In short
The episode explains how elite performers can suddenly lose a specific skill—often called “the yips” (also known as Whiskey Fingers, The Monster, Dartitis, etc.). It contrasts choking under pressure with a deeper loss of automatic control, using baseball pitcher Rick Ankiel. Ankiel, a dominant 20-year-old Cardinals prospect, began hesitating and throwing wild pitches in Game 1 of the 1999 division series, then deteriorated so badly he was pulled early. Sports psychologist Sally Akers argues yips can involve loss of automaticity (like driving becoming “conscious” and jerky). Ankiel tried mechanics, distraction, and therapy, but struggled for years, retiring in 2005. He later reinvented himself as an outfielder, hitting a three-run homer and regaining accuracy. Neurologist Steve Frucht presents task-specific dystonia as a possible physical cause: involuntary, task-triggered muscle overactivation seen on sensors/fMRI, sometimes treatable with meds/Botox but not fully curable.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOThe Pressure of Performance
1:38 to 2:14
Explore the intense pressure athletes face during high-stakes games.
“and the main thought I keep having is just, I don't know how these guys do it.”
Understanding the Yips
2:14 to 4:14
Learn about the phenomenon of the yips and its impact on performers.
“And it's been making me think about one of our favorite episodes, an episode about baseball, about high-stakes performance, and what makes some people choke.”
Rick Ankeel's Journey
4:14 to 7:11
Follow Rick Ankeel's rise and fall in baseball due to the yips.
“And once you're there, is there anything you can do to make it back?”
The Mechanics of Performance
7:11 to 12:23
Delve into how mental and physical mechanics affect performance.
“35 pitches, tortured pitches in the inning.”
Overcoming the Yips
12:23 to 14:00
Discover how Rick Ankeel dealt with the yips and his eventual retirement.
“And obviously that may well impact their being able to overcome it in future.”
The Weight of Failure
14:00 to 14:42
Rick's pitching career ended due to the Yips, but he felt a sense of relief.
“to whatever you want to call it, because I still felt like a failure.”
The Weight of Failure
16:33 to 17:21
Rick's pitching career ended due to the Yips, but he felt a sense of relief.
“Medications prescribed only if clinically appropriate based on a consultation with a clinician.”
Understanding the Yips
17:21 to 23:34
Exploring what the Yips are and how they affect athletes like Rick.
“Check out the product locator at pureleaf.com slash find dash us.”
Dystonia and Its Implications
23:34 to 28:04
Neurologist Steve Fruct discusses focal dystonia and its relation to the Yips.
“You can put sensors on their wrists, on their fingers, on their hands, and you can actually show millisecond by millisecond that right before the club head hits, certain muscles overactivate.”
Exploring Talent and Dystonia
28:04 to 29:00
Learn how task-specific dystonia offers insights into talent and performance.
“There isn't another disorder that I know of that gives you a window into talent and cognition and motor learning the way task-specific dystonia can do so well.”
Show all 11 chapters
The Surprising Nature of Talent
29:00 to 29:31
Discover the complexities behind talent and the YIPS phenomenon.
“Maybe it's that they were ever able to do it at all.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Sally Akehurst:Support for this show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. Do you have a pet? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill of over$1 ,000. And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch Pet Insurance comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance. Get paid back up to 90 % of vet bills. You can use any vet in the U.S. and Canada. All vets are in network. Go to FetchPet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's FetchPet.com slash save. Support for this show comes from Indeed. When the pressure's on and you need to hire the right person for the job, Indeed Sponsored Jobs has your back.
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1:37Rick Ankiel:I've been spending a lot of time recently watching playoff baseball, and the main thought I keep having is just, I don't know how these guys do it. the pressure is honestly hard to imagine. It builds and it builds until every single pitch seems like it has the whole season riding on it. Every player has the chance to make that one mistake that's going to make fans blame him for a generation. It's the kind of pressure that throws some of the best players in baseball into prolonged slumps, as if they suddenly just forgot how to play. And it's been making me think about one of our favorite episodes, an episode about baseball, about high-stakes performance, and what makes some people choke.
