Knuckler

by Tim Wakefield

  Having had the opportunity to catch their breath, the Red Sox came out to win four straight and five of their next six games, a winning streak for which Wakefield was largely responsible but for which he received almost no credit. His individual statistics suffered. The team benefited.

  That was just one of many such instances in which Wakefield made similar sacrifices.

  Since statisticians in baseball officially began counting pitches in 1988, Wakefield and his knuckleball have produced the two highest single-game pitch totals in any major league game. On April 27, 1993, as a member of the Pirates, Wakefield threw an astonishing 172 pitches in 10 innings of a 6–2 win over the Atlanta Braves; on June 5, 1997, he threw 169 pitches in 8⅔ innings of a 2–1 win for the Red Sox over the Milwaukee Brewers. Wakefield remained the only pitcher to appear twice among those named in the top ten pitch counts since 1988—again, he owned numbers one and two—and the ninth performance on the list belonged to longtime knuckleballer Charlie Hough, who threw 163 pitches in 11 innings of a 1–0 win for the Texas Rangers over the Seattle Mariners on June 29, 1988.

  And then there was this: during Wakefield's career in the major leagues, he had made 37 regular-season or postseason starts on short rest (three days or fewer)—more than any other pitcher in baseball. During that same period of time, no other Red Sox pitcher had started more than six games on short rest, all while Sox aces Clemens, Martinez, Schilling, and Beckett combined for three such starts (all by Clemens). That statistic offers great evidence for those who believe that Wakefield often was made into a sacrificial lamb, particularly during an age when pitchers were treated more and more like delicate crystal than strong, young, full-blooded American farm boys.

  In the modern baseball era, much to the chagrin of veteran pitchers who played prior to, say, 1985, major league pitchers generally are regarded as valuable assets and treated accordingly. Where teams once operated with four-man pitching rotations to negotiate the season—a starter would work every fourth day with three days of rest in between—the schedule has now been adjusted to incorporate a fifth starter, providing every pitcher with an extra day of rest. With costs escalating rapidly, especially for pitching—in 2009 the going rate for pitching was somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 million per win—teams have begun to protect their arms and, more specifically, their investments. By reducing the number of starts per pitcher per season from 40 or 41 to 32 or 33, teams can get more out of their pitchers over the long run—or so they believe. (This point is still contested by some.) The end result has been a culture in which pitchers are handled with great care. The resulting reduction in the number of starts per season and the number of pitches per start has created a rather peculiar business model in which pitchers are asked to do less while being paid more.

  Unless, of course, you happen to be a knuckleballer. Faced with a knuckler, teams generally throw caution to the wind and operate as if from another era.

  If this suggests a certain willingness among conventional baseball decision-makers to abuse knuckleballers in some form—and it does—then it also suggests a willingness on the part of the pitchers to do whatever is necessary to contribute, to endure, to succeed. As hypnotizing as the knuckleball can be to hitters, the pitch fosters humility in those who have dared to befriend it. As surely as Wakefield survived the ups and downs of a relationship with the pitch, the same has been true of Hough, Phil Niekro, and fellow knuckleballers like Wilbur Wood and Hoyt Wilhelm, among others. To a man, knuckleballers have never wanted anything more than to be treated like any other player, which has almost universally resulted in a willingness to sacrifice themselves for the greater good.

  "He's not really any different than any other pitcher in the major leagues," said Wakefield's father, Steve, who taught his son the pitch. "He's going to have his good days and he's going to have his bad days."

  Countered Phil Niekro, who is in the Hall of Fame: "Most knuckleball pitchers, if you go back and look—and Tim's very good at this—they can start for you, they can be a long man, they can be a middle man, and they can close for you. Tim's done all of that. I don't know if there's another pitcher that's done what he's done for one organization."

  For Tim Wakefield in particular, that willingness helped change the culture in a Red Sox organization that had long since gone astray.

  And along the way it made him one of the most unique and extraordinary success stories in team history. If his ability to harness the knuckler made him, in some ways, like any other successful pitcher in the major leagues, his commitment to the pitch made him a most unusual exception.

  Two

  Like some cult religion that barely survives, there has always been at least one but rarely more than five or six devotees throwing the knuckleball in the big leagues.... Not only can't pitchers control it, hitters can't hit it, catchers can't catch it, coaches can't coach it, and most pitchers can't learn it. The perfect pitch.

  —Ron Luciano, American League umpire from 1969 to 1979

  WITH THE KNUCKLEBALL, the debate between perception and reality begins at its core: the grip. In most cases, the pitch has little to do with the knuckles at all. Far more often than not, baseball's most complex pitch is thrown from the fingertips, positioned between the thumb, index, and middle fingers as if it were a credit card being held up for display. The knuckles are what people see, but they are, like many things associated with the pitch, an illusion.

  Just the same, the term knuckleball has become an accepted part of the American lexicon, synonymous with almost anything that lacks spin and moves in an unpredictable, unsettling fashion. In football, for example, a punt or kick returner might speak of handling a knuckleball kicked by a cleated punter or kicker; the poorest free-throw shooters in the National Basketball Association are usually those who put decidedly little backspin on the ball and shoot, as their coaches will tell you, knuckleballs. In soccer, a goaltender might face the unenviable task of saving a ball redirected with just the right amount of touch that the ball stops spinning altogether, knuckling its way toward the goal.

  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 uns
teadily 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 la
teral 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."