The Only Game in Town

by David Remnick

  Grumpy catchers may well have a point, too: Maybe all those passed balls are not their fault. “The fastest possible voluntary reaction time of a person is about a hundred and fifty milliseconds,” Adair says. “And during that time the ball can change its direction so much that you can’t catch it.” Adair’s conclusion: “When Tim Wakefield is on, it’s pretty tough—tough to hit, tough to catch.”

  And when he’s off? “All you need to know is that if you put any kind of a spin on it at all it’ll travel about four hundred and seventy-five feet in the opposite direction,” Bouton likes to say.

  Tim Wakefield was not supposed to be a major-league pitcher. He was a standout high-school ballplayer in Melbourne, Florida, where he still lives. Like most good young players, he pitched some, but mainly he played first base. He was a power hitter. In college, at nearby Florida Tech, Wakefield broke the school home run record, and in 1988, his senior year, he was drafted by the Pirates. He reported that summer to Watertown, New York, where the Pirates had a Class A minor-league affiliate, and promptly set about proving to the club that selecting him had been a mistake: He hit .189 and struck out more than once every three times at bat.

  Woody Huyke, one of Pittsburgh’s developmental coaches, saved Wakefield’s career. He saw Tim playing catch one day in the spring of 1989, during warmups, when many players goof around with sideline knuckleballs. (Like card tricks, everybody’s got one.) Tim’s ball was visibly of a different order from any garden-variety stunt pitch. “I thought, Jesus Christ,” Huyke recalled recently. “I didn’t say anything, I just played dumb. And then two days later we had an organizational meeting, because, you know, he was on the bubble as an infielder. I said, ‘Before you let him go, I’d like to see him on the mound, ’cause he’s got a good knuckleball.’ So they kept him around. They told him, ‘Either you pitch or go home.’”

  Wakefield, as a boy, had learned about the knuckleball the hard way—by trying to catch it. (“You don’t catch the knuckleball,” Yankees manager Joe Torre, himself a former catcher, has said. “You defend against it.”) His father, at the end of their backyard throwing sessions, would invariably end up pitching him butterflies. “Dad comes home from work, and I’m, you know, ‘Let’s go play catch,’” Wakefield told me. “He was tired, and he wanted to go inside. So the knuckleball was his way of trying to tire me out, ’cause I didn’t want to have to catch it—it’d go by me and I’d have to go pick it up. It was kind of a subtle way of Dad saying, ‘Time to go, let’s quit.’”

  At the time of Huyke’s intervention, there were just two knuckleballers in the bigs—Charlie Hough, who was then forty-one and pitching for the Texas Rangers, and Tom Candiotti, thirty-one and with the Cleveland Indians—and no promising apprentices. “We are, unjustly, in the twilight of an era,” one premature eulogy, by the former Rangers consultant Craig Wright, read. “We may be witnessing the last days of one of baseball’s most baffling, most charming, and most effective pitches.”

  Reluctantly, Wakefield took to the mound—and within a few short years, as if by some kind of extended practical joke, there he was on national television in 1992, the rookie ace, in young Charlie Zink’s living room, winning two games in the playoffs. Then, just as suddenly, he lost it. Flutterballs are exceedingly difficult to control, and the ability to land pitches anywhere near the strike zone with consistency is what separates a true knuckleballer from a Sunday-afternoon showoff. Wakefield walked twenty-eight batters over a three-game stretch in April 1993. He spent half of that season, and all of the next, in the minors, trying to regain his confidence; he lost twenty games and won just eight. In the spring of 1995, two years after he had been the Opening Day starter, the Pirates handed him his pink slip.

  It seems fitting that a pitch as fickle as the knuckleball would produce a career filled (in the early going, at least) with herky-jerky ups and downs, but it would be a mistake to think that this volatility reflects the person. Wakefield is a quiet, studious-seeming man, who does everything—from walking to playing the guitar to singing harmony—with visible deliberation. (One of his favorite songs is “Take It Easy,” by the Eagles.) He likes to call himself the “blue-collarite” on the pitching staff, a label that is reinforced by his friendship with various country musicians. Last winter, he made a guest appearance on the reality show Average Joe.

