Culture
Former Astros pitcher Tyler Ivey embarks on a comeback: ‘All roads led back to baseball’
HOUSTON — Tyler Ivey is at peace, but sometimes ponders his past as a passionless pitcher who still reached the pinnacle. Adrenaline aided Ivey through his major-league debut in his hometown, the sort of storybook tale only this sport seems to write.
On the day it unfolded, Ivey weighed 180 pounds and could not feel his fingers. Burnout and a barking elbow badgered him before and throughout the game at Globe Life Field on May 21, 2021. Ivey could not spin the baseball but still managed to survive into the fifth inning. After manager Dusty Baker pulled him, Ivey exited the mound with a wide grin.
Tyler Ivey smiles in the dugout after leaving a game against the Rangers in the fifth inning on May 21, 2021. (Kevin Jairaj / Imagn Images)
For many, it is their final image of a man who disappeared. Houston demoted Ivey to Triple A following the game, but he didn’t report within the requisite three days. He doubted whether he wanted to continue playing. Doctors diagnosed Ivey with thoracic outlet syndrome, finally solving his physical problems. The mental obstacles remained.
“One thing you can’t fake is passion,” Ivey said last month. “And I just don’t think I had the drive and the passion at that point to give my all or give my best to be at the top of the game and compete at that level. Even if I wanted to have it, it just wasn’t there at the time.”
So, 12 months after making his major-league debut, Ivey left the sport. He became a salesman, first of life insurance and, for a short time, solar panels. He married a longtime friend named Audrey, welcomed a son named James and made his family’s home in a tiny Texas town called Pottsboro.
“I just wanted to go have a simple life, spend time with my friends and family and see how God’s plan worked out for me,” Ivey said.
Ivey presumed it would not include baseball. After he retired, he swore off watching the sport, save the Astros’ annual playoff run. Once regarded as one of Houston’s premier starting pitching prospects, Ivey seemed content never to step on a mound again.
Now, it is his ultimate goal. Two years after he walked away, Ivey is attempting a baseball comeback. A slew of serendipitous encounters have allowed him to see the sport from a different perspective. An impromptu start for a collegiate summer league team helped Ivey, 28, to reignite his passion.
“There were some synchronicities that happened,” Ivey said. “And everything I did, everywhere we went, all roads led back to baseball.”
Ivey decided to quit during the first week of May 2022. His parents, Jon and Michelle, visited him throughout the week in Sugar Land after Ivey informed them it “may be the last time” they could watch him pitch.
That Sunday, on Mother’s Day, Ivey threw 59 pitches across 2 1/3 innings in his final professional appearance. After the game, he entered Triple-A manager Mickey Storey’s office and had what Ivey described as a “great conversation.” According to Ivey, he and the organization “left on really good terms.”
“They understood. There was no animosity on either side,” said Ivey, Houston’s third-round draft pick in 2017. “I still got tons of love and respect for them. They gave me a shot.”
No single reason exists for Ivey’s decision. He pitched through elbow pain for most of the 2020 and 2021 seasons, but hid it from the team for fear of losing his place within its hierarchy. Days after making his major-league debut, Ivey was further staggered by a family tragedy. The stresses of playing during a pandemic took a toll, as did strain from his decision not to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.
Trouble sleeping and eating left Ivey a shell of the person who entered professional ball. He weighs 205 pounds now — 25 pounds heavier than when he debuted in Arlington.
Ivey made eight appearances spanning 18 2/3 innings after that start against the Rangers, including five in Triple A at the beginning of the 2022 season. To hear him describe it, no single inflection point precipitated his decision, nor did one particular aspect of his predicament outweigh the other. An accumulation of it all became too much for Ivey to bear — and most around him knew it.
Three days after Ivey retired, an unexpected phone call interrupted a day at the gym. Ivey dropped everything to answer when he saw Baker’s name on the caller ID.
“We know you need a break. We get it,” Ivey recalled Baker telling him. “But the body, sometimes it needs some rest and sometimes it miraculously heals itself. And if that were to happen, you never know, a few years from now, you might get a call. At least consider it.”
“Absolutely,” Ivey answered. “Anything for you.”
Last summer, Ivey volunteered to help one of his neighbors coach a high school summer ball team, even though his original inclination was to decline.