2:27Rick Ankiel:Think about something you love to do, the thing you're best at, the thing you've practiced more than anything else in the world. Maybe it's painting or writing or playing the piano. Now, imagine you wake up one day and you just can't do it anymore. Everything else is fine. You're not sick. You're not injured. But that one thing is impossible. You can barely even hold the paintbrush. And you have no idea why. It's happened to some of the greatest performers in the world. To gymnasts like Simone Biles.
3:00Sally Akehurst:It looked like she got almost lost in the air.
3:04Rick Ankiel:Or world champion darts player Eric Bristow. The game I love to play used to be so easy to do. All of a sudden, I can't even throw it off. There was Leon Fleischer, who suddenly stopped being able to play the piano. I was in a state of deep funk, deep depression. There was talk show host Diane Rehm.
3:23Sally Akehurst:I couldn't go on the air. I'd go.
3:27Rick Ankiel:And this kind of thing can last for years, like it did with a pro baseball player I spoke to named Rick Enkel.
3:33Steven Frucht:I didn't understand the magnitude of what was really happening and what would happen to my career after that.
3:39Rick Ankiel:This phenomenon has a lot of names. Whiskey Fingers, The Monster, The Waggles, Dartitis, Musician's Cramp, and maybe most often, The Yips. I'm Noah Massenfeld, and this week on Unexplainable, what could cause people at the absolute peak of their profession to suddenly and often permanently lose their superpowers? The things they can do better than anything else. The things that, in a lot of ways, make them who they are.
4:11Steven Frucht:It's one of the loneliest places you ever want to be.
4:14Rick Ankiel:And once you're there, is there anything you can do to make it back?
4:32Rick Ankiel:Before he ever got the yips, Rick Ankele was a phenom.
4:36Steven Frucht:You know, I ended up being the number one prospect in the country at the time in high school. I threw nine no-hitters, threw three my sophomore, three my junior, three my senior year.
4:44Rick Ankiel:And when he was just 20, he made it to the majors, the youngest player in the league.
4:49Steven Frucht:You're watching all your dreams unfold right in front of you.
4:52Rick Ankiel:He wasn't just young, he was dominant. So at the end of his first full season, his manager tapped him to start the biggest game of his life.
5:00Sally Akehurst:A huge crowd gathering today as this much-anticipated division series featuring the Braves, the champions of the National League East, the Cardinals, the champions of the Central.
5:10Rick Ankiel:It was the first game of the playoffs. Over 50 ,000 fans watching to see if Rick was up for it.
5:16Sally Akehurst:And on the mound for the Cardinals,
5:18Steven Frucht:the young lefty, Rick and Keel, first game starter in the postseason. All eyes are on you. So your walk from the bullpen when you warm up as a pitcher is like your boxer's entrance. As emotionless as possible, body language, looking like, I want to knock these guys out.
5:36Rick Ankiel:Rick came out throwing crisp and easy, didn't give up a run in the first two innings. But then, in the top of the third...
5:42Steven Frucht:I threw a pitch, I threw a fastball in, I overthrew it, cut it pretty good, so, you know, it darts. And the dirt, back to the screen, and over to second base goes Greg Maddux on the wild pitch. I'm just standing there looking at it, and I remember telling myself, man, I just threw a wild pitch.
5:59Rick Ankiel:Everything seemed normal. The announcers weren't particularly phased. Wild pitches happen all the time in baseball. But Rick thought something felt off.
6:08Steven Frucht:It just struck me weird, and all of a sudden it felt like, I don't know, something I never felt before. I didn't really understand what was happening.
6:15Rick Ankiel:For the first time, Rick started hesitating.
