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)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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