by Tyler Kepner
Summers said the pitch was not a knuckleball, and he was right, in the literal sense. But the pitch he threw is the one that would carry that name through the ages. In 1908, Sporting Life used the term “finger nail curve” to describe a pitch by Ralph Savidge of the Reds. The ball made no revolutions and moved erratically, but actually, Savidge would say, he did not really use his nails to throw it.
“I never know what’s going to happen after the ball leaves my hand,” he told the same publication in 1909. “Sometimes it breaks upward and sometimes it drops and it is just as liable to break to either the right or left.”
Savidge would make just five appearances in the majors, and while the knuckleball appeared sporadically—a Phillies pitcher, Tom Seaton, won 27 games with it in 1913—it faced the first of many death scares with the banishment of Cicotte after the 1920 season. Fortunately for the knuckleball’s survival, something else was banned after that season: the spitball.
When Eddie Rommel reached the majors with the A’s in 1920, he brought a knuckler taught to him by a semipro first baseman, Cutter Drury, who had suggested it as a spitball alternative. In time, Rommel noticed that the softer he threw it, the more it would move. He led the majors in victories in 1922, with 27, and even flummoxed the Browns’ George Sisler, who hit .420 that season.
“If it made a one-way hop, the batter would be able to set himself and familiarize himself with the break,” Sisler said, as quoted by Rob Neyer. “But that’s just where Rommel’s success comes in. It goes down one time and the next will take an upward break. I believe I hit more infield flies against Rommel than any other pitcher in the league.”
Rommel went 171–119 in all, but his ending was proof that even knuckleballers have physical limits, and arms that can be destroyed by abuse. As Neyer described, Sunday baseball was illegal in Philadelphia in 1932. So that July 10, in the middle of a 10-game home stand, the A’s made a one-day trip to Cleveland. Times were good for the A’s, who had won the last three AL pennants, but owner-manager Connie Mack still tried to save on train fare by bringing along only two pitchers. Lew Krausse worked the first inning, and Rommel—who had also worked the prior two days—pitched the next seventeen. He gave up 14 runs, a major-league-record 29 hits, and never won another game. Finished at 35, he would fashion a second act as an umpire for 24 years.
With Rommel’s success, a pattern was setting in—one prominent knuckleballer gives way to another, with a few more flitting on and off the scene. Jesse Haines and Freddie Fitzsimmons overlapped Rommel, with better careers, but they threw the pitch off the knuckles, not the fingertips, and Haines (a Hall of Famer) sometimes used it just a dozen times a game. The 1945 Washington Senators had four knuckleballers in their rotation and nearly snagged a pennant, but just one—Dutch Leonard—had a winning career record. The others had little success outside the war years.
Gene Bearden, a 22-year-old minor leaguer who had already bounced through three organizations, found himself aboard the USS Helena in the South Pacific in July 1943. Bearden was in the engine room when a Japanese destroyer struck his ship with a torpedo. As Bearden climbed a ladder to escape, another torpedo strike sent him crashing to the floor, unconscious, with a mangled knee and a severe gash to his head.
“Somebody pulled me out,” Bearden would tell the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “They told me later it was an officer. I don’t know how he did it. The ship went down in about 17 minutes. All I know is that I came to in the water some time later.”
About 200 men died in the attack, but Bearden was rescued by an American destroyer after two days on a raft. At a Navy hospital in Florida, he had an aluminum plate inserted in his head and an aluminum cap and screw in his crushed kneecap. He took seven months to walk again and spent all of 1944 in the hospital.
Doctors told him to forget baseball, but Bearden returned anyway. He could not raise his right leg very high off the ground, and could not use a full windup. But he had no limp, and he won—15 games for the Yankees at Class A in 1945, then 15 more the next season in the Pacific Coast League for Casey Stengel.
