly owing to a narrow definition of toughness. Coaches and front offices, which favor predictability, are sometimes made uncomfortable by the uncertainty surrounding causes and treatments. For a while, Bard couldn’t even play a game of catch. “You want it to be a mechanical issue, or maybe a nerve issue or something,” he told me. He spent hours with coaches looking at video of his mechanics. “Which I know now was probably making things worse,” he said.
Once Bard acknowledged the problem, he tried every available fix. He met with sports psychologists; he saw a hypnotist; he meditated. He whispered mantras, which he found counterproductive—athletes “don’t think in words, we think in shapes, feelings, and visions,” he told me. He had a rib removed, to help with the blood-flow problem caused by thoracic-outlet syndrome. He tried different arm slots. Adair posted inspirational messages around their house. At one point, she and Bard drove to a Holiday Inn to meet a woman who used eye-movement therapy to treat soldiers with P.T.S.D. Bard also tried a technique called tapping: you tap your fingers on certain places on your head, in a certain order, to reframe traumatic memories. It didn’t work.
He went to Puerto Rico for winter ball, and reconnected with Aaron Bates, a former Red Sox teammate, who had had his own period of throwing issues, which he had never talked about before. Bates compared the experience to driving on the interstate, intending to pass an exit, and having your car swerve onto the off-ramp: “You can never trust the car again.” Bard said, “We would sit there drinking beer at, like, four in the morning, laughing our heads off at these feelings that we’d both had but had never told anybody.” It felt good, but it didn’t help his pitching: in Puerto Rico, he walked nine batters, hit three, and recorded a single out.
“I’ll have random players come up to me,” Bard’s brother Luke told me, “and they’ll be, like, ‘You know, I had to face your brother in a back-field spring-training live B.P., and I was scared for my life.’ ” Bard bounced around the minors, and he and Adair had their first child, a boy named Davis. In a two-month span, Davis went on fifteen plane trips, tagging along as his dad went from team to team. “I learned the subtle signs that his release from a team was imminent,” Adair later wrote, in an essay about this period. “A little too long at the field, a meeting after a bad bullpen session—I knew when to start packing.” Her own role, she added, was “an emotional conundrum”: “I was lost but the finder; I was fragile and drained, but expected to be the strength and sustenance to carry our family through the challenges. We were all exhausted.”
Bard read self-help books and books about achieving a “flow state,” in which a person feels fully immersed in an activity—in the zone. He played catch with his dad, to see if he could recover some of that old, easy joy. Kathy wondered if somehow she and Paul were responsible for what their son was going through: “We asked, ‘Did we do anything?’ ”
There were moments of real hope: Bard would throw twenty-five pitches and five of them would remind everyone of the guy who’d embarrassed the Yankees. He often felt relaxed before he threw. But in the nanosecond before his hand released the ball a terrifying thought would enter his mind: “I don’t know where the ball is going.”
In 2017, the Mets suggested that he become a submariner—a pitcher who throws more or less underhanded. Bard found himself at the Mets’ facility in Port St. Lucie, Florida, not having seen his family in weeks. Adair was pregnant again. He’d always been able to tell himself that, even if he wasn’t a good pitcher, he was a good husband and father, or was trying to be. He walked out of a training session, called Adair, and told her that he was done.
He felt relieved; she felt nervous. Their life together had always centered on baseball, and she didn’t know who they’d be without it. They bought an old house at the top of a hill in Greenville, in a neighborhood filled with young families that was a ten-minute drive from the minor-league stadium where Bard was playing when they met. Their second child was born, and a third arrived two years later. They were happy, but Bard didn’t know what to do with himself. He cleaned out his closet and started selling some of his clothes on eBay. In 2013, he had made two appearances for Boston, and the team went on to win the World Series. The Red Sox had sent him a World Series ring, but he felt no connection to it. He sold that, too.
At Adair’s prodding, he called some front-office people whom he liked and told them that he was looking for work. One of them, who had left Boston for the Arizona Diamondbacks, told Bard that he was hiring a mentor for minor leaguers. Bard got the job.
Mentoring wasn’t high-paying or glamorous, and it meant a lot of flying back and forth between Scottsdale and Greenville. But Bard found that the work came naturally to him. He’s an attentive listener, and, during his time in the minors, he had got used to younger players asking him about things—pitching grips, girlfriend problems. Many of Arizona’s minor leaguers were curious about his story. When he recounted it, they said it was awesome.
