http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/25893836/inside-37-year-old-pitcher-luke-hagerty-improbable-comeback-story

The yips are an exercise in loneliness. Nobody is quite sure what to do, what to say.

It covered five categories: adventure mindset, connect, authentic, forward focused and courage. On almost every reply, Hagerty was above average compared to the elite athletes Crews surveys. In only two segments were his answers problematic: negative thoughts and courage. This, Crews says, is typical of athletes with the yips. It is almost autoimmune, the way they forever lurk, ready to strike at the most inopportune moment. They manifest themselves physically. They poison psychologically. Crews asked Hagerty to go to an archery range that month. The idea was to get Hagerty away from his main sport and into an unfamiliar situation, where he doesn't have coping strategies. Everything, Crews says, shows up. When she noticed he was not shooting for the 10-point bull's-eye target, she asked how often Hagerty adopts his game persona. He stopped to think. That's what was missing. The yips had taken his ability to throw a baseball and his career the first time around. They were not going to kill this chance, too. They had infiltrated deep into Hagerty's mind, stealing another fundamental element -- his unrelenting competitiveness, the sort that lived inside his lab but was needed to leave it -- and torpedoing it. "He needed to go through it," Bretta says. "He needed to take ownership of it, carry it around on his shoulder and beat it up every day. He had to understand it. He had to dissect it and figure it out. That was important to him. It was important to him to get to this step." This step was the biggest. It was what Austin Davis and every kid who walked through X2's doors said at one point or another when they saw Hagerty light up a radar gun. Try. Just try. Hold a workout. There were always excuses. There always would be. "He's waiting for things to fall into place," Crews says. "He's got his business going. I said you just have to make a decision, and if you're going to go, you take steps to get the business covered, your family covered, everything so he can go when he makes it."