6:18Steven Frucht:I'm going through the routines and different things to get yourself back on track as a pitcher and nothing was working
6:28Steven Frucht:Pitch coach comes out talks to me we slow it down and then it just started to unravel
6:35Steven Frucht:My muscles and fingers in my arm were you know Locking up and the ball is just coming out of my hand like shot put like I didn't even know how to hold a ball
6:43Sally Akehurst:The quietness of the crowd is kind of eerie right now.
6:47Steven Frucht:It was like I blacked out.
6:53Steven Frucht:And then it was like, okay, oh God, where'd the ball go? So there is the fifth wild pitch of the inning. It was like, like everything I had ever done in the past from a pitching standpoint was gone. And I had no idea how to throw baseball. 35 pitches, tortured pitches in the inning. For the 21-year-old Ankeel, it's almost like my body was trying to protect me from death in a way. And I want to know why.
7:27Rick Ankiel:So when you think of someone like this baseball player I talked to, Rick Ankeel, who suddenly starts blacking out whenever he releases the ball, is this just like choking under pressure? Is it something different?
7:38Sally Akehurst:So choking has been defined as a failure to perform under pressure, but you may well still be in control. However, I think when we've spoken to athletes who have experienced yips, they talk about that just loss of control that is almost just a different level. It's a different experience from performing under pressure and not doing well.
8:02Rick Ankiel:This is Sally Akers. She's a sports psychologist in London, and she's done tons of research on the yips.
8:08Sally Akehurst:Sometimes we hear from athletes, their performance is automatic. They can't even tell you what their performance was like. Like it's so unconscious that they're just doing it. And to get that level of automaticity, I believe that an athlete truly trusts themselves that they can perform at that level.
8:28Rick Ankiel:And I guess if someone stops trusting themselves, they might stop being so automatic.
8:32Sally Akehurst:Yeah, and I guess when I was teaching students around this, I always get them to think about, you know, when you're driving the car and it's so automatic after you've driven for a few years, isn't it? You can be singing along and doing other things when you're driving, but maybe the police come up behind you and suddenly you become very conscious of how you're driving. And it gets all a little bit less automatic and it's then just a bit more jerky. It's not as smooth. It's not as efficient in the way you're performing and processing.
9:00Rick Ankiel:To do anything at this high of a level, you have to be automatic. You can't consciously think about every small motion you're doing, especially when you're doing something as complicated as pitching. And once you lose that feeling of being automatic, that ability to do something unconsciously, it isn't easy to get it back. It's like waking up in the middle of the night and trying to will yourself back to sleep. The more you think about it, the harder it gets. But that's exactly how Rick tried to attack this problem. And the next game, he was even worse.
Read the full transcript
9:33Sally Akehurst:Right back where he left off. First pitch, head high to Perez.
9:38Rick Ankiel:It got so bad, the announcers started making fun of him.
9:41Sally Akehurst:He's got guys in the third row ducking. Bob, you all right down there? You ducking? You feel like you're safe behind that screen?
9:48Rick Ankiel:That's Hall of Fame broadcaster Joe Buck right there, making fun of a 21-year-old whose life is falling apart in front of 50 ,000 people.
9:57Sally Akehurst:He's lost all his mechanics, and he can't get the ball to the point where the catcher can even catch it. He's throwing like a mechanic right now.
10:06Rick Ankiel:This time, Rick's outing ended much quicker. His coach took him out before the first inning was even over.
10:11Sally Akehurst:Well, that's the end of the night for Rick Ankele.
10:14Rick Ankiel:And pretty soon, the Cardinals' season was over.
10:17Sally Akehurst:The Mets are going to the World Series.
10:22Rick Ankiel:But in the offseason, Rick got right back up. He wasn't going to let two rough games ruin his career. He had a plan.
10:29Steven Frucht:The only thing I knew was to work harder, throw more, try to figure this out.
10:36Rick Ankiel:Rick went back to basics.
