by Tyler Kepner
Mussina rolls his eyes at all this. He practically spits out the term: “Spin rate. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” What he means is that spin rate for a curveball matters only as much as the radar gun reading for a fastball. It doesn’t mean the pitch is any good; not even close, actually. A great pitch that cannot be commanded is not, in fact, a great pitch. As hitters say about a bad curveball: “You hang it, we bang it.”
Yet as the curveball’s essential raw ingredient, spin rate is important to know. Organizations use those figures to tell them, empirically, which of their prospects might have a major league pitch. A nondescript pitcher with a high spin rate now gets chances once reserved only for those with a mid-90s fastball: Hey, there just might be something here.
Collin McHugh had made it through high school, college, and four years of pro ball without ever hearing of spin rate. A former eighteenth-round draft choice, he was 24 years old and pitching in the Arizona Fall League in 2011 when a coach circulated a thick packet of detailed statistics. McHugh found his name near the top of the list for rpm on his curveball.
“It was right up there with Verlander and Kershaw and Felix, some of these guys with really good curveballs,” McHugh says. “To see myself in that echelon with any one thing that I did, it gave me confidence. It gave me at least some kind of reference to say, ‘I’m not just some other Double-A guy somewhere. There’s something that I do exceptionally well, and I want to try to capitalize on it.’ ”
The next year McHugh was in the majors. He bounced from the Mets to the Rockies, and while his statistics were bad, the fast-spinning curveball still made him a prospect. The Astros signed him off waivers, and in 2015 he went 19–7 to help them reach the playoffs.
The Mets lost McHugh, but they held on to Seth Lugo, a thirty-fourth-round draft pick with a curve he had first honed, as a boy, with the tennis-ball-can drill. Lugo’s first minor league manager, Frank Fultz, took one look at the pitch and told him it would someday lift him to the majors. Five years later, with injuries ravaging the Mets’ rotation, Lugo earned a promotion and sparkled down the stretch. His curveball had the best spin rate in the league.
That August 30, in the sixth inning of a win over Miami, Lugo let loose a curve at 3,498 rpm, the highest recorded in the first two years of Statcast. Lugo was ahead in the count to Xavier Scruggs, 1–2, and wanted the pitch below the zone. Scruggs, who swung over the ball as it plunged hard and late, knew right away he had seen something extraordinary.
“Guys will swing and miss all the time, but you know when it’s a different swing and miss,” Scruggs says. “That ball didn’t go anywhere near where I thought it was going.”
Eleven days later, the Dodgers’ Rich Hill toyed with the Marlins for seven perfect innings. Hill threw curveballs with 57 percent of his pitches, the crowning example of the freedom he felt the year before, when the Red Sox signed him from the independent Long Island Ducks. Working with Bannister, Hill learned different ways to shape his curveball, and trusted Bannister’s advice to throw it much more often than any other pitcher in the game. Hill pitched well for Boston, then signed a 2016 contract with Oakland for $6 million.
Traded to the Dodgers, Hill sliced curveballs through the National League, ending with six shutout innings against the Cubs in the playoffs. That December, the Dodgers brought him back with a three-year, $48 million contract—a jackpot, at last, after 15 pro seasons, a deal that would soon lead Hill to the World Series. He wept at the news conference announcing it.
“I think that’s life, right?” Hill said, reflecting on the rocky path brought to riches by perseverance and a killer curve. “You’re going to be thrown a lot of different curveballs.”
THE KNUCKLEBALL
Grabbing the Wing of a Butterfly
The old knuckleballer grips his favorite pitch with three fingernails. Most pitchers use two, but for him that makes the pitch wobbly, impossible to control. Jim Bouton uses his ring finger, too. This is the grip he displayed for the nation four decades ago on the set of The Tonight Show, and the grip he showed me in his backyard a couple of years ago, high up in the Berkshires near Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
Bouton was 78 then, yet he was still throwing a couple of times a week. He built a cinder-block backstop in a sunlit corner of the yard, and hit the strike zone most of the time. His hat did not fall off anymore, as it did for the Yankees, back when he threw hard and beat St. Louis twice in the 1964 World Series. We played catch for 15 minutes, and his knuckler hit my glove every time. Mine hit his, too; the three-finger grip was the closest I’d ever come to controlling this most peculiar pitch.
