Rick Ankiel is a professional baseball player, currently unemployed (a free agent, if you will). Rick also has a rather unique story among MLB players.
He was a pitcher, selected in the second round of the 1997 MLB draft by the St Louis Cardinals. In his first full season, 2000, he came in 2nd in NL Rookie of the Year voting and had 9.98 strikeouts and allowed 7.05 hits per 9 innings. In the postseason of that year, however, Rick started to have trouble controlling his pitches. The next season, his troubles continued and he was demoted from the Majors. After missing 2002 with injury, he played in the minor leagues in 2003 before another injury. In 2005, he announced that he was going to become an outfielder (local side note: his wikipedia page has a pic of him in 2005 playing in the Quad Cities). He tried out with the Cardinals in 2006, hoping to make it back to the major league, but was sidelined by another injury. After beginning 2007 back in the minors, he got called up to St Louis in Aug of 2007, where he played through the 2009 season, somewhat successfully.
Over the past 4 seasons he has played for 5 different teams (he was in Washington for '11/'12 and on two different teams in each '10 and '13) as his production has diminished, leading to his current status.
His career stats are here, and someone on youtube did us the favor of this career summary:
http://youtu.be/JN_wWvRjoAA
Oh man...I want my career highlights to be set to Metallica!!!
ReplyDeleteI'll get right on that.
DeleteIronman Ankiel although it appears he might have used HGH in '04. Shocker
ReplyDeleteHey, man, everyone was doing it.
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