Culture
Trailing Michel Houellebecq From the Bedroom to the Courtroom
On Saturday night, an eclectic art crowd was gathering outside an industrial garage in Amsterdam East, where Michel Houellebecq, the celebrated French author, was set to speak.
Houellebecq had on May 24 released “A Few Months of My Life,” a new book describing a tumultuous period from October 2022 to March 2023 when he collaborated with a Dutch art collective called KIRAC. Together, they worked on a film, shooting scenes that show the married 67-year-old author making out with young women.
Although Houellebecq had consented to making the film, he later changed his mind and tried to back out. Beginning in February, he brought court cases in France and the Netherlands to stop the movie from being shown. Last month, an Amsterdam judge upheld Houellebecq’s complaint and granted him the right to see a final cut of any re-edited film four weeks before release, giving him a chance to file another action if he doesn’t like what he sees.
In “A Few Months of My Life,” a 94-page autobiographical work, Houellebecq digs deep into his hatred for KIRAC. He names the group’s leader, Stefan Ruitenbeek, only once, describing him as a “pseudo-artist” and “a cockroach with a human face.” Female KIRAC members are referred to as “the sow” and “the turkey.”
According to the organizer of Saturday’s event, Tarik Sadouma, Houellebecq had not come to Amsterdam to promote his new book, but to talk about his work generally. As a condition of his participation, Houellebecq asked Sadouma to bar Ruitenbeek and his cohorts from the event.
Yet just as the audience took its seats inside, Ruitenbeek burst through the door, dressed as a giant brown cockroach, with bobbing antennae and a furry cape. He was trailed by KIRAC members, one wearing a false pig snout, another filming the whole thing.
“I’m here!” cried Ruitenbeek, taking the stage, to a mixture of jeering and cheers. “I’m the cockroach!”
A woman taking tickets tried to wrangle the camera from the cameraman and Sadouma shouted for the intruders to leave. Eventually, Ruitenbeek — pleading, “No violence!” — left with his entourage.
This was the latest episode in an ongoing, surrealistic conflict between KIRAC, a fringe art group that posts its films on YouTube, and Houellebecq, one of the world’s most famous authors.
Was it a performance? A marketing stunt? Or part of a genuine cultural feud? Who could really tell?
KIRAC, an acronym for Keeping It Real Art Critics, is often described as an art collective, but its creative center is Ruitenbeek and Kate Sinha, a writer who is also Ruitenbeek’s life partner. They make films that at first appear to be documentaries, or possibly mockumentaries, typically set in the art world. In them, the boundaries between reality and fiction are often blurred, narratives sometimes conflict and onscreen characters can appear to be playing a game with the truth.
It is also often difficult to discern KIRAC’s political views. In one of its films, the Dutch architect and curator Rem Koolhaas is criticized as “macho” and “patriarchal.” In another, KIRAC seems to decry diversity efforts, arguing that the artist Zanele Muholi was given a retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum, in Amsterdam, “only because she is from South Africa, Black and lesbian.” (Muholi now uses they/them pronouns and identifies as nonbinary.)
Seen as provocateurs or pranksters, and sometimes art world trolls, KIRAC’s members often deliver critical monologues directly to the camera, usually in the form of articulate academic analysis from Sinha, or mocking insults from Ruitenbeek.
“In the broadest sense, we’re just trying to make great films, intellectual entertainment,” Sinha said. “I think we are primarily artists, interested in the object we make, which is always the film.”
In a joint interview, Ruitenbeek and Sinha said they developed the concept for the Houellebecq film with the author and shot 600 hours of footage of him, with his contractual consent. Houellebecq only objected when they put together a two-minute trailer for the work in progress, according to Ruitenbeek and Sinha.
In that clip, Ruitenbeek explains that a “honey trip,” or sex holiday, that Houellebecq had planned in Morocco had been canceled because the author feared being kidnapped by Muslim extremists. (Houellebecq has a long history of making critical statements about Islam, and some readers have found Islamophobic sentiments in his books.)