“It allowed me to see baseball from, I guess, a different light, a different point of view,” he said, “which started to make me fall in love with it again.”
That love proved strong enough for Ivey to double down on coaching. The Sherman Shadowcats are a Texas-based collegiate summer league team within the Mid America League. When they found themselves in need of a pitching coach, they offered the job to Ivey. The life insurance salesman accepted the chance to coach in his spare time.
But when attrition hit in late July, it left the team without enough pitchers to get through an upcoming game. The head coach asked Ivey if he would start it.
“I basically rolled out of bed. I’d played catch a few times, just screwing around. I hadn’t been training. Hadn’t been intently throwing, nothing,” Ivey said. “I just said, ‘Screw it, I’ll hop on the mound and we’ll see how it goes.’”
Ivey struck out all three hitters he saw. He threw without pain and, for once, could feel his fingers, fulfilling Baker’s prophecy. Radar guns had Ivey’s fastball in the low 90s, up from the 88-90 mph he averaged at the end of his professional career.
“It felt good to go back out there and compete and know that, ‘Hey, I can still throw strikes. My stuff is still good.’”
Ivey soon wondered how good. The reintroduction to competition, however brief it was, helped to crystallize a path that began to feel more realistic.
“I started throwing and thinking about it. And I just thought, ‘All right, I’m going to do this,’” Ivey said.
“We prayed on it a lot. My wife would pray for me and she would ask God to kind of help me find my direction. What’s my purpose? Everything just went back to baseball.”
Ivey knows he can pitch. That feel for the game hasn’t left him. Trying to do it without velocity or feel for any of his secondary pitches sunk his first professional stint, even as he ascended the Astros’ organizational hierarchy.
“If I come back and my stuff is better and I’m the same pitcher — which I do believe I can still pitch,” Ivey said. “And now stuff is better and I’m healthy, who knows what could happen?”
Ivey has not been on a radar gun since his substitute summer league start. He is studying both biomechanics and the art of pitching instead of relying on nothing but natural arm talent. Ivey’s initial findings leave him amazed at what he accomplished — and angry he didn’t discover it sooner.
“My throwing mechanics, in general, were just so bad. It’s a miracle that my arm didn’t blow off,” Ivey said.
Tyler Ivey has the most unorthodox delivery in camp. More on how he got it, why it works and why the Astros don’t want to tinker with it – https://t.co/L59T7l1ReL pic.twitter.com/jbG0ESpj5D
— Chandler Rome (@Chandler_Rome) March 11, 2021
“I just had no idea. I was just kind of relying on my arm, relying on my natural talent to get it done. That can only last for so long until it all blows up in your face.”
During his first professional stint, Ivey had an unconventional delivery, complete with a high leg kick and violent rotation. He’s modified it to be “much more efficient and smooth” after making “significant changes” to his body and posture.
“After throwing bullpens and throwing with 100 percent intensity, my elbow doesn’t even get sore, let alone hurt, which is pretty remarkable,” Ivey said.
Ivey hasn’t changed his five-pitch arsenal, but does believe all of his offerings have benefitted from his body’s overhaul. His curveball is sharper with more downward action. His changeup added some depth. His fastball remains hoppy with some backspin — traits Houston’s pitching infrastructure covets.
The Astros, the organization that once thought enough of Ivey to make him a major leaguer at 25, still retain his contractual rights. Whether they invite Ivey to minor-league spring training in March or release him remains an open question. But even if they offered him another chance, it’s possible that too much time has passed. Ivey isn’t sure of the outcome, but said he will nevertheless remain an Astros fan.
Ivey harbors some regret for how he handled the demotion after his major-league debut, but otherwise is content with the first chapter of his career.
How the next unfolds is Ivey’s foremost focus.
“We’re really happy living the nice, simple little life we’ve created,” Ivey said. “But we both feel that God’s put it on our hearts that I’m on a mission and I’m going to go do it, whatever that looks like. And if it doesn’t work out well, I’m completely fine with that. I’ll just go back home and be happy again with my family.
“But I do believe that there’s unfinished business out there. I’d like to go see what that looks like.”
(Photo: Tony Gutierrez / Associated Press)
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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