Stengel had managed Leonard with the Dodgers, and noticed Bearden working on a self-taught knuckleball in spring training. He encouraged Bearden to use it, and a catcher, Bill Raimondi, called it often and handled it well. Traded to Cleveland before the 1947 season, Bearden was a rookie sensation in 1948, going 20–7 and clinching the pennant in a playoff at Fenway Park.
Most pitchers feared throwing inside at Fenway, where Red Sox hitters could pull pitches for homers down the short foul lines. Yet Bearden, with the moxie that runs so strong in the knuckleball family, worked inside anyway, surprising the Red Sox and going the distance in a five-hitter. A week later—after shutting out the Braves in Game 3 of the World Series—Bearden was back on a different mound in Boston, closing out the Indians’ last championship in Game 6.
Bearden headed for Hollywood and appeared in two movies—And Baby Makes Three and The Monty Stratton Story—but his stardom quickly faded. He pinched a sciatic nerve in his leg the next spring, and his control, shaky in the best of times, deserted him. Batters hunted fastballs, and as Ed McAuley wrote in the Cleveland News, “Gene’s fastball never was more than an invitation to an extra-base hit.” After stints with four more teams, Bearden was out of the game just five years after his World Series triumph.
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Only two pitchers have gotten to the Hall of Fame with fingertip knuckleballs—not counting Wade Boggs, a third baseman who knuckled through a scoreless inning for the Yankees in 1997 and reprised the act for Tampa Bay two years later, just before retiring.
Cooperstown’s first true fingertip knuckleballer was Hoyt Wilhelm, who made his major league debut the year he turned 30 and pitched until the month he turned 50. Voters needed eight ballots before electing Wilhelm in 1985. The next inductee was Phil Niekro, who earned a staggering 208 victories after turning 35. He made it on his fifth try, in 1997.
For both men, persistence was everything.
“My first year in professional baseball, in 1959, I was pitching in Kearney, Nebraska, and I remember meeting Phil Niekro,” Bouton once told me. “I was sitting in the bleachers before a game and I see this skinny, crew-cut kid in the outfield, and he’s throwing the knuckleball. I could see, even from a distance, that ball was moving. So I walked over and introduced myself and told him I throw a knuckleball, too. I said, ‘What do you throw besides the knuckleball?’ And he said, ‘Nothing, just the knuckleball.’
“We had a nice chat and I thought to myself, ‘Phil Niekro, that poor son of a bitch. He’s never gonna make it because he’s only got one pitch—and I, Jim Bouton, I’m on my way to the big leagues because I have all these pitches.’ And then when I was in the big leagues, after my 20-win season, I remembered him and thought, ‘Oh that poor kid, he’s still in the minor leagues and I don’t know how he hangs on because I’m on my way to the Hall of Fame.’ Well, guess what? That poor kid, limited to one pitch—he’s in the Hall of Fame now. It’s a good reminder for me of the tortoise and the hare.”
Niekro would make 716 career starts, fifth on the career list, yet 102 of his first 103 appearances came from the bullpen. In the 1950s and most of the ’60s, that was usually where knuckleballers went—and Wilhelm was the model.
In Wilhelm’s teen years in North Carolina, Leonard was rising to stardom in Washington. Wilhelm, who did not throw hard, noticed a photograph of Leonard’s knuckleball grip in the Charlotte newspaper. He practiced with a tennis ball and found that the feel came naturally.
That experience convinced Wilhelm that the knuckleball could not be taught. Though he would spend many post-playing years as a coach, he believed that if you did not throw the pitch as a kid, you could never pick it up as a man. Though countless examples contradict this, Wilhelm was firm: you either have it or you don’t.
“Nobody has ever asked me to teach t
hem, but even if they did, I wouldn’t,” Wilhelm told The Atlanta Journal in 1973. “It’s an unorthodox pitch. You have to have a knack to throw it to start with.”
Wilhelm favored a fastball/slider/changeup mix for young pitchers, but if he happened to see his old pitch, he loved it. Coaching the Yankees’ rookie leaguers in 1991, he insisted that a promising lefty from Texas keep throwing his knuckler, even though the other instructors wanted him to stop.