“His wife had spent an entire month arranging prostitutes from Paris, and now everything was falling apart,” Ruitenbeek says in the trailer, in voice-over. He then suggests that there are plenty of young Dutch women in Amsterdam who would have “sex with a famous writer out of curiosity,” and invites the author to visit.
In a French court, Houellebecq argued that the trailer violated his privacy and damaged his image. He asked the court to make KIRAC pull the trailer from all online platforms, remove any mention of his wife arranging prostitutes and pay her damages. The court rejected Houellebecq’s case.
Later, in the Dutch court, Houellebecq argued that KIRAC had violated contract law, and misled him so that he ended up “in a different film than the one originally intended,” according to his Dutch lawyer, Jacqueline Schaap. An appeal judge in that case found for Houellebecq.
The film is still unfinished and continues to evolve, Ruitenbeek said. After Houellebecq left the project, KIRAC filmed in and around the court proceedings, as well as shooting other moments, such as Saturday night’s cockroach show.
Ruitenbeek said he was now rethinking the material, and a final cut may not come for months.
“We started off this project in an open-minded attitude toward each other; we took each other as artists,” Sinha said of the collaboration with Houellebecq. “It feels like he backpedaled and put on a different coat.”
Houellebecq last week agreed to an interview for this article, but pulled out after learning that he would not be shown his quotes before publication. (At the event in Amsterdam, he again declined to comment, claiming that he did not speak English, although he speaks it in the KIRAC film.)
Ruitenbeek’s over-the-top voice-overs and willingness to play a goofball suggest that KIRAC is going for humor. But, often, the subjects of its films don’t find them funny.
“They point fingers at others, but carve out a safe space for themselves’,” said the artist Renzo Martens, who was the focus of an unflattering movie. “From this safe space they are brave enough to cut into other people’s flesh.”
Three Dutch institutions that KIRAC has lambasted — the Stedelijk Museum, the Van Abbe Museum and the Kunstmuseum, in The Hague — declined to comment for this article.
Thijs Lijster, a senior lecturer on the philosophy of art and culture at the University of Groningen, said that there is “something threatening in their ways of going about their work. They have a style of filming, and approaching and talking to people, which is, in a way, rather hostile.”
It is not just KIRAC’s targeting of artists and institutions that has been controversial. Over time, its films have evolved to enter the realm of social commentary, drawing ire from across the political spectrum.
Some viewers saw the group’s 19-minute film “Who’s Afraid of Harvey Weinstein?,” in which Sinha speaks about sexual power dynamics between the American film producer and his rape victims, as dismissive of the #MeToo movement.
A leading art school in Amsterdam, the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, canceled a KIRAC screening after dozens of complaints from students, former students and teachers about statements in the group’s films that they found sexist and racist. The Weinstein movie was championed on a right-wing populist Dutch blog, Geen Stijl. Suddenly, KIRAC became a magnet for conservative followers.
Although Ruitenbeek and Sinha said their personal politics are progressive, KIRAC didn’t disavow the attention, and instead produced a film called “Honeypot.” For that, the group convinced a conservative Dutch philosopher and activist, Sid Lukkassen, to have sex on camera with a left-wing student. The idea was to see if the intimate act would somehow bridge a political gap.
More backlash ensued. When an Amsterdam arts center called De Balie screened “Honeypot,” a feminist collective submitted a petition with more than 1,000 signatures that called the film “a glorification of sexual violence.” The petition’s signers also included the right-wing Dutch politician Paul Cliteur and some of his followers.
“It was interesting that these two sides teamed up against the film for opposite reasons,” said Yoeri Albrecht, De Balie’s director, who did not cancel the event. “I’ve never seen that happen in the more than a decade that I’ve been organizing events here.”
The ambiguity around the group’s motivations only feeds the interest in KIRAC’s work. Many who have been following the Houellebecq affair are unsure whether it’s real or a postmodern KIRAC fiction.
“Everyone is wondering, are they playing a game together?” said Simon Delobel, a curator who teaches at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, in Ghent, Belgium, where he was introduced to the group’s work by his students. KIRAC and Houellebecq were surely “well aware that it can be interpreted as a stunt,” he added.
