Is Mitchell Johnson cricket's Rick Ankiel?

I often sit in front of my computer, watching the cricket streaming over the internet and wonder whom these players would be equivalent to, in American sports. Generally I try to think of athletes in positive comparisons. For example, Virender Sehwag is like Adrian Peterson of the Minnesota Vikings. If you are drafting a fantasy team in either sport, both players stand a good chance of being the No. 1 pick because of their ability to steamroll the opposition in devastating fashion, piling up yard after yard in Peterson’s case and run after run in Sehwag’s.

However, when I saw Mitchell Johnson’s massive wide bowled down the leg side to Jonathan Trott in the morning session on day five at the Gabba, there was only one player who popped into my mind. I was horrified when I arrived at the realisation that Johnson is turning into cricket’s version of Rick Ankiel.

“I don’t think it hit a crack. We’ll have a look at that,” Bill Lawry said on Channel 9, searching for a reasonable explanation as to how a ball could have been bowled that badly by someone who was the ICC Player of the Year in 2009. Perhaps Lawry was living in denial for the first four days as to how bad Johnson has been at the Gabba. But a few moments later when the replay was shown, reality started to fully set in for him. “Around the wicket he goes. Where does it pitch? Oh no, that’s one of the worst I’ve ever seen! That’s a shocker!”

It was a shocker all right and it had Ankiel written all over it.

For those of you not familiar with the story, Ankiel came into major league baseball like a house on fire in the 2000 season for the St. Louis Cardinals. In a similar vein to Dennis Lillee’s early prognosis of Johnson being a once-in-a-generation talent, Ankiel was a teenage phenom, earmarked as having superstar potential. He was USA Today’s High School Player of the Year in 1997 and was represented by mega agent Scott Boras, heading into the MLB draft. He was drafted in the second round by the Cardinals that year, not because of talent, but because of Boras’s financial demands for his client. Ankiel wound up inking a contract with a US$2.5 million signing bonus, the fifth-highest in history at the time for an amateur player.

A tall and athletic left-handed pitcher, Ankiel had an electric 95-plus mph fastball combined with a lethal curve ball that was the cornerstone of his success. He experienced a meteoric rise through the minor leagues and made his debut in the majors at the age of 20 late in the 1999 season. In his first full season in 2000, Ankiel finished second in voting for the National League Rookie of the Year, and perhaps would have won it, had his stats not suffered from the fact that Boras and the Cardinals agreed to impose a low pitch count on him to protect him from being burned out early in his career.

Ankiel was arguably the Cardinals standout pitcher that year and despite being a rookie, was given the ball to start game one for the Cardinals against the Atlanta Braves in the NLDS post-season series.

That’s pretty much when it all came crashing down for Ankiel. After going smoothly in the first two innings, Ankiel inexplicably walked four batters and threw five wild pitches in the third before being yanked out of the game. A week or so later, he started game two of the NLCS against the New York Mets and couldn’t make it out of the first innings. As a Mets fan, I vividly remember him spraying the ball all over the place while Joe Buck and Tim McCarver were at a loss for words in the Fox broadcast booth. Ankiel was one of baseball’s best pitchers during the regular season and all of a sudden he could no longer throw the ball close to home plate, let alone for strikes.

It was clear then that Ankiel’s days were numbered. No matter how many days he had to correct his technique in the off season, it appeared that his pitching skills had vanished and people started to classify him as having Steve Blass Disease, termed after a former Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher. Blass was an All-Star in 1972, only to suddenly lose his control the following season, never to recover it before deciding to retire in 1975.

After notching 194 strikeouts in 175 innings during his outstanding rookie year in 2000, Ankiel has only pitched 34 innings in the rest of his career. He eventually rededicated himself to making the majors again as an outfielder and due to the incredible athletic gifts he possessed, he was able to pull it off and make his return to the Cardinals in 2007 as an every day player. In 2008, he hit 25 home runs for the Cardinals.

The Johnson from two years ago, the one who terrorised Graeme Smith and Jacques Kallis at home and away, has completely disappeared. He almost got the axe in England back in 2009 after a horrid start in the last Ashes series but by the end of it he was able to find a way to take wickets. However, his struggles have returned and they don’t appear to be going away after the Test ends. That wide down leg side to Trott was just as bad, if not worse, than Steve Harmison’s ball to second slip four years ago. Coming onto the field after lunch, Johnson’s first two balls down leg side to Alastair Cook were cringe-worthy.

If Johnson can’t rediscover how to bowl the ball at the stumps and take wickets, it’s not so radical to think that he might give up on his bowling and like Ankiel, focus on rejoining his team based on fully developing his skills with the bat. Johnson is athletic enough to do it. I’m sure a lot of Australian fans wouldn’t mind seeing him bat at No. 6 in place of Marcus North either.