The Yips Ruined Chuck Knoblauch's Yankee Career

Today, I’m wishing Chuck Knoblauch a happy 56th birthday. When he joined the Yankees in a trade from the Twins in 1998, his time could not have been better as the Yankees won three straight World Series with him at second base and batting at the top of the order. But then everything went off the rails due to his fielding woes and his career nose-dived. Lets get to it.

Everyone of a certain age - such as my age - who grew up a Yankee fan remembers Phil Rizzuto not as a Hall of Fame shortstop during the Joe DiMaggio days but as the loveable team broadcaster in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Scooter was a trip because sometimes you wondered what the hell he was talking about, but that was his charm. And the funniest thing about Rizzuto is that when he wasn’t spinning some yarn, or saying something silly, or poking fun at himself, he would often bolt from the press box in the seventh or eighth inning and leave the broadcast duties to Frank Messer and Bill White or whoever else was up there so he could beat the traffic out of the Bronx to get back to his wife Cora on the Jersey side of the river. Classic.

On the night of June 15, 2000, Chuck Knoblauch wasn’t trying to beat the traffic; he just needed to get away from Yankee Stadium as soon as he could, and it just so happened that it was the bottom of the sixth inning of what wound up being a 12-3 loss to the White Sox.

Knoblauch was in the midst of a crisis known in baseball as the “yips.” It seems impossible that major leaguers occasionally go through this, but Knoblauch struggled to throw accurately from his second base position and it reached a cataclysmic level on this night as he made three throwing errors – one in the third inning, one in the fifth and one in the sixth, the last two leading directly to Chicago runs.

So distraught was Knoblauch that as the rest of the infield gathered on the mound when Joe Torre came out to replace Andy Pettitte after Knoblauch’s third error prolonged that inning, Knoblauch stood on the edge of the right field grass, alone and expressionless. And when the inning ended, Knoblauch and Torre headed into the tunnel that leads to the clubhouse and Knoblauch did not return to the dugout, his night over.

“He wanted to talk,” Torre said. “He felt bad that he was hurting the ballclub. In his mind, he was costing us. I decided it was time to take him out of the game and I sent him home. He needs our support.”

The career-high three errors raised his season count in 2000 to 12 in just 43 games which was more than he had in six separate seasons when he played for the Twins between 1991 and 1997. Only his 1991 rookie season - when he won AL Rookie of the Year and helped lead the Twins to a World Series title - was worse as he had 18 while learning to play in the majors.

Since joining the Yankees, Knoblauch had committed 13 errors in 1998, then doubled the total in 1999 to an MLB-high for second basemen, a whopping 26 which were the most by a Yankee infielder since third baseman Graig Nettles made 26 in 1973. Knoblauch would finish 2000 with 15 errors (a figure helped by the fact that he missed 59 games with injuries), giving him 54 in three years after he’d made only 66 in his seven seasons with the Twins.

It was crazy. When he arrived in New York, he owned the highest fielding percentage for any second baseman in history who had played at least 1,000 games at the position and the only reason why he’d won only one Gold Glove (in 1997) was because Hall of Famer Roberto Alomar was winning them all for the Blue Jays and later the Orioles.

A month before the meltdown against the White Sox, after making a throwing error in another game against the White Sox, Knoblauch had admitted to teammates that he was at “the breaking point” regarding his throwing problems. Now, the breaking point had been surpassed, though they continued to support him, mainly because he was still such an important part of the offense.

Jeter then took a swipe at all the fans who had taken to booing Knoblauch, saying, “We’re here to support him and it’s about time the fans do the same.”

The next day Knoblauch returned to the stadium to find a horde of reporters waiting for him, and he faced the media music and answered every question.

“I wasn’t going to go home and do something stupid,” Knoblauch said of his Rizzuto-like early departure. “I’m the same guy every day. I woke up today, felt all right, looked outside and the sun was shining. When you make mistakes or errors, you can accept it. But I can’t accept the errors I made last night. These are errors that shouldn’t be made. I have a problem, obviously. It confuses the hell out of me. But I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else (than with the Yankees). Whether I’m under the microscope or not under the microscope, it’s still a problem. It won’t go away if I’m not here.”

Knoblauch was a key member of four consecutive pennant-winning teams in New York, three of which won the World Series, and he was a presence at the top of the order along with Jeter, but his time in the Bronx is often reflected on negatively. The fielding woes were the driving force of that, but when he came from Minnesota in a trade prior to 1998 - one that he requested, which permanently soiled his relationship with Twins fans - he brought with him a tremendous offensive resume, one that he never quite lived up to in New York.

With the Twins his slash line was .304 average/.391 on-base/.416 slugging for an OPS of .807. He was constantly on base, he averaged 40 steals per year, and four times he scored at least 100 runs.

With the Yankees, that shrank across the board to .272/.366/.402 with an OPS of .768. He topped 100 runs twice, but his stolen base average dipped to 28. Today, the Yankees would die for that production from someone like Anthony Volpe at the top of the order, but back then, Knoblauch being unable to sustain the pace he was on with Minnesota painted him as a failure in the eyes of many fans.

The fielding problems forced the Yankees to move Knoblauch to left field in 2001, and after he signed as a free agent with the Royals in 2002, that’s where he played in his last two seasons, ultimately retiring at the young age of 33.

“Something obviously went wrong, but I have no idea what it was,” Knoblauch told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in 2011. “I couldn’t overcome it. I got to thinking too much and I couldn’t shut it off. It was bright lights, big city and I was having this serious issue in front of millions of people. … If you care so much about something, it’s hard not to make it a life or death thing. I feel like I went to New York as a boy and I left it a man because I went through the wringer.”

His post-baseball life has not gone well, either. Knoblauch is sitting on three divorces, and he was arrested in 2009 for assaulting his second wife, was arrested again in 2014 on the same charge made by his third wife, and he also admitted to having used performance enhancing drugs during his final Yankee season in 2001.

His was a career that started on a Hall of Fame track in Minnesota, one that everyone assumed would continue barreling down that way with the Yankees, but once it got derailed, the trip was over.

⚾ July 13, 1973: Bobby Murcer had one of the greatest nights of his career as he hit three home runs and drove in all five runs in the Yankees’ 5-0 victory over the Royals at Yankee Stadium. All three of the homers came off righty Gene Garber, normally a reliever who was forced to start when tough lefty Paul Splitorff suffered a back strain. The first homer was a three-run shot in the first, more than enough for Mel Stottlemyre who pitched a six-hit shutout.

The last came in the eighth, a solo shot, after Garber had thrown a knockdown pitch that riled the crowd. Murcer got back up and two pitches later hit his third. “I expected him to knock me down,” Murcer said. “That’s part of the game. I didn’t say anything to him. We both knew what was going on.” Imagine that happening today? The benches would have emptied in a flash.

⚾ July 14, 1934: Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games played streak almost ended at 1,426. He was suffering from back pain, so manager Joe McCarthy came up with a little scheme to preserve the streak at least another day, after which Gehrig could decide whether he needed to come out of the lineup. In the top of the first at Navin Field in Detroit, McCarthy listed Gehrig as the shortstop and batted him in the leadoff spot.

Gehrig led off the game with a single and McCarthy sent in Red Rolfe to pinch run, and then replace Gehrig at short in the bottom of the first. The next day, Gehrig must have been feeling much better because he went 4-for-4 with three doubles and an RBI, though the Yankees lost 8-3 to the Tigers.