“He was just a crusty old dude,” Andy Pettitte would say, many years later. “I loved him to death. I’d come back and say, ‘Hoyt, dad-gum it, why did I do this?’ or, ‘Why didn’t I do that?’ And he’d say, ‘Pettitte, just keep turning ’em to the right,’ meaning when they get to first base, turn them to the right, back to their dugout. That’s all he would say: ‘Pettitte, just keep turning ’em to the right.’ ”
The other coaches persuaded Pettitte to scrap his knuckleball, but late in his career he would joke that he just might revive it as a last resort. He stayed strong to the end and never did, and besides, Pettitte said, the pitch would have gone stale by then. The knuckleball needs constant nurturing, as his old coach believed and proved.
Wilhelm was the first pitcher to appear in 1,000 games. He twice led his league in earned run average and no-hit the Yankees for Baltimore in 1958—incredibly, through 2017, it remained the last complete game no-hitter against them. Ted Williams ranked Wilhelm with Bob Feller, Bob Lemon, Eddie Lopat, and Whitey Ford among the five toughest pitchers he faced.
“Wilhelm had a sure-strike knuckler, then a real good knuckler, then with two strikes, a real bastard of a knuckler, dancing in your face,” Williams wrote in his autobiography. “The closest thing to an unhittable ball I ever saw.”
You might think teams would hold on to a pitcher with that kind of weapon, especially in the era before free agency. By any measure, Wilhelm was an elite and versatile performer, and his pitch made him almost ageless. Yet teams never seemed to trust him very long. Over 21 years, Wilhelm spent time with nine teams—not counting the Royals, who took him in the expansion draft and traded him—but never stayed more than six years in one place.
Even if he chafed at teaching his signature pitch, Wilhelm helped its spread by encouraging Wilbur Wood, a journeyman left-hander who had bounced between the minors and majors for seven seasons before joining the White Sox in 1967. As a boy, Wood had learned to throw a pitch off the fingertips that imparted no rotation. His father taught it to him and called it a palmball, which typically means changeup. Wood did not think much about terminology; he just liked having a pitch to stifle the big kids on the sandlots of Boston.
Wood reached the majors at 19 but struggled to stick. His fastball, he says, in a thick and endearing accent, was “a few yahds too short,” so batters could wait for his curveball and crush it. With Chicago, Wood decided to revive his father’s pitch, and Wilhelm, his new teammate, eagerly approved.
“That’s when I just said, ‘What the hell, I gotta make a change,’ and that’s when I made the change, really, to go 100 percent with the knuckleball,” Wood says. “His biggest thing was: ‘If you’re going to do it, you’ve got to stay with it and you’ve got to throw it. It’s great to throw a curveball, fastball, slider, whatever else it may be, but you’re either gonna make or break with the knuckleball.’ Hearing those words, it’s a pretty easy decision, isn’t it?”
For the next several years—until a line drive shattered his kneecap—Wood was a sensation. He led the league in appearances three years in a row. Then he became a starter and ripped off four straight seasons with at least 20 victories and 300 innings pitched. Just two others—Fergie Jenkins and Robin Roberts—had done that since the 1930s, and no one has done it since. Across a five-year period, Wood made 199 of 224 starts on fewer than four days’ rest. His 1972 workload (376⅔ innings) is the most by any pitcher since 1919. Staggering facts, all, and only one part of Wood’s legend is typically overstated: he did start both games of a doubleheader, in 1973, but it was a disaster. He got 13 outs, gave up 13 runs, and lost twice.
In any case, Wilhelm had proven in his own career that trusting the knuckleball meant everything. In 1969, when he saved the NL West division clincher for the Braves, Wilhelm was 47 and his catcher, Bob Didier, was 20. Facing a dangerous hitter, Alex Johnson, Wilhelm fell behind, 3–0, and Didier twice flashed the fastball sign. Both times, Wilhelm shook him off. Didier trotted to the mound.
