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Charlotte Christian alumnus Daniel Bard, shown here throwing batting practice during spring training in Scottsdale, Arizona, finished the 2020 season with a 4-2 record and his first majorleague victory in eight years.

SPORTS

Back on the Mound

Daniel Bard had the good stuff: a fastball in the high 90s, a reputation as one of baseball’s best setup guys, and a solid spot on one of the sport’s most storied teams. Then, suddenly, he lost it, and the once-feared pitcher, who grew up in Charlotte, traveled a crooked path to learn how to get it back

BY ANNA KATHERINE CLEMMONS

DANIEL BARD stood on the out eld grass of Coors Field in Denver and exchanged long tosses with a fellow Colorado Rockies bullpen pitcher. It was early a ernoon on July 21, several hours before a practice game. Their pitching coach, Steve Foster, walked up. “Daniel,” he said, “when you’re done, I need to talk to you for a minute.”

This was one of the last days of summer camp, the second round of training to prepare for an abbreviated Major League Baseball season with COVID restrictions. The Rockies had invited nearly 60 players to compete for spots on the team’s 40-man roster. None had a story like Bard’s.

Bard grew up in Charlotte and dominated at Charlotte Christian School, then as a three-year starter at UNC Chapel Hill. The Boston Red Sox dra ed him in the rst round of the 2006 dra , and for two years, he was one of the best setup pitchers in baseball. Then his career quickly unraveled with a problem uniquely tormenting for a professional athlete, one that had more to do with his psyche than his physique. Bard bounced from team to team as he struggled to perform a pitcher’s essential job: throwing the ball over the plate.

Exhausted and demoralized, Bard retired from baseball in 2017. Two years later, he started to throw again. By 2020, he’d decided to try one more time. He’d pitched well in Denver—some of his pitches hit 97 mph—and felt con dent. But he wasn’t sure if this meeting with Foster would bring good news.

The two men walked through the tunnel and into the manager’s office, where General Manager Jeff Bridich, Manager Bud Black, a few front office sta ers, and fellow invitees Chris Owings and Matt Kemp—both major-league veterans—were scattered around the room, per social distancing rules. Black turned to the trio of Bard, Owings, and Kemp and momentarily pulled down his mask.

Daniel Bard with younger brothers Luke and Jared in spring 1998. Bard went on to star at Charlotte Christian and UNC Chapel Hill before the Boston Red Sox drafted him with the 28th overall pick in the 2006 Major League Baseball draft.

“We are excited about this team this year,” Black said, “and we want you three to be a part of it.”

JUST MAKING a major-league roster again was a profound victory for Bard, and over the course of the shortened, bizarre 2020 season, he managed to achieve more on the diamond than he’d dared to hope.

He earned other things, too: lessons about the relationship between mind and body; the relative importance of baseball to family; himself. “It’s not about if I can throw a baseball perfectly,” Bard says. “It’s, ‘What example and legacy am I leaving for my kids?’ I hope that in 10 or 15 years, they’ll realize what kind of risk we took—and that we did it because we believed in it.”

Bard has come to realize how improbable it all was. It’s a curious place for him considering how many things in his life had always gone right—until, out of nowhere, they didn’t.

DANIEL’S PARENTS, Paul and Kathy, moved to Charlotte from Houston in 1985, when Daniel was less than a year old. Paul, a minor league catcher for ve years, had played one season with the Double-A Charlotte O’s, and he and Kathy settled in Charlotte a er he retired from baseball. After Daniel, they had two more boys. Jared, born two years later, and Luke, ve years Daniel’s junior, would achieve their own success on the diamond. Luke now pitches for the Los Angeles Angels.

Baseball was Daniel’s favorite sport, but he thought about quitting when, at 12, he failed to make an all-star roster. He did make the team at Providence High School but mostly sat on the bench for his rst two years. Then, the summer before his junior year, Daniel, a right-hander, pitched in a showcase in Massachusetts and threw 91 mph. He was the only pitcher there who topped 90.

He transferred to Charlotte Christian, became one of the team’s best pitchers, and won a scholarship to UNC. In 2004, Baseball America named Bard the nation’s top freshman pitcher. Two years later, he helped lead the Tar Heels to the College World Series nals. The Boston Red Sox chose Bard with the 28th overall pick in the 2006 dra , and he made his professional debut the next year with the team’s High-A a liate in Lancaster, California.

There, a coach adjusted his delivery technique, and his pitching troubles began. After two months of poor outings, Bard was demoted to Low-A in Greenville, South Carolina. He grew selfconscious about his technique, which led to more instruction from coaches, which only made things worse. He stood on the mound before every pitch and recited the instructions as a litany: Li your leg—but don’t go too high …

The more Bard listened, the more he adjusted, the less he felt like himself. He nished 2007 with 78 walks in 75 innings and a dismal 7.08 earned run average. His physical skills weren’t the issue; his arm felt ne, and his fastballs still hit the mid90s. The problem lived in his mechanics and mind. He began to feel the pressure of expectations: I was a rst-round dra choice. Why can’t I throw strikes? When he began the 2008 season in Greenville a er a winter league stint in Hawaii, Bard told himself to ignore the pressure and enjoy the moment. (It helped when he met a Furman student named Adair Sturdivant, whom he’d marry two years later.)

It worked. He nished the season 5-1 with a 1.51 ERA and 107 strikeouts.