Yet Ruitenbeek and Sinha both said their clash with the author was no stunt. They don’t want to be in court with Houellebecq, whom they both described as “a genius.” They just want to be in conversation with him, Sinha said.
Ruitenbeek added that when he showed up at Houellebecq’s talk on Saturday, he thought there was a small chance that everyone would laugh and give each other hugs. He was “very happy the day he went to get the cockroach suit,” Sinha said. “After all these intimidating court cases,” she added, “we were back on our own territory again: making art.”
Léontine Gallois contributed reporting from Paris.
When watching a game of football, we only truly consume a snippet of the action.
We are naturally drawn to the fun stuff occurring on the ball, but zoom out a little and there is beauty laid out in the carefully choreographed off-ball movements across the pitch.
You might not notice a lot of runs. Some of them will not even get picked up by the television coverage, but when a player receives the ball in space, you can be confident that it was their team-mates’ movements elsewhere that dragged the opposition out of shape.
Runs beyond the defensive line are crucial to a team’s attacking potency, particularly in a Premier League that is increasingly physically demanding.
“Deep runs are probably the most important thing in football,” said Liverpool manager Arne Slot on Amazon Prime after their 3-1 victory over Leicester City.
“You don’t even always have to play to a player who makes the deep run — but then you can maybe create a bigger one-v-one situation for your winger, so the more deep runs you make, the more chance you have of winning a game.”
The Athletic identified a similar trend in Slot’s side earlier this season, with the underlapping runs made beyond the opposition defensive line allowing Liverpool’s wingers to come inside to cross — as shown by Mohamed Salah’s assist for Curtis Jones against Chelsea.
Runs beyond the ball remain a key theme of Liverpool’s campaign under Slot.
As well as the obvious candidates of forwards Salah, Cody Gakpo and Luis Diaz, Slot’s midfielders have shown a notable propensity to break beyond the opposition last line with those runs from deep.
For example, in their recent Premier League game against Manchester United, Jones is desperately trying to catch the attention of Ibrahima Konate as he identifies a gap in the defensive line.
While the ball does not reach Jones, Harry Maguire’s attention is drawn to the 23-year-old as the ball continues to be circulated.
Five seconds later, that space is exploited with another deep run from fellow midfielder Alexis Mac Allister, with Salah’s clipped ball struck first time by the Argentina international.
Using SkillCorner’s Game Intelligence model — which extracts contextual metrics from broadcast tracking data — we can measure the number of off-ball runs made by each team when they are in possession, focusing on runs made in behind.
For those unsure, this type of run simply logs when a player is attacking space behind the last defensive line — like the example below. Crucially, the player does not have to receive the ball for the run to be logged.
When looking across all Premier League teams, Liverpool’s 4.1 runs in behind per 30 minutes in possession — adjusted to control for each side’s share of the ball — is the third-most this season, with Crystal Palace topping the charts, edging ahead of Aston Villa.
There is no right or wrong method here, but the graphic above highlights the stylistic approach taken by each team in attack.
For example, Arsenal and Manchester City are comparably low by this measure, which reflects their desire for a more patient, possession-based build-up that looks to squeeze the opposition back — gaining territorial dominance, which often leaves less space behind the opposition defensive line.
As for Southampton, well, let’s not compound their misery.
GO DEEPER
Measuring off-ball runs by Premier League wingers
For league-leading Palace, the runs of Jean-Philippe Mateta are crucial to Oliver Glasner’s attacking approach and they can have a dual benefit for the team.
The first is the typical threat of a striker receiving the ball beyond the opposition last line, but the second is the space that such a run can provide for others to exploit between the lines — namely Eberechi Eze.
For example, in their most recent Premier League game against Chelsea, Ismaila Sarr finds right wing-back Daniel Munoz in space on the right flank, with Mateta occupying Chelsea’s centre-backs with a run in behind, towards the front post (see frame 2).
That run makes space for Eze to drift into, with Munoz’s cutback allowing Eze to shoot first time — albeit missing the target.
There was a near-identical pattern 20 minutes later. Sarr’s ball finds an onrushing Munoz, with Mateta’s run in behind to the near post allowing Eze to hold back and receive the cutback — which is blocked on this occasion.
