Major League Baseball

World Series 2021: Braves reliever Tyler Matzek overcame the yips to reach MLB's biggest stage

Updated Oct. 26, 2021 9:00 p.m. ET

By Pedro Moura
FOX Sports MLB Writer

HOUSTON — For most of the first seven years of his professional career, Tyler Matzek dreaded reporting for work. He hated the fear he felt boarding the bus bound for the ballpark, the terror that enveloped him whenever he tried to sleep as a scheduled start approached.

He pitched through all those feelings and pitched reasonably well. But he increasingly viewed every success as a stroke of luck and the inevitable failures as the result his performance deserved.

When combined with an untimely injury, that perspective plummeted him down a path toward the yips, that infamous worst of baseball ailments. Once the top-rated left-handed pitcher of the 2009 draft class, Matzek lost the ability to reliably throw a ball 10 feet, let alone to a precise spot from 60 feet, 6 inches.

In an effort to regain that ability, he had his brain waves studied, moved across the country in search of places to play and pitched at a remote Tennessee field while men ran at him and made deafening noises to distract him. He also befriended dozens of young Chinese men who approached baseball with the sort of joy he had long since lost.

The path that has delivered Tyler Matzek to the 2021 World Series was an incredibly winding road. (Photo by Daniel Shirey/MLB Photos via Getty Images)

On Tuesday afternoon, Matzek, a key member of the Atlanta Braves' bullpen, will head to Minute Maid Park for Game 1 of the World Series a happier man and an improved pitcher. What changed him was acceptance of the fear he had always strived to suppress.

"It's taking that fear and keeping it there," he said. "Instead of letting it hold me back, I’m using it as fuel for an aggressive mindset. When I go out there, that fear that my body is feeling is telling me that this is exciting for a reason. Let’s not be afraid of it. Let’s attack it. When you start learning to harness that fear instead of being afraid of it, it fuels you."

It has fueled Matzek, and he has fueled the Braves. Without him, it’s unlikely they would have won the NLCS in six games, if at all. If they are to win the World Series, it will be in significant part because of a 31-year-old reliever who, two years ago, lived out of a trailer 250 miles from here while pitching in front of a few handfuls of fans.

"To say he hit rock-bottom would be an understatement," said John McLaren, a former major-league manager who managed Matzek in independent ball. "He went through hell, and he survived, and he’s back on the top of the mountain."

Matzek started at the top. The Mission Viejo, California, native entered professional baseball knowing nothing but sporting success. "In high school," said his wife, Lauren, his high-school sweetheart, "he was always the best."

As a high school star from California, Matzek pitched in the 2008 Under Armour All-America Baseball Game at Wrigley Field. (Photo by Dilip Vishwanat/Getty Images)

He was selected 11th overall by Colorado in the 2009 draft. To forgo a University of Oregon scholarship, the Rockies offered him a $3.9 million bonus, six times what they gave their second-round draft pick, Nolan Arenado.

In his initial full pro season, Matzek impressed but battled command problems. Afterward, he questioned if he was good enough. The next year, he was so doubtful that he stepped away from the sport for the first time. He started asking his older half-brother, Ryan Johnson, about his experiences with anxiety.

Matzek was talented enough that he made the majors anyway. In 2014, he logged a 4.05 ERA in 20 outings (19 starts) as a rookie, an impressive feat considering he called Coors Field home. But rather than celebrate the campaign, he fretted over it. Was that as good as he would get? He expected more.

An ankle sprain suffered the following spring training forced Matzek to slightly alter his delivery in ways he and the Rockies did not detect. He opened the season with four effectively wild starts, but he was growing more and more concerned. In his fourth start, he couldn’t throw his fastball for strikes. In his fifth, he lost the ability to throw any pitch anywhere near where he wanted. He walked six Diamondbacks in two innings. Two days later, the Rockies demoted him.

"What if that’s the last time I ever pitch in the big leagues?" Matzek asked Lauren.

After initial success with the Rockies, Matzek's anxiety got the best of him, and he lost his ability to throw strikes. (Photo by John Leyba/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

His next start was even worse. He walked seven in one Triple-A inning. After being deactivated for a month, he returned in short-season ball still unable to throw a strike.

"It was pretty obvious," Matzek said. "If you were on the baseball field with me, you’d say, ‘Yeah, that guy’s got the yips.’"

The Rockies sent him home to Orange County. One day there, he headed to a Little League field to play catch with Johnson. They started out a few yards apart, but Matzek couldn’t get the ball to Johnson without bouncing it. After a few failed throws, he flung his glove to the ground and started screaming obscenities.

"It was just so mentally draining, it looked like," Johnson said.

Matzek’s family called his condition "performance anxiety" then, not the yips, sensing that he preferred not to use the loaded word. They tiptoed around the issue as he searched for solutions. He saw psychologists, psychiatrists and the Rockies’ mental-skills coach, who helped him locate some temporary fixes.

Upon his return two months later, he obtained better results, but he was still just releasing the ball and hoping it was near the strike zone. The Rockies released him a year later.