A LITTLE MORE than a month into the 2009 season, the Red Sox called Bard up from their Triple-A club in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Over the next two seasons, until late 2011, he was one of baseball’s best setup pitchers—a reliever who replaces the starter in late innings before, ideally, the designated “closer” gets the nal three outs in the ninth. From 2009 through 2011, Bard pitched 197 innings, with nearly three times as many strikeouts as walks. He was named Red Sox Rookie of the Year in 2009. Whatever had bedeviled him in 2007 seemed long gone. Then, as suddenly and inexplicably as before, it came back. His loss of control coincided with a monumental collapse by the Red Sox. Boston led its division at the All-Star break and in early September was a virtual lock for the playo s—then lost 20 of 27 games and was eliminated on the regular season’s last day. “Daniel Bard had the most unfortunate month on a sta of dismal performances,” ESPN’s Jeremy Lundblad wrote at the end of that

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month. “He nished September 0-4 with a 10.64 ERA, issuing more walks (nine) than he had in the previous three months combined (eight).”

Again, a pitching coach changed his mechanics. Bard’s con dence crumbled, and his command disappeared. In 2012, at age 27, Bard toggled between the Red Sox and their Triple-A namesake in Pawtucket. His ERA soared. In 2013, a er two brief appearances with Boston, the team sent him back to the minors. He would never again pitch for the Red Sox.

IN THE OFFSEASON, doctors discovered a physical problem Bard thought might explain his struggles. He was diagnosed with thoracic outlet syndrome, a group of disorders that cause shoulder and neck pain and nger numbness when the nerves between the collarbone and upper ribs are compressed. He underwent surgery, which ended the symptoms, and signed with the Texas Rangers.

But by the time he returned to the mound in 2014—this time for the single-A Hickory Crawdads, an hour’s drive from home—his control had deserted him. Bard made four appearances for the Crawdads that year, pitching a total of two-thirds of an inning. He walked nine batters and hit seven with errant pitches.

One night, Paul and Kathy drove up to Hickory to watch him. Bard made a brief appearance out of the bullpen. None of his pitches came close to the strike zone. “He had pitched in the big leagues just three years before, dominating teams as a setup guy,” Paul says. “Now, it’s a Low-A game with maybe 1,500 people watching. His head was down. I said to Kathy, ‘This is really taking a toll on him.’”

A year later, he signed a minor-league deal with the Chicago Cubs organization, which invited him to spring training. “The hardest part was seeing the ashes of it still there, but realizing there was this mental block,” Adair Bard says. “The most gut-wrenching sound was him warming up in the bullpen and hearing the thud of the backstop instead of the pop of the catcher’s mitt.”

Bard thought about quitting every day. But he’d see glimpses of his old self, the one who threw 99 mph fastballs over the plate. Of 25 bullpen pitches, 15 would be terrible, and 10 would be solid. A erward, he’d think, If I could just harness those 10. He couldn’t—not then, anyway—and only recently has professional sports made a serious effort to learn how to treat athletes, so familiar with the science of their bodies, when their psyches break.

BASEBALL PLAYERS, especially pitchers, know the term well. So do golfers. They know it well enough to avoid mentioning it: “the yips.” There’s no strict de nition, although Dr. Jason Freeman, the sports psychologist for the University of Virginia’s Athletics Department, has a provisional one: “the override of a welllearned or routine motor script.” You can throw a 99 mph fastball. You can sink a 20-foot putt or 20 straight free throws. Then something happens, and suddenly you can’t do those things, and you begin to xate on the fact that you can’t, and then everything goes bad. Talking about it is one way out of the hole—but you do not want to name it.

“I think, for many athletes, they just get stuck and feel like they can’t acknowledge it, so it develops a power and a reinforced pattern of its own,” says Freeman, who works with athletes in 25 varsity sports on mental health and wellbeing. “Part of the role of sports psychology is to support players in acknowledging, ‘I’m going through something, and that something seems like the yips. Let’s shine a spotlight on it, understand it, and work through it.’”

Bard tried. He spent portions of the 2016 and 2017 seasons with a trio of minor-league teams. He tried hypnosis. He fixated on his physique and spent hours in the weight room. At each stop, he’d talk to the team sports psychologist. Some wanted to steer clear of the negative, but others spent hours working with him on visualization and other exercises. He spoke with teammates. Over beers one night, he asked an in elder how he’d pushed through the yips and how they a ected his personal relationships.

“You see two coaches talking, and you think, ‘They’re talking about how I just played catch,’” Bard says. “I think about it now, and it was ridiculous. It’s a weird thing that eats at you.”

And the expectations kept weighing him down—even more than before he’d made it to the majors. Each time he signed with a new team, he’d walk into the clubhouse, and players would tell him, “I loved watching you pitch in Boston.” They meant well, but the praise added to the pressure he placed on himself. They wanted the same thing he did—for him to be that Daniel Bard again. The more he wanted it, the harder it was to pitch, or just to take the mound.

In August 2017, at 32 and playing for a New York Mets a liate in Florida, Bard threw a handful of pitches during a bullpen session, then tossed the ball to a coach. “I don’t want to throw anymore,” he said.

He meant only that he was done for the day. But as he got into his car, he began to think: No, I’m done, period.

AS A PLAYER, PERHAPS, but not with baseball. Daniel and Adair bought a house in Greenville, and Daniel accepted a job as a player mentor with the Arizona Diamondbacks.

At rst, Bard couldn’t believe he had quit baseball only to turn around and take another job in baseball. But he had learned a lot, and he wanted to use that knowledge to help other players through similar struggles. Bard traveled to the Diamondbacks’ a liate sites and chatted with players. Some wanted to talk about his days in Boston; others had never heard of him. Each retelling felt like therapy—“It so ened the blow of it a little more,” he says—and hearing from others gradually shi ed his perspective: “I became more grateful for what I did get, versus seeing it as my 10-year career that I cut short.”