If we were really on our games, though, we’d have let loose a few wild pitches. The best knuckleballs often zig and zag away from the mitt, sending their catchers scrambling. But if Bouton’s knuckler can’t quite dance like it did for the Seattle Pilots, it remains his pitch—slower now, but authentically his.
It was good for Jim to have company, said his wife, Paula Kurman, who has a doctorate in interpersonal communications from Columbia. They have been married since 1982 and have lived in the Berkshires for more than 20 years, among the foxes and black bears, surrounded by pine trees. A cloud might roll by, straight through the screened-in porch, and there are no other homes in sight. Their children are grown and live elsewhere.
Bouton had a stroke on August 15, 2012. They know the date because it was the fifteenth anniversary of the death of Bouton’s daughter, Laurie, in a car accident. Bouton’s body was largely unaffected. But his mind, the one whose pointed and poignant observations produced the classic Ball Four in 1970, will never be the same. He has a brain disease: cerebral amyloid angiopathy, a form of dementia. He struggles with numerical concepts. Processing questions can be frustrating. Writing is too complicated to organize and enjoy. Life is filled with unforeseen gaps in understanding.
“Sometimes we’ll have conversations and it’s like it’s 10 years ago,” Kurman said. “Things are flowing along. And then you step in this pothole and you didn’t know it was there.”
He still remembers a lot of old baseball stories, many in precise detail from years of retelling. He is gentle and funny and kind, as ever. And when I mention that I always keep my baseball glove in the trunk of my car, he eagerly scurries to find his own: a brown, well-worn Louisville Slugger marked with his old number, 56, in thick black pen. Let’s play catch.
There are no potholes in the yard, only green grass and pine trees and sunshine. It remains for Jim Bouton as he once wrote: he can still grip a baseball, and baseball still grips him. The knuckleball endures.
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Baseball people like to say that your worst day at the ballpark is better than your best day at the office. It reminds them that the baseball life is really not too bad. Yes, it’s stressful, with relentless travel and meager pay in the minors. But somebody wins every day, you’re outdoors a lot, and deep down you recognize that, of all the industries out there, you’re lucky to work in the baseball one.
Maybe for that reason, I’ve found that most people in baseball tend to be…pretty nice. And of all the subsets of folks in the game, knuckleball pitchers might be the nicest. They are also part of the smallest group, which helps explain it. Almost all knuckleballers were rejected by the game before they could last very long. They earned their living by grabbing the wing of a butterfly and then, somehow, steering it close enough to the strike zone, again and again, to baffle the best hitters in the world.
“Most of our careers were headed in a different direction, and out of desperation, we all found the knuckleball,” says Tim Wakefield, who won 200 games with it. “So I think the knuckleball itself has humbled most of us to a point where we’re grateful that we still have a job and we’re still able to compete.”
“Compete” is the word Charlie Hough uses to explain his reason for throwing it. Hough was a decent pi
tcher in Class A for the Dodgers, but after six months in the Army reserves, his shoulder hurt when he tried to pitch again. With average stuff to begin with, Hough guessed that his future would be working at the Hialeah Race Track, two blocks from his home in Florida.
Then a scout named Goldie Holt showed him how to throw a knuckleball. Hough gave it a try.
“If you want to compete, you compete,” he says. “You find something.”
That something, for Hough and just a few dozen others in baseball’s long history, is a pitch as quirky as its name. Pitchers once threw it with their knuckles actually pressed against the ball, and the knuckles are still prominent in the visual presentation. But the pitch is really thrown with the fingertips—“positioned between the thumb, index and middle fingers,” as Wakefield wrote in his book with Tony Massarotti, “as if it were a credit card being held up for display.”
