Knuckleballers
· Yahoo Sports
This summer, the San Diego Padres cut right-hander Matt Waldron - the only remaining knuckleball pitcher in the major leagues. Too bad. With the Padres now in the postseason, we could've seen a knuckler on baseball's biggest stage. That might help make this endangered species reproduce.
There is apparently some remaining nostalgia even among the unsentimental suits who run MLB these days, however, because after Waldron was dumped by the Padres, he was picked up briefly by Toronto and then by the beleaguered Washington Nationals. He faced two hitters against the Atlanta Braves in mop-up duty on Sept. 2, striking out one and inducing the other to fly out. I wish I had been there.
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For the uninitiated, a knuckleball is thrown by a pitcher who pushes the ball out with his fingertips in a way to minimize the spin caused by snapping his wrist. The effect is a ball that floats toward home plate so unpredictably it's hard to catch, let alone hit. It's not easy to do. Although the knuckleball's origins date back more than a century, only a handful of pitchers ever perfected it. But those who did - such as Phil Niekro and Hoyt Wilhelm - have been much more likely than conventional pitchers to be enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
The impending extinction of the North American knuckler (none have been found in the wild outside the U.S.) is a paradox. Today's highest-paid fireballers spend more time under the knife than atop the mound. Knuckleballers are indestructible. They also work cheap, and compete into their late forties. Watching Methuselahs like Niekro, Wilhelm, and Tim Wakefield baffle Henry Aaron, Willie Mays, and Edgar Martinez has allowed young ballplayers to imagine themselves in The Show - even if they could never come close to throwing a 96-mile-an-hour fastball.
After R.A. Dickey's pitch in the 2012 All-Star Game, I caught my boys trying to throw knuckleballs in our backyard. They were following a hallowed tradition: Matt Waldron and his twin brother taught each other the knuckler in their Nebraska backyard, too. Seeing my boys experiment with the elusive pitch launched a decade-long quest recounted in my new book "School of Hard Knucks: My Three Sons and Baseball's Wildest Pitch."
Almost all serious knuckleballers learned the pitch when they were about 12 years old. Many were inspired watching guys like Charlie Hough or Wakefield pitch in big postseason games. As they got older, they shelved it for fastballs, curves, and sliders. Only after they learned they didn't have big league stuff did they turn back to the knuckler.
One MLB executive told me that new velocity and pitch design labs have given those guys other options. "Now you can develop velocity, and all these other nasty pitches."
Two recent knuckleballers have raised expectations for how fast the pitch can be thrown. Dickey, the last knuckleballer to pitch into October (Toronto, 2015), threw his in the high 70s. Steven Wright, who got Red Sox rings in 2013 and 2018 without throwing a postseason pitch, sat around 75. The old masters like Wakefield, the last knuckler to pitch in the World Series (Boston 2004), threw in the 60s. The faster standard may discourage slower throwers from committing to the pitch, or scouts from singing their praises.
One thing seems clear: MLB organizations are still willing to give knucklers a look.
"Knuckleballers can throw as much as you want," another exec told me. "It's a low-stress pitch with a low risk of injury. You don't have to worry about pitch sequencing - you throw the same pitch over and over. It seems you would always want a knuckleballer on your roster."
Teams have tried to grow knuckleballers from scratch in their farm systems, but it hasn't worked. Ditto an MLB Network reality competition that tried to make knuckleballers out of retired football quarterbacks like Doug Flutie. Canceled after one season.
Then there's Howard Rich - a real estate mogul Mets fan who founded libertarian organizations Americans for Limited Government and U.S. Term Limits. He saw the shortage of knuckleballers as a business opportunity and opened the International Knuckleball Academy. The doors closed before a single student enrolled.
"You know Field of Dreams - 'If you build it, they will come'?'" Rich said. "Well, we built it, and they didn't come."
That's the paradox: The knack for killing the spin on a baseball is as rare as the ability to throw one 102 mph.
"You can't go out looking for knuckleballers," Charlie Hough told me, "you just have to wait until they fall into your lap."
First you need a slew of 12-year-olds in their backyards trying to throw a ball with no rotation. A knuckleballer starring on baseball's biggest stage could do just that.