Now he's really The Natural

In the some stories are too good to be true department, I bring you Rick Ankiel.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, Rick Ankiel was brought up in the Cardinal's organization as a flame throwing left handed pitcher when he was 20 years old. He tore up the league, right up until the NLCS when he all of a sudden couldn't throw a strike.

I mean, literally, could not throw a strike. Ever.

Everyone thought he'd get over it, but he never did. So much so, that they sent him down to the minor leagues, where everyone thought he was done. But, in a Disney story come true, Ankiel converted to an outfielder two years ago. He was called up earlier this season, and improbably has been tearing up the league. His extended stats if he had played a full season would like Ruthian, something like 65 home runs, 15o rbi, that sort of thing. Last night, he had perhaps his best game, with two home runs and 7 rbi in a Cardinals win over the Pirates. Baseball writers all over the place were falling all over themselves making references to Roy Hobbs - Rick Ankiel, The Natural part Deux.

This morning, he woke up to headlines in the New York Daily News that he is accused of buying a year's worth of HGH (Human Growth Hormone). In other words, the Natural? Mebbe not.

Or wait a second..

In the movie The Natural, Roy Hobbs is played by Robert Redford as a Iowa farm boy who is a little too good to be true. Once a pitcher, he comes back as a slugger later in life following an incident involving a lady in black on a train. He comes back as a dominant slugger, who buoys the NY Knights to the pennant. Gamblers try to pay him off, but he loves baseball too much and just can't do it.

In the book, the story falls a little differently. Roy Hobbs in Bernard Malamud's The Natural, is a creature who falls victim to his own immense appetites. He gorges himself in women and food throughout the book, but his natural talent as a player carries him. Still, he is portrayed as a brutish, immoralist character, hardly one likely to be played by Robert Redford. In the end of the book, Malamud's Hobbs is guilty of throwing the game. One of the last lines of the book is from a small child who sees Hobbs after he is found guilty of conspiracy, and says "Say it ain't so Roy."

So maybe there are some more real parallels between Roy Hobbs and Rick Ankiel after all. Unfortunately for Ankiel, and for us, the parallels were between a literary Hobbs, and not the film one.