The whole concept of the knuckleball is to be fundamentally different from every other pitch. With almost everything else, pitchers want to increase spin for greater velocity or a more deceptive break. They manipulate the ball to serve their will, to send it to a specific spot. If executed properly, the pitch will obey.
Because knuckleballers want no spin at all, they don’t engage the same muscles as conventional pitchers. If a robot could pitch, it would throw like a knuckleballer, like one mechanical piece instead of a flexible acrobat stressing multiple leverage points to impart spin. The physical dangers of repeated throws at maximum effort do not apply for these craftsmen. Theirs is the safest pitch of all, but the trade-off is severe: it is also the hardest to master, and to trust.
Simply put, the trick is to use the seams to deflect the air and move the ball erratically, like an airplane flying into turbulence. A University of Iowa study, cited by the author Martin Quigley, described the aerodynamics like this: “When the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand, it runs head on into a ‘wall’ of air. This air pushes at the front of the ball and pulls at the back. The air also tends to ‘pile up’ on the seams and rough surfaces. The forces holding the ball back build up so fast that the ball slows down suddenly and drops unusually fast…usually a short distance in front of the plate, and causes the batter to swing ‘where it was, not where it is.’ ”
This results from what is known, in science, as the Bernoulli Effect, which states that the pressure within a flowing fluid (including a gas, such as air) is less than the pressure surrounding it. An object that is not spinning—or just barely spinning—will move toward an area of less pressure. As Robert K. Adair, PhD, wrote in The Physics of Baseball, the seams on a ball create chaos: “If the ball is thrown with very little rotation, asymmetric stitch configurations can be generated that lead to large imbalances of forces and extraordinary excursions in trajectory.”
Then we have the unofficial explanation, from the batter’s box, by the longtime outfielder Bobby Murcer. Trying to hit Phil Niekro, Murcer memorably said, was “like trying to eat Jell-O with chopsticks.”
A good knuckleball will leave you laughing and stupefied, like a comedian who also does magic tricks; Satchel Paige called his the “bat-dodger.” The pitch has a deep and rich history in the game, yet remains so uncommon that it is often an object of ridicule.
Sometimes the teasing is playful: in Wakefield’s heyday with the Boston Red Sox, catcher Mike Macfarlane would cry “Freak show!” in the clubhouse before games. Sometimes, it is not so much teasing as a deep dislike, for practical reasons. Joe McCarthy, the Hall of Fame Yankees manager, groused that when a knuckleball breaks, the catcher misses it, and when it doesn’t, the batter crushes it. He had little use for pitchers who did not throw hard.
“Any time you’ve got a soft ball pitcher,” McCarthy would say, “then you’ve got a .500 pitcher.”
Hough was .500 personified, with a career record of 216–216. Nobody else with that many victories has precisely the same number of losses. Then again, nobody else has made 400 appearances as both a starter and reliever, and few others have spent a quarter century on major league mounds.
Hough is a very nice guy, too. Bobby Valentine, who was teammates with Hough in Los Angeles, managed him in Texas, and hired him as a coach in New York, called him one of the best baseball men in the world. But Hough was not simply happy to be there. Nice does not mean pushover. Floating knuckleballs for a living takes a special kind of athletic bravery.
“I think you need a huge ego,” Hough says. “You need to believe that you’re the best pitcher in the world when you’re in there. When they put down ‘1’ for Nolan Ryan, he threw it 100 miles an hour. When they put down ‘1’ for me, I threw what I felt like was a pitch they couldn’t hit.”
Adrenaline is the enemy. If you overthrow a knuckleball, it spins—and if it spins, you’re in trouble. Trusting it defies logic, but doing so is essential. The pitchers who throw it do not frustrate easily. They need to stay calm so their pitch will behave. Low-key, happy-go-lucky people—with the guts to bring Silly String to a battlefield—just might have a chance.
The knuckleball is, at once, the most frustrating and fascinating pitch in baseball. It is also relatable, much more than any other pitch, to the fan in the stands. No one sees a turbocharged fastball or jackknife curve and thinks: “Yep, I could do that.” Yet anyone can look at a dancing knuckleball and say, “You know what? Maybe.”