  “It’s not a macho-type thing,” Wakefield said recently, about his unlikely livelihood. “I had to come up with a way to get outs, and that’s the bottom line as a pitcher. It doesn’t matter if you roll it underhand, as long as you get outs.” He works hard, still, at practicing his fastball and curveball, each of which he throws between 5 and 10 percent of the time, to preserve at least some element of surprise. “I’ve hit eighty on the radar gun maybe half a dozen times,” he said, cracking a restrained smile. “That’s a huge accomplishment for me. I get high fives when I get to the dugout.”

  Wakefield was picked up for cheap by the Red Sox shortly after the Pirates cut him loose, and the accidental pitcher is now, improbably, starting his tenth season in Boston, which makes him the longest-serving member of the club. In the history of the Red Sox franchise, only three pitchers have appeared in more games or struck out more batters. Wakefield is thirty-seven, an age that spells retirement planning for ordinary players, and he is just entering his prime.

  “I plan on pitching as long as I can, as long as I’m having fun,” Wakefield told me earlier this year. He said that last season was the most fun he’d ever had in his baseball life. “I kind of look at it now as something special. It’s an art. It’s something that may be a lost art here, soon, if somebody else doesn’t come up and start throwing it again.”

  Knuckleball pitchers are not just a rare but also a close-knit breed—the Fraternal Order of Knuckleheads, bound by their shared experiences of alienation and finger cramps. “We always root for each other across the miles,” Bouton says. “We all understand we’re a little weird.”

  Barry Meister, Wakefield’s agent, also represents Steve Sparks, the other knuckleballer currently pitching in the majors. (Sparks, who is thirty-eight, has enjoyed less success than Wakefield, shuttling from team to team. He began this season as the fifth starter, and spot reliever, for the Arizona Diamondbacks.) “It’s like some strange disease—they all hang out together,” Meister told me, before the start of spring training. “I called Sparks last week and he said, ‘Hey, I’m out in California, staying at Charlie Hough’s house, playing golf.’”

  The uniform No. 49, worn by Wakefield, and previously by Hough and Candiotti, serves as an unofficial pledge pin, honoring Hoyt Wilhelm, the most famous midcentury knuckleballer, whose career reflects many of the perks and humiliations of the tribe. Wilhelm was a few months shy of his thirtieth birthday when he was finally called upon to throw his first big-league pitch, for the New York Giants, in 1952. Over the course of twenty years, serving reliably as both a starter and a reliever, he was released four times, sold twice, traded four times, and offered up once to the expansion draft. Yet when he retired, just a week before his fiftieth birthday, he’d managed to pitch in more games than any player in history, and he was later inducted into the Hall of Fame.

  Now that Wilhelm is gone (he died in 2002), the undisputed Grand Poobah is Phil Niekro, or Knucksie, as he is known among his brethren (though not to his brother Joe, another knuckler; together they amassed 539 wins, the most of any sibling pair in baseball). Knucksie won 208 games—of his career 318—after turning thirty-five. He is now sixty-five, and the resident prankster of the crew, an amateur magician always eager to impress with his sleight of hand.

  Over the years, despite their scarcity, the knuckleball bunch have produced more than their fair share of bizarre and noteworthy feats. The last pitcher to start both games of a doubleheader, Wilbur Wood, was a knuckleballer. (That was for the White Sox, against the Yankees, in 1973. He lost both games.) And who can forget Eddie Rommel, a bug-tosser for the Philadelphia A’s? On July 10, 1932, having alre
ady pitched on each of the previous two days, the thirty-four-year-old Rommel threw batting practice, took a breather for the first inning, and then came out of the bullpen, in the bottom of the second, to pitch for what turned out to be seventeen straight innings over four hours, along the way yielding twenty-nine hits and fourteen runs. (He won, 18–17. It was the last win of his career.)

