Knuckler (4 page)

Even tennis players, on rare occasions, can fire off a forehand or backhand return, only to see the ball
knuckle
right back as the result of an unusual convergence of spin and counterspin.

In baseball, of course, the absence of any spin on the ball is achieved by design, at least by the pitcher, though the skill is far more difficult than it sounds. (Fielders, too, sometimes speak of balls hit at them that
knuckle.
) That simplest of facts about the knuckleball is why relatively few people can throw it, and fewer still can throw it effectively. Proper delivery of the knuckleball requires absolutely no spin—or very, very little, because even the slightest deviance from that requirement can render the pitch entirely useless.

In effect, every pitch with the knuckleball can be a proverbial roll of the dice.

"If it spins at all," Wakefield said succinctly, "it basically doesn't work."

In the most complex sense, according to everyone from physicists to knuckleball cultists, the knuckleball succeeds through an array of physical realities, many of them triggered by the red stitching that secures the cover of a baseball (also known as the laces). There is ample talk of airflow, vortexes, and wind swirls—mind-numbing physical terms that would cause the average person's eyes to glaze over as if trying to follow the path of the pitch itself. Curious minds ranging from Robert Adair, a professor emeritus at Yale and author of
The Physics of Baseball,
to Dave Clark, a baseball fan and author of a playful work entitled
The Knucklebook,
have taken a turn at explaining the physics behind the pitch, though the simplest explanation goes something like this:

When the knuckleball is thrown properly, air deflects off the laces and slides around the ball to the top, bottom, and sides. The rear of the ball generally remains untouched. And because the shape of the laces deflects balls at varying speeds, the combination of factors can cause instability in the movement—the kind of turbulence, on extreme levels, that can cause an airplane to rumble unsteadily through patches of rough air.

Wakefield, for his part, typically planted his fingertips just below the area of the stitching that he described as the
horseshoe,
a patch of
white typically adorned by the official logo for Major League Baseball. (Baseballs are stitched in such a way that the laces resemble a pair of horseshoes connected at the two tips on the open end.) The grip allowed for the stitches to run across the top and down the sides of the ball's front side, effectively directing wind in all directions and creating an entirely unpredictable journey.

Wakefield's version of the physics: "Aerodynamically, when you throw it without any spin, it seems to catch the air and there's a vacuum, or a pocket of air behind the ball, that causes it to move around."

And when it moves, as any major league player will tell you, the challenge of hitting it or catching it can be arduous.

In fact, baseball lore is filled with amusing tales and anecdotes about the knuckler, which has caused more than its share of angst for pitchers, catchers, hitters, coaches, and managers alike. Hall of Fame first baseman Willie Stargell, who played for the Pittsburgh Pirates, once suggested that the challenge of throwing strikes with a knuckleball was "like throwing a butterfly with hiccups across the street into your neighbor's mailbox." Richie Hebner, a highly regarded hitter who played much of his career in Philadelphia, once said that trying to hit a knuckleball was "like eating soup with a fork." Longtime catcher and baseball wit Bob Uecker once scoffed at the notion that catching the knuckleball was difficult, arguing that a catcher merely had to "wait [until] it stops rolling, then go to the backstop and pick it up."

Not surprisingly, then, the knuckleball has always been met with a great deal of skepticism, particularly by managers, executives, and evaluators who often enough are at a loss to explain how the knuckleball works and, just as often, why it sometimes does not. Red Sox manager Terry Francona, who managed Wakefield at the end of the pitcher's career, often remarked that the hardest part of handling Wakefield came when it was time to remove him from the game, primarily because the usual indicators did not apply. With conventional pitchers, Francona noted, fatigue is often apparent to the trained eye, and pitch totals have far greater meaning. Toward the end of his stint with the Red Sox, for example, ace Pedro Martinez usually became ineffective anytime he exceeded 100 pitches, the count that put Francona
and Red Sox pitching coaches on high alert. But with a knuckleballer like Wakefield, a pitch count of 30 could be just as revealing as 130—in other words, neither number was particularly revealing at all.