10:38Steven Frucht:I'm trying so many different things. He broke down his throwing mechanics step by step. I'm thinking about keeping my weight back and the ball's coming out perfect. Went out the next day. Same thought, I can't throw it anywhere close.
10:50Rick Ankiel:But he didn't get discouraged. He just kept trying something different.
10:53Steven Frucht:I'm driving down the street. I see kids playing catch. It's like, let me try that mechanics. It works for him. And I'd go find a field and throw another 100 balls. But that didn't stick either. Same thing. Can't throw it anywhere close.
11:05Rick Ankiel:He tried anything he could think of to get back to that feeling of being automatic.
11:09Steven Frucht:There was times I would just sing songs, right? Try to distract your brain from, like, taking over.
11:14Rick Ankiel:But nothing was working.
11:16Steven Frucht:It was like my body would start to tense up and lock down.
11:20Rick Ankiel:At this point, Rick wasn't throwing in front of 50 ,000 people anymore. He wasn't facing the kind of pressure he was dealing with on live TV, pitching in the playoffs. He was just out there with a couple of guys, and he still couldn't throw straight.
11:34Steven Frucht:I'm just trying to play catch, and I'm having trouble just throwing it to the guy that's 15 feet away from me. And that's when I'm like, you know, I don't know what is going on, but something's not right. The issue with it, right, is that it's not as if you have a shoulder injury where I can say, oh, look, I was hurt. That's what happened. You have something going on that only you can feel and nobody can see.
11:53Rick Ankiel:He tried asking his teammates if they'd had experience with the yips, but no one would even say the word. It was like they felt it was some kind of curse you could speak into existence.
12:02Steven Frucht:People feel like it can be contagious, you know. Nobody wants to talk about it. So people are nervous all the time.
12:07Sally Akehurst:There's really quite a stigma around the yips and almost a fear that if someone says, oh, maybe you've got the yips, it's almost having this, oh, goodness.
12:18Rick Ankiel:Sally says all that superstition can make players obsess even more. That initial experience and the reaction of others will be influencing potentially their dealing with it.
12:30Sally Akehurst:And obviously that may well impact their being able to overcome it in future.
12:34Rick Ankiel:That's kind of what happened with Rick. He started overanalyzing every tiny action in his life. It was like he was looking for something to be naturally automatic. Did he normally brush his hair with his left hand? Was that the way he always tied his shoes? He wasn't sure anymore.
12:51Steven Frucht:I'd have nightmares in the middle of the night that I couldn't throw strikes. I'd wake up, my heartbeat going 100 miles an hour, soaked in sweat. I'd wake up at 3 in the morning, and I would just, I would get out of bed and stay awake. It's just a dark, nasty, you can't get it to leave your mind.
13:09Rick Ankiel:Eventually, Rick found a sports psychologist who helped him get past the worst of it. He helped Rick manage his frustration, to not obsess over every single throw, to not blame himself for everything. and he got to the point where he could control it a bit sometimes, but it would always come rushing back.
13:27Steven Frucht:There was even a time where I could hear what it felt like was blood draining from my brain down past my ears into my neck, and I could feel that feeling coming, and it's like, here we go.
13:42Rick Ankiel:Rick kept struggling for years. He went down to the minors, worked his way back up, But eventually, he decided he couldn't keep going. So in 2005, almost five years after that first playoff game, he walked into his coach's office.
13:56Steven Frucht:And I shut the door and I just said, I can't do this anymore. It took almost everything I had to retire, to quit, to whatever you want to call it, because I still felt like a failure.
14:07Rick Ankiel:Rick's promising pitching career was over. The Yips had claimed another victim. But honestly, for the first time in years, he felt okay. He felt good about it.
14:18Steven Frucht:I just felt like this giant weight was taken off my shoulders. You know, felt like I could breathe.
