Jonathan Blitzer on Roger Angell’s “Down the Drain”

As a New York Yankees fan, I spent the summer of 2000 feeling my chest tighten anytime my team was on the field and the ball travelled in the vicinity of second base. Routine grounders caused the greatest stress. The more inconsequential the play should have been, the more likely it was to go wrong. Seemingly overnight, Chuck Knoblauch, the All-Star second baseman, had lost his ability to toss the ball to first, the shortest throw on the diamond.

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There was a particular lineage to his condition. In the nineteen-eighties, a Mets catcher named Mackey Sasser couldn't throw the ball back to the pitcher. Years later, Rick Ankiel, a Cardinals pitcher, could no longer throw strikes—yet, when he was moved to the outfield, his accuracy rarely faltered from a greater distance. The list goes on. Only a small fraction of players are on it, but there are enough for fans to identify their struggles as the yips, a now familiar term. For a while, however, the affliction was mostly called something else: Steve Blass disease, after the Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher who, in 1973, became the first known case in the Major Leagues.

In June, 1975, just after Blass was forced into early retirement, the great