Conversely, Mateta’s improved link-up play has allowed Sarr to thrive as a No 10 by making runs from deeper.
This is shown in his Premier League goal against Aston Villa in November, with Mateta dropping to receive the ball in his own half before releasing Sarr, who has made the run in behind.
It is a part of his game that Sarr has been actively working on in training since his summer arrival.
“We showed him the space where he can show his strength,” Glasner said in his press conference last month.
“We wanted to have pace, a player who can make runs in behind. (To find) the perfect profile we are looking for, we can’t spend (a lot of) money, so we have to find players with most of the profile, then it’s our job to teach them where they can show their skills and talent.”
GO DEEPER
If Eze has his confidence back, Palace have a true triple threat up front
At Aston Villa, the midfield runs of John McGinn and Morgan Rogers — alongside the wide runs from left full-back Lucas Digne — are key to Unai Emery’s system. However, Ollie Watkins is one of the leading candidates across the Premier League for runs made in behind.
While he is capable of dropping deep to receive, Watkins has developed his game in recent seasons, staying on the last line between the width of the six-yard box and conserving his energy — having pulled into wider areas in seasons gone by.
He picks his moments carefully, but the muscle memory of his channel runs in behind when Tyrone Mings has the ball continues to be effective — as it was against Leicester last weekend.
It was a similar run made for his Premier League goal against Crystal Palace in the aforementioned fixture in November. Before McGinn received the ball between the lines, Watkins was already looking for the space he could exploit in behind (see frame 1).
A perfectly weighted pass and a calm finish duly followed.
When breaking down Watkins’ run types by category, more than two-thirds of his total tally are runs in behind or ahead of the ball — with a notably small share coming short or pulling into the half-space to receive.
When a team-mate gets the ball in space, you can be sure Watkins will be on his bike heading towards goal.
Crucially, this aligns with Emery’s method of attack to pierce through the opposition’s back line when they can. No Premier League team has logged more than Villa’s 53 through balls this season, which shows that they often take the opportunity to play the pass when those runs are made.
Breaking down our SkillCorner dataset by player, Watkins is out in front alongside Leicester’s Jamie Vardy in the highest volume of runs in behind as a share of their total tally, in a list made up largely of No 9s who spearhead their team’s respective attack.
Below Watkins on the list? The previously discussed Mateta, of course.
Like Mateta, the runs made by Watkins and Jhon Duran don’t always need to be met with a pass from a team-mate. However, these movements are still vital for pushing the defence back and creating space for Villa’s No 10s to exploit.
This was particularly notable in Villa’s recent victory over Manchester City — as The Athletic has previously analysed — with Rogers and Youri Tielemans benefiting from Duran’s relentless forward running.
GO DEEPER
How Tielemans and Rogers’ ability between the lines helped Villa beat City
While our post-match debrief will largely focus on the events that occurred on the ball, the key to unlocking a defence might often occur elsewhere on the pitch.
Whether you’re Nottingham Forest or Forrest Gump, running matters — and now we can measure its impact in context.
THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE RAPE KIT: A True Crime Story, by Pagan Kennedy
In 2021, the Smithsonian acquired something called the Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit for Sexual Assault Examination. It was a 10-by-6-inch cardboard container filled mostly with items you could buy at any pharmacy, but for millions of American women, the “rape kit,” as this 1970s invention is now known, was a revolution in a box.
Oh, and one important detail: The Chicago police sergeant Louis Vitullo didn’t invent the kit that initially bore his name. That credit goes to Martha “Marty” Goddard, a determined, soft-spoken woman who came up with the idea of a consistent set of tools to collect evidence after an assault — but then disappeared before it became the national standard it is today.
How Goddard dreamed up her creation is the central question of “The Secret History of the Rape Kit,” by Pagan Kennedy, a journalist with a “feverish obsession” with the subject. “How,” she asks, “does a tool that empowers women ever get built in a man’s world?”