As Clark notes in
The Knucklebook:
"For a knuckleballer, a pitch count of 150 is not a problem—unless it's the first inning."

Adding to everyone's mistrust of the pitch is its schizophrenic nature: the knuckleball can oscillate between effectiveness and ineffectiveness as if possessing multiple personalities. The change can come abruptly and without notice. Whether the result of humidity, wind, or maybe nothing at all, the knuckleball can move dramatically on one pitch and do relatively little on the next, giving managers little advance warning that a pitcher is about to implode. More so than some other pitches, a poorly thrown knuckleball is susceptible to two outcomes in particular—walks and home runs—and any combination of elements can rapidly turn a stable, successful pitching performance into what baseball people might refer to as a
stinker.

And there is quite simply no way to prepare for it.

Beyond that, because the knuckleball is thrown relatively slowly—Wakefield's knuckler, for instance, was often clocked at 60 to 68 miles per hour, or 25 to 30 miles an hour slower than the average major league fastball—an array of side effects can make even the most accomplished, highly respected, and astute managers sweat.

Said Jim Leyland, who has overseen nearly 3,000 major league games (including some during the early years of Wakefield's career) and is regarded as one of the best managers in baseball history: "One of the reasons is that with runners on base, it's a very tough pitch to catch and you're always worried about it getting away [for passed balls]. You're always holding on tight. Another thing is, even while a guy like Wakefield is really quick to the plate, a lot of guys will still run, try to steal, because the pitch is thrown so much slower and because it's hard to handle."

Add the threat of stolen bases and passed balls to the walks and home runs and what you have, for any manager, is a recipe for a nervous breakdown. Almost to a man, managers are control freaks, and most tend to treat and interpret the knuckleballer the way a young,
single man might regard an attractive, successful single woman in a bar.

Psycho.

So they do the instinctive thing.

They run in the opposite direction.

Bill Lajoie has spent a lifetime in professional baseball as a player, scout, and executive, amassing more than 50 years of experience that have made him one of the most widely respected and highly regarded evaluators in the history of the game. During a career that began as a minor league player with the Baltimore Orioles in 1956, Lajoie has played or worked for franchises in Baltimore, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Washington, New York, Minnesota, Cincinnati, Detroit, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Boston, and Pittsburgh. Through it all, Lajoie has remained one of the most open-minded men in baseball, someone whose thirst for the game is so great that he deems any and all perspectives worth considering.

In 2003, the year that marked his 69th birthday, Lajoie served as an adviser and special consultant to Theo Epstein, then a 29-year-old in his first season as general manager of the Boston Red Sox. As much as the Red Sox hired Lajoie to counterbalance the new, progressive ways of analytical baseball thinking that someone like Epstein had come to represent—perpetuated by the Michael Lewis book
Moneyball,
statistical analysis in baseball, or
sabermetrics,
had become the rage—Lajoie found himself as eager to learn
from
Epstein as he was to impart wisdom to his young boss.

"I've had a saying all my life: believe your eyes. But your eyes are also looking at a [computer] screen now, and that can help you," said Lajoie. "This is a great challenge for me—to understand this concept and to put it to use. I think anybody will tell you I'm making a concerted effort to understand. I hope everybody does. It would be easy for me to sit back and say, 'Bullshit,' but I'm going to learn more about this game. So why not do it?"

And yet, when it comes to the knuckleball, Bill Lajoie admitted that he probably has been as biased against the pitch as most any other conventional thinker in the game.

Of course, in an age when baseball is a multibillion-dollar operation and jobs are at stake on a daily basis, most baseball evaluators are unwilling to gamble their careers on something so fickle as the knuckleball. In the eyes of most baseball evaluators, the skills of the game's positional players have always been measured in five
tools:
arm strength, speed, fielding, hitting for average, and hitting for power. (A player who grades well in all five areas is said to be a
five-tool player.
) With pitchers, the breakdown has always been far simpler. While evaluators look for pitchers with relatively smooth mechanics or deliveries—the smoother the delivery of the pitch, the less the strain on the arm and the greater the likelihood of a healthy, long, and productive career—the first objective is always the same: power. The harder a pitcher can throw, the greater is his margin for error and the better are his chances for success. Even a pitcher with a straight fastball has a chance of succeeding if he possesses above-average or higher velocity; baseball history is littered with fireballers who were good enough to enjoy fairly long careers despite being relatively mediocre pitchers.

