by Jason Wojciechowski
Do you remember when Rick Ankiel was awesome? I do, by god. Twice, in fact. I remember when he was a 20-year-old phenom pitcher, throwing 175 innings, striking out ten men per nine, and matching the .382 slugging percentage that Rookie-of-the-Year Rafael Furcal pounded out. I was 18 at the time, doing my level best to finish my first year of college without utter academic disaster, drinking Bombay Sapphire while composing papers on Russian literature, but we all keep one eye on the game.
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| Hats off to you Photo by chetthejet |
As it happened, maybe Ankiel could have used a little chemical depressant in his system. I won't even rehash his 2001. It was painful to watch. It was painful to hear about. It was painful to have in the back of my mind as something I knew was going on even while I didn't have a ton of time to consume baseball. I'm not anything like a Cardinals fan, but hey, Mark McGwire was slugging .492 with a sub-.200 batting average while J.D. Drew hit like a Hall-of-Famer (specifically Mickey Mantle, given the time he missed due to injury), and I've always been a fan, for different reasons, of both guys. Plus, Craig Paquette was on that St. Louis team. So what I'm saying is that I rooted for Ankiel just a few percentage points harder than your typical non-Cardinals fan might have otherwise, and felt just a few percentage points more pain than your typical non-Missourian.
