This year’s first case of spring training yips is here

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It only took one video of an errant throw and a quote from Blake Swihart assuring us that he very much did not have the yips for much of baseball to conclude yesterday that Blake Swihart must indeed have the yips. Admittedly, on its face, the situation doesn’t look too great — for starters, the throw back to the pitcher in that video clip is really, really bad. According to reports from camp, that kind of throw has been common for the Boston Red Sox catcher so far this spring.

Perhaps more pressing is the fact that it’s the first time that we’ve been able to see Swihart at his natural position since last April, when he was moved to left field to receive more playing time. Of course, he only lasted there until early June when an ankle injury took him out for the rest of the season. So it’s the first time in a while that we’ve seen Swihart at all and the first time in an even longer while that we’ve seen him at catcher, and it doesn’t look great.

Maybe more relevant than all of the aforementioned reasons this situation doesn’t look great, however, is the fact that it doesn’t necessarily have to look great in the middle of February. It’s not exactly wild for a guy who made a position change before being sidelined for months with an injury to struggle with getting his original mechanics back. It’s not encouraging. But it doesn’t have to be reason for panic. There is a variation of this in spring training almost every year, a beat reporter cell phone video that seems for a day or two to show evidence that a player has completely lost himself. And usually it doesn’t end up being true. It just ends up being spring.