/ STAFF WRITER
TEMPE, Ariz. – Imagine, asks Cody Buckel, if you woke up one morning and forgot how to walk. Something that had been simple was suddenly a complex series of movements requiring full concentration. And imagine that every time you tried, you feared embarrassment. The shaking heads of sympathetic onlookers.
Only then can you begin to understand the yips, which is the sports shorthand for a mysterious mental block that prevents athletes from performing their sport’s simplest tasks.
Buckel, a former star right-hander at Royal High in Simi Valley, was a 20-year-old phenom, ticketed for the Texas Rangers rotation.