Rick Ankiel: A Story of a Changed Career

For those who may not be familiar with the story, Rick Ankiel is a center fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals. But that has only been for the past two seasons of his nine year Major League career.
Ankiel broke into the major leagues in 1999 as a left-handed starting pitcher for the Redbirds.
At age 19, Ankiel was brought up by the Cardinals and appeared in 19 games, and did a pretty good job, as he gave up 26 hits, 12 earned runs, walked 13 while striking out 39, and had a 3.27 earned run average in 33 innings.
He followed that up in 2000 with a strong campaign, as he went 11-7, and his ERA was 3.50 and he struck out 194 batters while walking just 90.
Suddenly, in 2001, Ankiel began to break down. He couldn’t find the plate any more, and he totally lost his command and his control.
He only pitched 24 innings in the 2001 season, and threw five wild pitches and walked 25 batters while striking out 27. Ankiel also surrendered 25 hits, 21 runs, 19 of them earned, seven home runs, and hit three batters as his ERA ballooned to 7.13.
Ankiel was having problems and the Cardinals didn’t know what to do about it. The harder that they worked on his control, the worse it got. Dave Duncan and Tony LaRussa were completely befuddled.
They decided to send Ankiel down to the minor leagues, and they took a different approach. As the many attempts to straighten him out proved futile, the Cardinals decided not to give up on Ankiel, but to instead have him change positions, no longer being a pitcher. Ankiel has completely turned his career around after that decision was made.
Ankiel slowly worked his way through the minor leagues after that, and he was even out of baseball for the entire 2006 season.
But he came back strong in 2007, as he was playing for AAA Memphis, where he played 102 games, and he clubbed 32 home runs, drove in 89, had over 100 hits on the season, and boasted a slugging percentage of .568. Not bad for a guy who was on the pitcher’s mound just three years earlier.
Although he didn’t even finish the season in the minor leagues, he would go on to be named the 2007 Minor League Player of the Year.
Ankiel was brought up to the Cardinals for the final 47 games of the 2007 season, and he made the most of the opportunity. In 172 at-bats, he smacked 49 hits, cracked 11 homers, and drove in 39 runs while maintaining a .285 batting average as well as a slugging percentage of .535.
He now continues to tear up the National League, as he has been with the Cardinals since the start of the 2008 campaign, and already this season he has 18 home runs, which makes him tied for 11th in the league, driven in 45 runs, and scored 49 runs himself, and his batting average is a respectable .265, but he has an on-base percentage of .339, and a slugging percentage of .523. Ankiel’s batting average over the past two seasons with the St. Louis Cardinals currently stands at .275. Those are pretty good stats for a guy who thought that his major league career was in jeopardy just a few seasons ago.
And he has also shown that he has more than just an offensive game. Several times this season Ankiel’s acrobatic catches have ended up on Sports Center, and a few of them have been top-10 highlights.
Ankiel has done an incredible job of not just getting back to the majors, but excelling, as he is now the starting center fielder for the Cards.
Ankiel’s story is an amazing one, and it also sends a message about weighing your options, not giving up, and finding out that through perseverance, there is more than one road that leads to the major leagues.