This was a surprise; he was embarrassed by the past. But they viewed him as someone who had pitched for the Red Sox and struck out Hall of Famers. Plus, he’d persevered through adversity, as athletes love to say. Bard began to see his story as they saw it, putting into practice advice that he was giving them about reframing discouraging thoughts. “The way you talk to yourself and the way you view yourself is who you become,” he would say.
He taught them breathing exercises and meditation, things he’d learned during his own odyssey through the minors. He picked up tips from the team’s mental-skills coaches, like keeping a journal—first to jot down his thoughts about baseball and then, more often, just to reflect on life. He sat in on meetings with the pitching coaches, and learned how to create highlight reels of bullpen sessions, so that he could help pitchers visualize the path of the ball. He started bringing his glove out to Scottsdale, because he preferred to talk to the players where they were relaxed, and for most of them that was on the field. He noticed that throwing didn’t feel difficult anymore.
He didn’t think too much about it. But a few players commented on how hard he was throwing. One day, he asked a coach if he’d ever considered a particular grip, and the coach asked him to demonstrate it. Bard demurred; it was the spring of 2019, and he hadn’t thrown a pitch in almost two years. Still, he was curious. He got on the mound, warmed up a little, and threw a fastball. The coach looked up from his iPad. Bard had thrown a ninety-m.p.h. strike, in his running shoes.
That fall, back in Greenville, he went to Home Depot and bought materials to construct a pitching net in his back yard. He told Adair that it was for the kids. He told himself that, too. After a little while, he set down one of the kids’ toys as a makeshift home plate, and paced out the distance to where a pitcher’s rubber would be.
On rainy days, he went to the Y.M.C.A. and threw against a piece of tape on a wall. Adair said it was nice that he felt good about throwing again—he might someday be able to take Davis into the back yard to play catch. “If your dad was a major-league player, that should be cool,” she told me. “Not, like, ‘We don’t talk about that.’ ”
Bard hung targets from the net in the back yard to create a strike zone, and hit them so often that they broke. Adair began to suspect his intentions. Around Christmas, he called Luke, who was training in Charlotte, to see if he could join him. “I’m just messing around, because it feels good again,” he told his brother. Then Luke watched him throw and asked if he was trying to make a comeback. “Kinda,” Bard said. He came out again the next week, and threw with Luke and a few other pros. They told Bard that he could pitch in the big leagues the next day.
Afterward, he and Adair talked for a long time. She had reservations—they now had three children under the age of five—but, in the end, she encouraged him to try, if only to put his playing career behind him. Maybe he’d end up looking foolish; more likely, he’d toil in the minors for a while and then have to find a new job. Still, she said, there was no reason to assume the worst. What if he pulled it off?
In February, 2020, Bard flew to Scottsdale and told the Diamondbacks that he was stepping down from his job to attempt a comeback. He says that he offered them a private tryout but that they declined. Word of his decision spread through the complex quickly, and coaches and staffers asked if they could help. He needed video of his pitching and a printout of data that his agent could send to prospective teams. One coach set up data-collection equipment, and another volunteered to catch the session. A friend on the team’s minor-league staff angled the camera just right. Bard made the highlight reel himself.
His agent announced a tryout in Arizona the following week, at a local high school. Scouts from about twenty teams showed up, and Bard threw for fifteen minutes. Ten minutes after he finished, his agent got a call from the Colorado Rockies.
Five teams invited Bard to their big-league camps. His agent called Paul, and Paul called Kathy, who was in the car with Adair, in Greenville, when her phone rang. She told Adair that Daniel had several offers, and Adair began to cry. Kathy saw how much pressure Adair had felt. She also realized that, because of Adair and the kids, her son didn’t feel that pressure as much as he used to. Bates, Bard’s old teammate, who is now a hitting coach with the Los Angeles Dodgers, believed that Bard’s time coaching had made the difference: it requires a lack of ego, and had given him a sense of perspective about what he could and couldn’t control.
Bard signed with the Rockies, in part because they called first, and also because he and Adair liked Denver, which they figured would be less intense than Boston or Los Angeles. Three weeks after the tryout, he put on a Rockies uniform for a spring-training game in Arizona. He walked a few batters and gave up hard hits, but he didn’t yank any of his throws. A few weeks after that, the coronavirus pandemic arrived, and baseball shut down. Bard packed up, flew home, and figured that the experiment might be over.