14:24Rick Ankiel:He drove home, lay down on the couch, got ready for retired life. And then... His phone rang. It was his agent. I was like, what in the f*** are you talking about? That's next.
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17:30Sally Akehurst:What are the yips? Are you kidding me, you two? We don't say the Y word out loud, you understand? It just comes automatic. Don't think, just throw. Don't think, just throw. After years of struggling with the yips, Rick finally decided to just let it go.
17:51Rick Ankiel:Move on from baseball, clear his mind.
17:53Steven Frucht:So I went home. I didn't even turn on the radio. I didn't turn TV on. I was just sitting on the couch in pure silence. And I was like the first time I'd felt inner peace in a long time. Until my agent calls, hey, are you OK? Yeah, man, I'm good. I'm great. Whatever. And he goes, hey, what do you think about being an outfielder? I was like, what in the f*** are you talking about?
18:16Rick Ankiel:Going from pitching to playing outfield in the majors might not sound like the hardest thing. But only a tiny handful of players have ever been able to do both at the highest level. So Rick basically laughed at his agent.
18:30Steven Frucht:He's like, no, I'm being serious. So I hang up. I walked around. I found a bat in my room. And I came back out to the living room. And I started swinging it. And I had this, just this feeling took over my whole body. It was an outer body experience, so to speak. But I could see it. I could feel it. I almost felt like I could taste it. I felt like the heavens came down and spoke to me. Like, it was like listening to the best version of Amazing Grace ever.
18:59Rick Ankiel:Rick dropped the bat, picked up the phone, and called the general manager of the Cardinals, who told him,
19:04Steven Frucht:Be here tomorrow morning. You're an outfielder. Yes, sir. I'll see you tomorrow morning. Click. It was absurd, but the thing is that I believed it.
19:14Rick Ankiel:Rick started at the bottom of the minors, and he hit pretty well. Played the field pretty well, too. He slowly worked his way up. And finally, after two and a half years, he was back.
19:25Steven Frucht:When I walked into that clubhouse, the hugs, the high fives, you know, everybody in that organization knew what I went through and what it took to get back. And the love that I felt in the clubhouse was surreal.
19:39Rick Ankiel:It wasn't a particularly important game. It was mid-August, dog days of summer for a Cardinals team that had more losses than wins. But the stadium was packed. And as Rick walked out for his first at bat as a major league outfielder, Right fielder, Rick Ankeld. he got a standing ovation.
20:01Rick Ankiel:Rick was amped. He knew just how big this moment was. What is going through his mind right now? His heart has got to just be racing. He blocked out all the noise and swung. First at bat, he pops it up to short, handled by Blum for the first out. Then his second time up. A high strike looked to be a ball, and Ankeel strikes out, and he's 0 for 2.
20:24Sally Akehurst:But then his third time up. Fans are ready to erupt with a base hit, a home run, something positive for Rick Ankeel.
20:31Rick Ankiel:He took a huge swing. 2-2, and Ankeel strikes out, 0 for 3. Finally, in the bottom of the seventh, Rick came up with runners on first and second. And this time.
20:43Steven Frucht:Ankeel out to deep right field. I'm running to first. I'm looking at the outfielder, I'm looking at the ball, I'm looking at the wall trying to judge if it's going to be enough. He has a chance to leave the ballpark, it's gone!
20:54Sally Akehurst:A three-run shot for Rick Ankele back in the major leagues. Remarkable.
21:03Steven Frucht:I could feel the ground shaking from the people in St. Louis, the fans going crazy, the explosion of emotions. I don't even, I felt like I floated around the bases on a magic carpet. And these fans are pretty happy along with him.
21:20Rick Ankiel:After so many baseball players before him had been beaten by the Yips, Rick had made it back. But he didn't get there by just working harder and harder, trying to beat the Yips into submission. He found a way around them.
21:34Steven Frucht:I knew if I didn't give this a shot, that I was going to wake up days and be like, why didn't I try that? Why didn't I try to make it back? I already felt like a failure as it was, and this was a way for redemption.
