The Yips: Steve Sax Disease

The yips refers to “extreme nervousness causing a golfer to miss easy putts.” More broadly applied, such sports-based performance anxiety can also lead to a pitcher making wild throws, a quarterback sailing the the ball, and the like.

Pirates pitcher Steve Blass can certainly speak to the problem. He suffered such a severe case of the yips in the 1970s that they came to be called Steve Blass disease in baseball circles. At least, they were known as that until Chicago White Sox second baseman Steve Sax came along a decade later.

There seem to be a number of causes for the yips, with performance anxiety being chief among them. If it’s not the root of the problem, anxiety at least follows as an athlete loses his confidence in competing well in front of spectators and fellow players.

You must be some kind of idiot

Sax’s case of the yips was so severe that he committed thirty errors during the 1983 season and inspired fans to sit behind first base wearing baseball helmets as a form of mock protection. We’ll let Sax himself pick up the story from an interview for the radio program Snap Judgment:

I started becoming the laughing-stock of the league. Yes, I was getting a lot of bad press. I would go to a game like in San Francisco and they would have these gigantic bed sheets. They would paint a target on it, and say “Sax, throw me a souvenir!” I was getting calls and letters from women who played bobby sox softball saying, “You must be some kind of idiot. Because I’m a woman, and I can make that throw.” I got death threats.

The plight of Steve Sax shows just how difficult it can be a well-known public figure to bear a case of performance anxiety. It’s certainly understandable how it could mushroom into a general phobia of social situations, especially if you’re receiving death threats.

My arm was on freeze mode

In an interview, Sax gives us an intimate account of what it’s like to experience the yips

Sometimes when I’d throw the ball away I’d miss it by a long shot. When fear and doubt creep into your psyche, that is very dangerous. It is tantamount having the yips in golf…. My arm was on freeze mode. The ball would just go anywhere. They would take me out in the afternoon and blindfold me, the Dodgers would, and make me throw to first base blindfolded, and I would do it impeccably all the time. Then the game would roll around, and I’d be Ok, and then here it would come again. I’d throw the ball away.*

Fortunately, the Steve Sax story has a happy ending. After receiving a confidence restoring pep talk from his father, the second baseman overcame his anxiety and even want on to lead the American League in both double plays and field percentage. A cartoon version of Sax even made a guest starred on the Simpsons television show in a 1992 episode.

Have you ever experience the yips as an athlete while competing in public? Share your experience by commenting below.

*Sax’s observation revels the criteria behind performance anxiety, you do something in front of others and are judged on it (or at least feel you’re being judged.)