He’d succumbed to the same inexplicable mental block that previously haunted Steve Blass in the ’70s, and that would infamously also hamper Yankees second baseman Chuck Knoblauch. “‘The Thing,’ ‘The Yips,’ ‘The Monster,’ whatever you want to name it,” Ankiel said in 2017. “You lose your ability to do something that you’ve done your whole life without the explanation of why.”