After all, someone will almost always take a gamble on a pitcher with a power arm that can produce baseball's omnipotent weapon: the strikeout.

Beyond power, a pitcher is graded on the quality of his secondary pitches—the curveball, changeup, and slider—as well as the supplementary areas of movement, control, and command, the last two of which are often mistakenly interchanged. (If
control
is the general ability to throw the ball over the plate, then
command
is the ability to harness a pitch's lateral and vertical
movement.
A diving or darting target, after all, is always harder to hit.) Combine all three elements with some measure of velocity and what you have is something akin to Greg Maddux, a craftsman who won 355 games and pitched more than 5,000 innings with a fluid delivery and an uncanny ability to pierce the strike zone from an array of angles, or Pedro Martinez, a harder-throwing power pitcher who commanded an array of secondary pitches so devastating that his 1999 and 2000 seasons forever will remain among the greatest pitching performances in baseball history.

Now compare all of those pitching assets to the general description of knuckleballers, all of whom throw with almost no power and
possess questionable degrees of command and control. The knuckleballer throws his pitch, upward of 90 percent of the time, with only one real asset: movement that is often unpredictable or unreliable. In the end, what a manager or scout is left with is a 65-mile-an-hour pitch that can move a lot, a little, or not at all, a list of options that leaves relatively little room for success. The knuckler that moves too much cannot be harnessed or caught; the knuckler that moves too little will be transported to faraway places by opposing hitters as if shipped via Federal Express. Thus, the successful knuckleballer has to walk a tightrope between two dangerous places—self-destruction and certain doom.

"Everybody's looking for power. That's the one thing that remains constant," said Leyland, who has spent nearly a half century in professional baseball as a player, coach, and manager. "I think some of it is just the nature of our game."

As such, while the list of people who have attempted to throw the knuckleball is fairly extensive, the true, successful knuckleballers in baseball history have been relatively few and far between. The origins of the pitch trace back to the early part of the 20th century—there are varying theories as to who, precisely, invented the knuckleball—but the concept of throwing a ball without spin is hardly unique. Somewhere along the line, in their never-ending attempt to confuse hitters and disrupt their timing, pitchers recognized that throwing a ball without spin can be extremely effective, mostly as the result of a sharp, downward movement just before the ball reaches home plate. Over the course of baseball history, pitchers have accomplished this in a number of ways, ranging from wrapping the entire hand around the ball (if they can) and holding it deep in the hand—the
palmball,
which is thrown to the plate almost like a shot put—or sticking the ball in the gap between the index and middle fingers—the
forkball
or, later, the
split-fingered fastball.
Regardless of the precise name, the concept was the same.

Remove the spin.

And watch the ball dance.

The knuckleball took its name from the earliest grip: a pitcher would
place his thumbs under the ball, then press it against the uppermost knuckles on his index and ring fingers. This method has morphed into the far more common fingertip-grip of the present day—again, the grip that Wakefield uses—though the objective is the same. By holding the ball against the knuckles or by the fingertips, most (if not all) of the friction is eliminated upon release, allowing the ball to travel to the desired target with little or no spin.

"It's kind of a push with your arm and your wrist," said Lajoie. "It's a push rather than a speed thing."

For a scout like Lajoie—and for that matter, a baseball manager or traditional evaluator like Leyland—the concept of a
push
can be difficult to grasp, if only because power and speed are so ingrained in any baseball evaluator's thinking. As a longtime scout, Lajoie can remember occasions when, seated in the traditional scouts' seats behind home plate for a night game, a pitcher would throw with such great arm speed that Lajoie could see a brief burst of perspiration spray from his arm. The phenomenon is visible only at night, when the perspiration reflects in the stadium lights, but it's as sure an indication as any that a pitcher is throwing with great velocity.