Bouton’s knuckleball was like a character of its own in Ball Four, his famous diary of the 1969 season. Like Bouton, the pitch was a nonconformist struggling for respect in the game. It had intrigued Bouton as a boy, when he rooted for Hoyt Wilhelm and the New York Giants. He learned the grip from a cereal box that told the story of a knuckleballer named Dutch Leonard.
“It was like a magic thing,” Bouton told me, several years ago. “You didn’t need to be big. You didn’t need to be strong. The idea was to throw a ball with perfection, really. And once you’ve thrown a successful knuckleball, you become entranced by it. If you’ve hit somebody in the chest with a knuckleball, you’ll never forget it.”
When something leaves us awestruck, we usually can’t do it or wouldn’t want to try—a mural on a church ceiling, a rousing guitar solo at a concert, a chainsaw-juggling act at a circus. Yet a fluttering knuckleball at a ballgame seems to be within our grasp. That is part of its appeal, and a reason it stands out as one of the more colorful patches on the baseball quilt.
But the premise that anyone can become a knuckleballer? Well…it’s dead wrong. There are many reasons the pitch always flirts with extinction, but the most fundamental is this: it’s really, really hard to throw. Fastball pitchers are born; knuckleballer pitchers are painstakingly self-made.
“People watch us throw and they say, ‘Oh that’s easy,’ ” Wakefield says. “Throwing it 65 or 70 miles an hour, anybody could do that. But in reality, it’s really hard. And to be able to throw it for strikes consistently, that’s the big thing. I mean, every middle infielder had a good knuckleball—but can they get on the mound and throw it to a hitter with a game on the line?”
Indeed, plenty of position players fool around with knuckleballs while playing catch—Mickey Mantle and Cal Ripken Jr. were well known for it, and R. A. Dickey, who won the 2012 National League Cy Young Award, says a different teammate would find him every year to show off his version.
But pitching from the slope of a mound makes it harder to keep the palm behind the ball, and changes everything. And even if a pitcher has the patience and the temperament for it, the knuckleball still requires the same kind of extraordinary athleticism as any other pitch—that is, the ability to repeat sound mechanics. This delivery is just engineered differently, for a much different kind of result.
“From your shoulder down you’re all stiffed up, everything’s locked in, there’s no flip of your wrist,” says Phil Niekro, the greatest knuckler of all. “In baseball—curveball, slider—it’s all what you do with your wrist and the movement
of the ball, the spin of the ball. Here, you want to throw something that’s not gonna do anything at all, and you figure: ‘What the hell, it’s not doing nothing, but it’ll do more than any other pitch you throw up there.’ ”
By doing nothing, the pitch with no spin can do anything.
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Could it be that the first pitcher famous for the knuckleball, the last-chance weapon of the friendly warrior, was a notorious scoundrel? History knows Eddie Cicotte best as one of the eight Chicago White Sox banned for life for conspiring with gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series. Cicotte sent the signal by hitting the Cincinnati leadoff man in the back in the opener.
By then, Cicotte was well known as a master of the knuckleball, which he threw about 75 percent of the time. His nickname, after all, was Knuckles, and he threw the pitch—at first—by resting his knuckles on top of the ball. Cicotte had played with Nap Rucker (another early knuckleballer) in the minors in 1905, but would cite a 1906 minor league teammate, Ed Summers, with developing the pitch in its modern form.
Lew Moren, who pitched a few years for the Pirates and Phillies, would unveil his knuckler in the National League at roughly the same time as Cicotte and Summers in the American League. The knuckleball showed up in their 1908 stats: Cicotte led the league in wild pitches, Summers in hit batters. That July, Summers explained the difference in their grips to Baseball Magazine:
“I watched Eddie Cicotte, who first used it, and followed him. He rested the ball on his knuckles, but I couldn’t see the value of that, because I couldn’t control it, and one can put but little speed on it….I found by holding the ball with my finger tips and steadying it with my thumb alone, I could get a peculiar break to it and send it to the batters with considerable speed and good control.”