Maybe some poetry would help.(what might help control pitches and mind of minor league baseball pitcher Rick Ankiel)(Brief Article)(Column)

You might remember Annie Savoy. She taught English in Durham, N.C. She believed in the Church of Baseball because "there's no guilt" and "it's never boring." Each summer, when the Class A Bulls played their 142 games, she dedicated her resources to a single player. She liked "youthful exuberance" and a "veteran's sense of timing." She admitted to a bias against anyone hitting under .250 "unless he had a lot of RBIs or was a great glove man up the middle. A woman's got to have standards."

Annie's most famous summer project was Ebby Calvin (Nuke) LaLoosh, a righthanded pitcher who threw 98-mph fast balls with no idea where they'd go. (He once plunked the team mascot.)

Said to own "a million-dollar arm and a five-cent head," Nuke once described baseball as a simple game: "You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains."

Into this mostly empty vessel, the missionary Annie poured sweet salvation. "It's my job," she said of Nuke, "to give him life and wisdom and help him get to the big leagues." She knew that what she gave players lasted forever while what they gave her lasted one season. "Sometimes it seems like a bad trade-but bad trades are part of baseball-who can forget Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas, for godsakes!"

Annie Savoy is the fruit of Ron Shelton's imagination, a character in the writer/director's 1988 movie classic, Bull Durham. She comes to mind now as life and art again bump into each other.

Her man, Nuke LaLoosh, was inspired by Shelton's own minor league days in the Orioles system. Some of those days were spent with Steve Dalkowski, a lefthander who threw fast balls nearly 100 miles per hour with no idea where they'd go. (He plunked a fan buying a hot dog.) And now, as Dalkowski became LaLoosh, we see LaLoosh made real as Rick Ankiel.

The poor guy.