“You can’t imagine the feeling that you suddenly have no idea what you’re doing out there. You have no business being out there, performing that way, as a major-leaguer.”
Steve Blass gave this quote to the New Yorker’s Roger Angell in 1975—after he’d mysteriously lost his ability to pitch, but before this loss of ability had been pathologized as a disease bearing his name. But, of course, you’re not supposed to compare a player to Steve Blass. To invoke Steve Blass Disease is to suggest that a player’s bad week or bad month or bad year is not just struggle but failure; moreover, it’s to suggest this failure is fatal.