21:47Rick Ankiel:He stopped trying to figure out an explanation for the Yips, and he just accepted what he didn't understand.
21:53Steven Frucht:Up to that point, I want to know why. Not everything. Doesn't matter why that happened. Why that happened. I had to adapt to the fact that sometimes we don't always get to know why. There's not always a why. I think that's a powerful lesson, too.
22:08Rick Ankiel:But as the year went on, something strange started happening. His arm came back to him.
22:15Sally Akehurst:Here comes that throw from Akeel. Look at that! On a fly! He threw a strike from about 300 feet away. Watch this. He got him!
22:24Steven Frucht:Another one! Over here!
22:27Rick Ankiel:His arm was strong. It was accurate. It was feared. He was that same 20-year-old phenom again. Not thinking anymore, just throwing. All of a sudden, it seemed like his yips were gone.
22:40Steven Frucht:But the surprising part is that I couldn't do it from 60 feet. And then I could go out there and probably throw more strikes from 180 feet away than I would be on the mound.
22:49Rick Ankiel:One kind of throw, pitching from 60 feet, Rick couldn't do it. Another kind of throw, from way farther away, back to automatic. Which is a sign that maybe his yips weren't actually a psychological thing. They might have been caused by something else entirely.
23:06Sally Akehurst:The idea that you can't throw 60 feet, but you can throw 300, that's perfectly reasonable to be physiological. Okay, not psychological. Because they're totally different motor activities.
23:21Rick Ankiel:This is neurologist Steve Fruct. And he told me scientists used to assume that the yips were psychological. But in the last few decades, there's been new research showing that for a small number of patients, there's a physical cause. Like this one study on golfers.
23:35Sally Akehurst:You can put sensors on their wrists, on their fingers, on their hands, and you can actually show millisecond by millisecond that right before the club head hits, certain muscles overactivate. You can actually show that physiologically.
23:51Rick Ankiel:A lot of these golfers twitched the same exact way, with the same muscles, which suggested they had an actual disorder in their nervous system, a disorder called focal dystonia. Dystonia is a very unusual disorder in which involuntary movements are triggered by a very specific task.
24:10Sally Akehurst:In this case, just by this athletic performance. That's not just a performance anxiety. That's an actual movement disorder.
24:19Rick Ankiel:Movement disorders are neurological conditions that lead to involuntary movements. So things like Parkinson's disease, Tourette's syndrome, essential tremor. And just like a lot of movement disorders, scientists still don't know exactly what causes focal dystonia. But they do know a couple basic things about the symptoms. One, these twitches happen in only one specific part of the body. And two, they only happen during a specific action.
24:46Sally Akehurst:For example, things like writer's cramp, which is a task-specific dystonia. Everything about the hand's okay, but when they pick up a pen, the task of writing induces the dystonia. And for musicians, it's not uncommon for somebody to develop dystonia just on one instrument. So they can't play flute, but saxophone and clarinet, just fine.
25:11Rick Ankiel:I asked Steve why this kind of thing couldn't just be psychological, and he told me you can actually see signs of dystonia with a functional MRI.
25:19Sally Akehurst:These are disorders of the way the brain activates, particularly the motor and sensory networks within the brain.
25:27Rick Ankiel:And because this is a physical thing, people with dystonia tend to yip in the same way whether they're under pressure or not. Which might explain why Rick had trouble just playing catch, even when no one was watching.
25:39Sally Akehurst:Now, how could that be? Psychological? No, come on. This is a physiologic disorder.
25:48Rick Ankiel:A diagnosis like this can be hard for patients to accept. Steve says that people he works with can find it hard to believe they could have some kind of involuntary twitch they don't even feel themselves doing. So they're often convinced that the whole thing is just in their head.