Out of necessity, in this case. As a volunteer at a Chicago crisis center, Goddard began to see “a dark and terrible underworld” of young rape survivors. She set about understanding their experiences, wheedling her way into local police departments and interviewing hospital and crime-lab personnel to learn what it would take to solve cases.
Solving cases at all was a novel idea, apparently. Kennedy argues convincingly that not much had changed in the 400 years between when an English judge dismissed rape as “an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved,” and 1970s Chicago, where a police training manual taught that “it is unfortunate that many women will claim they have been raped in order to get revenge” against “a boyfriend with a roving eye.” When officers did do forensic exams, she writes, they were “Kabuki theater” usually designed to expose a mendacious woman, or to conveniently convict a nearby Black male. Physical evidence was lost; victims were left humiliated; justice was rare.
What if, Goddard wondered, there were a consistent, court-approved way of collecting the evidence that would bolster a survivor’s word? Her assembly of tools — bags for semen or fingernail samples, swabs, a tiny comb for pubic hair — was nothing fancy, but she persuaded the Playboy Foundation to design the packaging. The result had an air of professionalism — and sincerity. It “promised to treat a victim with dignity, as an eyewitness whose body might reveal real evidence of a violent crime.”
Its namesake, Vitullo, screamed at Goddard when she presented him with her proposal, but subsequently embraced the idea — and Goddard, understanding that law enforcement would more readily accept the kit if it bore a man’s name, helped “collaborate in her own erasure.” The history of that erasure is a fascinating subplot of this book, as Kennedy traces the way generations of canny American women have been denied credit and profit and glory for their brainchildren.
And Goddard did more than just devise the kit — she proselytized for it across the country. She added cards that shared counseling resources, and forms for police officers to sign — meaning they could be held accountable for losing evidence. She spoke to Girl Scouts, church groups, and F.B.I. criminologists. By the mid-1980s, her invention was everywhere.
But if you’ve heard of the rape kit, you’ve probably also heard of the rape-kit backlog. During the 1990s, cities slashed funding for collecting rape evidence, and literal mold grew on Goddard’s invention, with hundreds of thousands of untested kits piling up. When investigators opened one storage unit in Detroit in 2009, they discovered more than 11,000 rape kits — three decades of evidence from victims ranging in age from one month to 90 years old.
Outrage erupted, and once kits began to be widely tested the results offered what Kennedy calls “spectacular proof” of their value. Old crimes were solved. Myths about serial rapists were debunked. And false convictions dropped; as DNA testing became more widespread, fewer Black men were wrongfully convicted of the rape of white women than in prior decades, per one report.
Marty Goddard had vanished from public life by the time all this happened, and Kennedy works to solve her “mysterious disappearance.” But the truth she eventually uncovers feels beside the point. There is another equally urgent narrative here, and it’s Kennedy’s own. She herself, she confides, was molested as a child — and the brutally economical descriptions of the violence she endured are the real “true crime story” of the book, a tiny handful of passages that rise off the page, incandescent.
For most of her life, Kennedy kept her memories and her anger to herself: “My rage had always seemed greasy and salty, like something I binged on when I was alone, in fits of self-hatred.” When she wrote an earlier version of Goddard’s story, she spent days inserting and then deleting a single mention of her own experience, wishing she could bury “molested” somehow “so that just a bit of the word poked up, like the tip of a bombshell. Did I deserve to make any kind of claim at all?”
Too many readers will recognize that doubt, and Kennedy’s love for her subject reverberates throughout the book. Kennedy’s own mother hadn’t understood what happened to her, but Goddard, she writes, “was the woman who had believed little girls.”
There’s a heartbreaking passage in which Kennedy explains her decision not to name her assailant. She opts not to do so, she writes, “because I have no physical evidence, nothing compelling to back up my account.”
Marty Goddard provided a way to preserve that evidence, for generations of victims. No wonder Kennedy wanted to tell this forgotten story. And along the way, her own.
THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE RAPE KIT: A True Crime Story | By Pagan Kennedy | Vintage | 256 pp. | Paperback, $19
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)
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/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25821992/videoframe_720397.png "Las Vegas police release ChatGPT logs from the suspect in the Cybertruck explosion")
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