But, for him, the shutdown proved to be a strange kind of gift. It gave him more time to train with pros in Greenville, and to pitch to live batters. When baseball returned, that summer, he was invited to an abbreviated summer camp in Denver.
In July, he stepped onto Coors Field and caught his breath. “It’s such a pristine environment,” he told me. “There’s barely a pebble on the warning track that’s out of place.” His family rented a cabin in the mountains nearby. One afternoon, Bard showed up at his locker to find that his uniform had no number on it; the clubhouse attendant explained that numbers were reserved for those who’d already made the big-league roster. Bard and another player found a roll of duct tape and fashioned “52”—one higher than the 51 he’d worn in Boston—on the back. “I was, like, This is entertaining and funny, and it’s 2020 and the world’s falling apart, so who cares?” Bard said. He added, “I went out and I pitched really well that day.”
At the end of camp, the manager called him into his office and said that he’d made the team. Bard was thirty-five years old. Soon, the Rockies realized that they were getting not only a player but a kind of coach. “Guys gravitate to him, especially the younger guys,” Darryl Scott, now the team’s pitching coach, told me. He was also impressed by Bard’s demeanor: “When you go to the mound and talk to him in the middle of the game—it could be bases loaded, one out—he is completely calm.” Bard was summoned from the bullpen two days into the season. There were two out in the bottom of the fifth, and runners on first and second; the Rockies led by a run. Bard got out of the inning with a flyout, then pitched another scoreless inning, his fastball consistently hitting ninety-eight m.p.h. He got the win, his first in more than eight years.
By the end of August, he was the team’s closer. He appeared in twenty-three games that year, striking out twenty-seven batters and walking just ten. He was named the National League Comeback Player of the Year.
In his second season back, he faltered, losing some of his movement and velocity and ceding the closer’s role to another reliever. In the off-season, a friend who coaches at U.N.C. Charlotte suggested that he throw a two-seam fastball from an arm slot two inches higher than his usual position. Bard had spent years tinkering with his arm slots, to disastrous effect. But he understood his body and his mind better now. Instead of instructing his body, he tried imitation, thinking of pitchers with higher arm slots and mimicking them. The ball hissed out of his hand and sank. That fastball became his best pitch.
Bard was no longer simply throwing as hard as he could. He experimented with grips and spins; he learned how to throw a pitch that he used to envy, which looked at first like it would sail wide, only to swing back toward the plate and catch the left corner, surprising the batter. During the 2022 season, he was one of the best closers in baseball, converting thirty-four saves in thirty-seven chances, the second-best rate in the league. The Rockies signed him to a two-year contract for nineteen million dollars. One day in the off-season, as he fixed his daughter a snack at home in the kitchen, he told me that he was a hundred per cent better at pitching than he’d been in Boston. “Like, not even close,” he said.
He recalled a trip that he and Adair had taken during the years when he was struggling. They went to Europe and spent a few weeks driving around. On a Sunday afternoon in Spain, they sat in a square drinking beers, and Bard got to thinking about the baseball that was being played, at that moment, on the other side of the ocean. The sport suddenly seemed small and inconsequential. He thought that the trip would provide the reset he needed. It didn’t, but the epiphany stayed with him.
“Naturally, playing baseball on TV just feels more important than it actually is,” he told me. “And that’s O.K. That’s a good thing. It feels like it matters. It does matter. It matters to a lot of people. But, at the end of the day, we’re not saving any lives or curing cancer or anything super meaningful. We’re just doing something that brings a lot of joy to people. And there’s no reason to let yourself get so caught up in it that it feels like life and death. And I did for a long time.”
In December, Bard was selected to represent the United States in the World Baseball Classic, an international tournament featuring many of the game’s best players, which would be held in March. It was an honor, and he welcomed the bigger platform that it offered. “I want to use my story to just give hope for people to get through really hard things, especially in sports, but also people outside of sports and in different areas, different walks of life,” he told a reporter when the tournament began. “I don’t necessarily have clear-cut, take-this-pill kind of solutions, but I do have a lot of things I know helped me, and are a piece of the healing process for me.”