  Baseball manicures are a popular topic of conversation when any two or three from the gang get together. Knucksie once recommended that Sparks scuff his nails on concrete before pitching, to achieve the ideal gripping texture—a strategy that backfired when Sparks shattered one of his nails in the process. Others have tried laminating their nails with horse-hoof solution as a sort of reinforcement. “I did all sorts of things,” Bouton told me. “I even tried filing saw teeth in my fingers to sort of get, like, an alligator grip on the ball, but the little points would break off—and they weren’t too popular in bed, either.”

  The weather—artificial or real—comes up frequently, too. Most knucklers agree that wind in the face is good (anything to add resistance and turbulence), while wind blowing from behind spells doom. Heat and humidity are welcome, unless you’re pitching in a dome; for whatever reason, the consensus seems to be that central air-conditioning can work wonders. Boston’s Doug Mirabelli, who catches Wakefield exclusively (knucklers often get their own personal backstops), has observed that the SkyDome in Toronto causes an extra hiccup per pitch. And in the Astrodome in the seventies, conspiracy theorists will swear, the temperature was always suspiciously cool—the AC set to full blast—on days when Joe Niekro was starting for the home team.

  All that’s missing is an actual frat house, a fact that hasn’t been lost on Bouton. “I just hope that one day there may be a home for aged knuckleball pitchers to go to,” he said. “You know, like polka meetings, the Friars Club. That’d be nice. You could spend your final days rocking on a porch talking about some of the great games, laughing at all the broken bones that you’ve created for catchers, broken backs for batters trying to swing and swat it.”

  Charlie Zink, the Red Sox’ knuckler-in-training, had two main ambitions as he entered his late teens, neither of which was to be a pro baseball player. He thought he might like to join the PGA Tour—golf suited his laid-back demeanor—or else get involved with law enforcement. “My parents were both wardens at Folsom State Prison, and I was thinking of doing something like that,” he said this spring. “But then art school came along.”

  Art school was the Savannah College of Art and Design, known to its students as SCAD. Zink had been attending junior college in Sacramento, and playing on the baseball team there, but he found the atmosphere too competitive. “I was kind of burned out on baseball,” he said. “I just wanted a change of scenery. I was looking for something easier at the time, and SCAD seemed like a good fit.”

  SCAD had a baseball team—a perfectly uncompetitive Division III team—whose coach, strangely, was Luis Tiant, the 1970s Red Sox star famous for his pretzel-twist pitching motion. Tiant took a liking to Zink, who seemed game to try anything—even turning his back on home plate during his windup, as Tiant himself had done. Though Zink graduated with roughly twice as many losses as wins on his record, Tiant got him a spring tryout with the Red Sox in 2002. Zink at least had a strong arm—he could throw 94 mph—and, well, he had a distinctive pitching motion; it was worth a shot.

  Zink’s reincarnation story, set in the summer of 2002, is similar to Wakefield’s, only more vivid. “I was just getting ready to throw one day, messing around like everyone else does, and our trainer asked me to throw a knuckleball,” he told me. The trainer was not wearing a mask, and Zink’s pitch—inspired by that long-ago glimpse of Wakefield as a rookie on national TV—danced its way squarely into his eye socket. “Our pitching coördinator was there to see it,” Zink went on. “He told me to throw it a few more times, and I hit a few more guys in the chest.”

  If the black eye sealed Zink’s conversion from Tiant protégé to Wakefield disciple, he didn’t realize it at the time. He even went home to California for the winter and hit the gym (“All off-season, I was just lifting my butt off”), hoping to increase his arm strength and velocity for the following year. When he showed up in camp last spring, the Red Sox had new plans for him, and an increase in velocity was not among them. Wakefield told him, in a private knuckling tutorial, that in those infrequent instances when he’d be throwing fastballs, he ought to throw them slower than he was capable of—he ought to throw them from a half-assed knuckleball windup, that is, not a Tiant Twist—so as not to tip the batter off.

  “The only thing I don’t like about it is I still think of myself as an athlete,” Zink, who has broad shoulders and an effortless grace that disintegrates when he throws his knuckler, told me. “And most people don’t think of knuckleballers as athletes, which kind of makes me upset.” A little early success goes a long way toward erasing such concerns. Late last summer, Zink was promoted from Class A Sarasota to Class AA Portland, where he twice carried no-hitters into the eighth inning. “My first double-A game, I was pitching in Binghamton against the Mets,” he said. “And the second hitter I faced pulled a rib-cage muscle from swinging so hard. He had to get taken out of the game. I mean, that was one of the funniest things I’ve seen.” Zink has even started having dreams about the knuckleball—about different grips and release points, and the inimitable flight patterns they can produce.