26:03Sally Akehurst:So what do they do? They work harder and harder. The musician locks the practice room door and says, I'm not coming out of here until I fix this. And usually that's exactly the wrong thing. It just accelerates the development of the problem.
26:19Rick Ankiel:Practice on its own isn't going to make dystonia go away. It might actually make it worse. Medicine or even Botox injections can help stop twitches in some cases. But even when these treatments do work, they just blunt the effects of dystonia. They don't fix the underlying issue in the brain.
26:37Sally Akehurst:Neurology has lots of therapeutics, but it doesn't have a lot of cures. It's just tumbling how little we know about this, really. You know, I think 50 years from now, people will look back derisively like, I can't believe they thought that. I can't believe they were treating it this way. You know, didn't they know this? They're probably going to think that of people who are seeing these patients today.
27:03Rick Ankiel:To actually cure someone with dystonia, scientists would probably need to know what causes it in the first place. And right now, they just don't. But when Steve looks at what scientists still don't know about dystonia, he thinks it's an opportunity to learn something even bigger, something that goes beyond the yips. Just think about what connects tasks like writing, throwing, or even playing music.
27:28Sally Akehurst:They're all tasks that require teaching, and it's not something that happens overnight. It requires multiple repetitions, probably over many months to years.
27:41Rick Ankiel:These are all things we need to learn. And how we learn them, or even how we learn anything really, is still pretty mysterious. But Steve thinks that by looking into this one failure in the system, the moment when someone stops being able to do something they've practiced their entire life, scientists can get a better understanding of how that learning system works in the first place.
28:04Sally Akehurst:There isn't another disorder that I know of that gives you a window into talent and cognition and motor learning the way task-specific dystonia can do so well.
28:18Rick Ankiel:Dystonia is just one potential cause of the YIPS. We still don't know whether it was at the root of problems for Rick or with so many other people who dealt with these issues. But it might be able to help scientists get answers to questions that used to seem unanswerable.
28:33Sally Akehurst:How come one person will practice the 10 ,000 hours and only get so far, and another laps them by three years in? Well, what is that, quote, talent? You know, we take it for granted that, of course, in sports, there are those that are more talented than others. But where is that in the brain? And what made that so? Was it inherited? Was it chance? You know, they're profound questions.
28:59Rick Ankiel:Maybe the most surprising thing the Yips reveal isn't that people can suddenly stop being able to do the thing they're best at. Maybe it's that they were ever able to do it at all.
29:30Rick Ankiel:This episode was reported and produced by me, Noam Hassenfeld. We had editing from Jorge Just and Brian Resnick with help from Bird Pinkerton. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala. Music from me. Fact-checking from Melissa Hirsch. Meredith Hodinot manages our team. And Mandy Nguyen is turning inside out. If you want to hear more about Rick's story, check out his book. It's called The Phenomenon. Pressure, the yips, and the pitch that changed my life. Thanks to Charles Adler, Debbie Cruz, and Phil Clark for their help on this episode. And if you have thoughts about the show, send us an email.
30:04Rick Ankiel:We're at unexplainable at vox.com, and we'd love to hear your thoughts. And if you can, leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. It really helps us find new listeners. This podcast and all of Vox is free, in part because of gifts from our readers and listeners. You can go to vox.com slash give to give today. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back on Wednesday.
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From the publisher
Think about the thing you’ve practiced more than anything else in the world. Maybe it’s painting. Or writing. Or playing baseball.
Now, imagine you wake up one day, and you just can’t do it. You’re not sick. You’re not injured. But suddenly, that one thing is impossible. (Originally published in 2024)
Guests: Rick Ankiel, former Major League Baseball star; Sally Akehurst, sports psychologist and a dean at University of Roehampton, London; Steven Frucht, neurologist at NYU Langone
For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscriptsFor more, go to vox.com/unexplainableAnd please email us! unexplainable@vox.comWe read every email.Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: vox.com/membersThank you!
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