In 2017, the White Sox signed him but then cut him at spring training’s end. Matzek spent all season out of baseball, languishing. At the start of September, he thought about retiring and enrolling at a local junior college to knock out some general-education requirements. When he told his wife, she broke down and tearfully convinced him to try once more.

On the advice of a former teammate, catcher Michael McKenry, Matzek visited a former Navy SEAL, Jason Kuhn, in Tennessee, where he runs a business counseling athletes and corporate clients.

Kuhn himself had contracted the yips in 2002 as a senior reliever at Middle Tennessee State. In the last competitive inning of his life, he threw six wild pitches. The anguish spurred him to enlist and pursue SEAL training. Two decades on, the condition still impacts his life. But until Matzek, he had never coached another sufferer. The two worked together actively for a year, experimenting with a number of methodologies. They emphasized practical, not clinical, exercises.

"You’re not gonna think the yips away," Kuhn said. "You’ve gotta go throw and retrain your brain."

McKenry said he and Kuhn took Matzek to a field in Tennessee and blew bullhorns while he pitched. As Matzek prepared to throw, Kuhn would run toward him, and friends would walk behind the plate. Everything was done in service of severing his old anxieties.

Around New Year’s Day 2019, Matzek started feeling like he had conquered, or at least subdued, the condition. He started calling it the yips. But he had also lost some of his velocity. After the Diamondbacks released him that spring, he signed with an independent team, the Texas AirHogs, for a second season in the Dallas suburb of Grand Prairie.

This time, he lucked into an unexpected tip from a pitching coach who suggested he shorten his arm path. That unlocked the lost velocity. Soon, Matzek was racking up strikeouts. In August, Atlanta reached out with a minor-league contract offer. He was back in affiliated ball.

"The physical change would’ve been wasted had it come earlier," Matzek said. "I wasn’t ready."

That summer in Texas, Matzek became an unlikely mentor to nearly 30 Chinese national team ballplayers, who, in an unusual arrangement, made up the majority of the AirHogs' roster. Matzek was making a couple thousand bucks a month and living in a trailer with his wife. It wasn’t glamorous, but the energy from the unpaid young players enlivened the experience.

"I really think those kids enlightened us as players," said former big-leaguer Josh Prince, then a member of the AirHogs. "It brought the kid back out in us, which let him be a kid again and let the natural ability take over again."

When Matzek made it back to the majors last year, the Chinese players exchanged excited WeChat messages with their former American teammates. "He’s got fans all over the world," McLaren said.

Last season’s climax came in the NLCS, at Globe Life Field in Arlington, only a few miles from where Matzek had been living in a trailer. Now, he was staying at the Four Seasons and facing the mighty Los Angeles Dodgers. Matzek pitched in four games, allowed only one run and won Game 2.

When Tyler and Lauren returned home for the winter, Lauren realized it felt like six years earlier, after her husband’s rookie season. That scared her. She wondered if it was even possible to replicate that dream season. "But," she said, "you don’t want to put that doubt out there."

So she didn’t. As 2021 spring training approached, she saw that her husband was fine, more excited than nervous about the upcoming season. He handled the year’s blips better than ever. In 57 of his 69 appearances, he held opponents scoreless. Overall, he posted a 2.57 ERA and allowed only 40 hits in 63 innings.

By the start of October, Braves manager Brian Snitker relied on Matzek as his top setup man. Matzek tied a major-league record by pitching in each of Atlanta’s first eight postseason games.

On Saturday in Atlanta, Snitker summoned Matzek into the biggest situation of his life. With no outs in the seventh inning of Game 6 of the NLCS, the Dodgers had baserunners on second and third and two future Hall of Famers, Albert Pujols and Mookie Betts, about to bat. With the Braves clinging to a 4-2 lead, Matzek struck out all three men he faced.

When Betts missed a 98 mph fastball to finish the inning, Matzek spun, pumped his fist, yelled to the sky and hopped around in a circle. He pumped his fist again, so hard that the force of it carried him two feet into the air. Braves fans went berserk. The position players behind him, rendered unnecessary, retreated to their dugout in awe.

Matzek fired another perfect inning in the eighth. Of his 17 total pitches, 15 were strikes. Soon after, the Braves were World Series-bound.

"It’s hard to put into words how unbelievable that moment was," veteran Brave Freddie Freeman said, "for our team and for him."

During his first go in the major leagues, Matzek never celebrated like that. "There was no reveling in it," his wife said. These past two years he has because he has convinced himself that he has earned this success and that fun is worth having.

When he couldn’t even throw a child’s distance, when no team wanted him, when he trekked to Tennessee to see if he could beat the yips, he was dreaming of a night like Saturday.

"It was always the light at the end of the tunnel," Matzek said. "It’s been the fuel that’s been keeping that fire going."

Pedro Moura is the national baseball writer for FOX Sports. He most recently covered the Dodgers for three seasons for The Athletic. Previously, he spent five years covering the Angels and Dodgers for the Orange County Register and L.A. Times. More previously, he covered his alma mater, USC, for ESPNLosAngeles.com. The son of Brazilian immigrants, he grew up in the Southern California suburbs. Follow him on Twitter @pedromoura.

Fox Sports MLB Writer Jake Mintz contributed to this story.