  It takes a certain kind of seven-year-old—possessed of an extraordinary sense of his own limitations, or else an unimaginative fantasy life—to watch a professional baseball game and immediately identify with the oldest, slowest person on the field, the guy who, if not for the uniform, could plausibly pass for a math teacher. Sean Flaherty, of Englewood, Florida, was that kid. In April 1993, the expansion Florida Marlins played their first-ever game, and Sean’s dad pulled him out of first grade to watch at a local sports bar. The Marlins’ starting pitcher that day was the leather-faced forty-five-year-old Charlie Hough, still hanging on after all those years, throwing ghostballs in slo-mo.

  “Sean was just mesmerized,” Mike Flaherty, his father, remembers. “From that point on, he grew his nails out, and we played catch every day. I had bruises all over my body.”

  Sean Flaherty is now a senior in high school, and possibly the only full-fledged knuckleballer pitching for any secondary school, anywhere. (Like Wakefield, he throws knucklers at least 85 percent of the time.) He is five feet ten and not an obvious athlete—his aspect is that of a firefly chaser—but next year, against all odds, he will be suiting up for the University of Miami, a Division I powerhouse. Sean is also hoping to become the first of his breed ever to be selected in the amateur draft, next month. (And also, presumably, the first pitcher ever drafted who cannot hit eighty on a radar gun. His knuckleball ranges from 45 to 68 mph, and his fastball tops out in the seventies.)

  The day of Tim Wakefield’s first appearance this spring, Sean’s team, the Lemon Bay Manta Rays, had a game of their own in Fort Myers, against the local Riverdale Raiders. Sean arrived at the field late, wearing a tuxedo. He plays tuba in the Florida West Coast Youth Symphony and was coming straight from a performance.

  “Sean’s journey has been unique,” Mike Flaherty said, sitting in the bleachers. “He’s a pioneer—he really is.” During the regular season, Mike aid, he and Sean catch all of Wakefield’s starts on satellite TV at the same sports bar where the journey began. Last year, they also made regular trips to Sarasota and befriended Charlie Zink. (Sean, who has been throwing the knuckleball for much longer, offered Zink some pointers.) It was the fourth inning, and Lemon Bay was down, 10–3, by the time Sean took the mound. Riverdale, as it happened, was coached by the former Red Sox left fielder Mike Greenwell. (His son Bo is a freshman first baseman.) Greenwell, who said he’d hit knuckleballs quite well during his playing days, imparted what wisdom he could to his players: “Swing under it—the ball will always drop. Try to lift it.” (This undoubtedly be
ats the famous hitting coach Charlie Lau’s advice: “There are two theories on hitting the knuckleball. Unfortunately, neither of them works.”) Sean warmed up to the song “Eye of the Tiger,” played on someone’s boom box, and then floated his bubbles: three innings, four strikeouts, one run allowed.

  After the game (Riverdale won, 11–5), I joined Sean on the field for a crash course in knuckleball catching. When I’d told Dave Clark, an amateur flutterball fanatic who sent me his “Knucklebook” manuscript, that I planned to play catch with a serious knuckleballer, he said I should make sure to wear a cup. “Wear a mask, too,” he added. “And stand behind the backstop.” I had neither a cup nor a mask, nor an oversized softball mitt (which is what big-league knuckleball catchers traditionally use), but I took my chances, and tried to remember the advice that Doug Mirabelli had given me earlier in the day: Let it travel as far as possible; don’t reach out to meet it, or you’re asking for trouble. The first pitch did a little jig about midway, and then darted down and to my right. I got some glove on the ball, but not enough to squeeze it. On two occasions, the ball swerved particularly late—I’d like to believe these were instances such as Professor Adair described, where it is physiologically impossible to react—and struck my unprotected throwing hand.