Team U.S.A. reached the quarterfinals, where it faced Venezuela. In the fifth inning, the U.S. was up 5–2, and Bard was called in from the bullpen. Venezuela’s fans were roaring; whichever team lost would be out of the tournament. Bard had never pitched in an environment like this. He walked the first batter, then gave up a single on a checked swing. His adrenaline spiked. “There’s a fine line between being super excited and really nervous,” he told me later. He threw a pitch into the dirt, well off the plate, and both runners advanced. Bard knew that something was wrong. It was obvious to everyone.
The next batter was Venezuela’s biggest star, José Altuve, a former American League M.V.P. Bard tried to throw a sinker inside, hoping to elicit a ground ball. Instead, the pitch, traveling ninety-six m.p.h., rose and hit Altuve in the hand. Altuve dropped to the dirt in pain; his thumb was broken. Team U.S.A. had relievers up in the bullpen, but another batter was already stepping into the box.
Bard stood rigid on the mound. The bases were loaded, there were no outs, and the tying run was on first. Bard’s next pitch dove into the dirt behind the batter, narrowly missing his heels, and rolled to the backstop. A runner scored. Finally, the call went to the bullpen. Bard was done.
He didn’t sleep much that night. He went back to Arizona, where he pitched in two more spring-training games, but he felt terrible on the mound. He felt terrible at home, too—stressed, short-tempered. Adair urged him to be up front with the Rockies’ coaches and trainers. They were glad when he was. Nobody wanted to say anything, but everyone knew.
The Rockies put Bard on the fifteen-day injured list. Even after all he had been through, Bard told me, it was tempting to do what athletes in every sport often do: blame a tight back or a sore elbow instead of a troubled mind. “Arm fatigue” would have been an easy excuse—after all, his velocity was down. When Bard had been struggling in the minors, he’d wished that he felt encouraged to treat his condition as an injury, something you could recover from with medical treatment and time. A misfire between the mind and the body may not be as well understood as a torn ligament, but it isn’t fake.
He and the Rockies decided to list his injury as anxiety. It wasn’t a first; in the past two decades, a number of players have gone on the list for mental-health reasons. But it remains rare, and still makes headlines. Bard started talking to a therapist. On game days, he’d take the kids to a park near their house, where they’d whack golf balls or fish in a pond. He started to feel calmer. He was still yippy, but he was getting to a place where he could work on his pitching without feeling overwhelmed. He felt more like himself.
After nearly three weeks, he was reactivated. Since then, the Rockies have used him in low-leverage situations; he’s not being brought in to finish close games. His velocity is still down, and he is still yanking some of his pitches. He has struggled to keep the ball where he wants it, down low, and has been relying more on his slider, an off-speed pitch, than on his fastball. He understands the yips differently now—as part of him, as something to be managed, the way a pitcher might treat a frayed shoulder.
On a gorgeous Saturday in early May, the Rockies were getting ready to play the Mets, in Queens. The Mets were observing Mental Health Awareness Month, something that would have been hard to imagine not long ago. Two other players this season have followed Bard in going on the injured list with anxiety. I sat with him in the visitors’ dugout, sheltered from the sun, listening to the pre-game hum. The hours before a baseball game have a languor to them: kids gawking on the edges of the field, big-leaguers thwacking batting-practice home runs. Bard looked out at the groundskeepers readying the diamond. He was about to turn thirty-eight.
“I’m not super satisfied with where I’m at, but I’m happy to be where I’m at, you know what I mean?” he said. He’d been walking about as many hitters as he struck out, and had given up a fair number of hard hits—but, whenever he walked a batter or threw a wild pitch, he gathered himself. A month after the game in New York, I watched him, on television, walk three San Francisco Giants, loading the bases, then strike out two, walk in a run, and strike out a third. 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.” Ten of Bard’s first fifteen strikeouts this season came with runners in scoring position.
The game against the Giants was his sixteenth appearance of the season—his worst outing so far, and a sign of how much was still going wrong. And yet the run he gave up was only the second he’d allowed all year. Success isn’t the same thing as dominance. The point has never been to blow guys away with hundred-m.p.h. fastballs, as much fun as that is. It’s always been to try to win with whatever you’ve got. ♦
As credos go, you could do a lot worse than “Win with whatever you’ve got.” I still think somebody in the Rockies front office has a screw loose. But I will never again look the same way at Daniel Bard setting foot on the mound at Coors field for a middle-inning relief stint, $19 million contract and all. Vaya con Dios, Daniel. And may the ghost of Nuke Laloosh leave you in peace.