“Wilhelm says, ‘What the fuck are you doing? The only thing you know about pitching is it’s hard to hit! Get your ass behind the plate right now!’ ” Didier recalls. “So I turned around, 3–0 knuckleball, 3–1 knuckleball, 3–2 ground ball to short, we’re Western Division champions. After the game [sportswriter] Furman Bisher came up to me and said, ‘Bob, you really showed me something the way you settled Wilhelm down in that big situation.’ Yeah, I really settled him down all right; he was chewing my ass out!”
The winner that day was Niekro, completing his first 20-win season. He was 30 by then, but the skinny, one-pitch kid who had earned Jim Bouton’s pity was well on his way. He had never doubted his knuckleball because he had never thrown anything else. It was his father, Phil Sr., who used the pitch in desperation.
Phil Niekro Sr. worked in the coal mines and pitched as a teenager; somewhere, Phil says, he has news clippings of his father striking out 17 or 18 in a game with his fastball. One cold spring day, Phil Sr. was called in to pitch without having warmed up. He blew out his arm and turned to the knuckleball, taught to him by an old minor league catcher named Nick McKay. Phil Sr. passed the pitch on to his daughter, Phyllis, and then to his son, Phil; Phyllis, her brother would say later, handled his knuckler better than some major league catchers.
Joe Niekro, younger than Phil by five years, struggled to learn it as quickly; his hands were too small. Joe had enough other pitches to fashion a decent major league career, then found stardom for the Astros when he came home to the knuckler in his mid-30s. But Phil never strayed.
“Me and my buddy John Havlicek”—the NBA Hall of Famer—“would get the bat and choose sides and that’s when I would throw it, to get all the girls and boys out in that little town of Lansing, Ohio,” Phil Niekro recalls. “So I was throwing it all the time. I didn’t know there were knuckleball pitchers in the big leagues. I didn’t even know what a knuckleball was. It was just something I had fun with, playing catch with my dad.”
Phil used the knuckler to make the Bridgeport High School varsity team as a freshman, and he signed with the Milwaukee Braves at age 19. He would spend two decades perfecting the pitch for the franchise, from 1964 through 1983. By the time he finished, with a one-game cameo for the Braves in 1987, he had thrown 5,404 innings; only Cy Young, Pud Galvin, and Walter Johnson threw more. Niekro never apologized for his pitch.
“He has as much confidence in the knuckleball’s effectiveness as Aroldis Chapman does throwing 106,” R. A. Dickey says. “It blows you away, the mentality he must have possessed as a competitor.”
For his 300th victory, as a Yankee on the final day of the regular season in 1985, Phil tried something new. He waited until the final out to throw a knuckleball.
He had failed in four attempts at 300. On the fourth try, on September 30 in New York, he carried in his back pocket a note from Phil Sr. that said: “Win—I’ll Be Happy.” Phil Sr. wrote it because he could not talk; Phil and Joe, by then a Yankee teammate, had visited him in the hospital the day before, in Wheeling, West Virginia. Phil Sr. was on a breathing tube, his health failing.
Phil’s last chance came on October 6 in Toronto. His hard stuff, such as it was, seemed strong in the bullpen, and he figured that fastballs might confuse the tired Blue Jays, who had won their first division title the day before. Knucklers had not worked lately, anyway, and Niekro liked the idea of proving he could win without them. It worked in the first inning, and he kept on going through eight.
> Joe came out to warm up Phil before the ninth. With two outs, a runner on second, and Phil’s old Braves teammate, Jeff Burroughs, coming to bat, manager Billy Martin sent Joe to the mound for a conference. The brothers agreed that Phil should throw a knuckler, at last, for their dad. George Steinbrenner had arranged for the Yankees’ TV feed to be played through the phone to the hospital, so their mother, Henrietta, could give play-by-play to Phil Sr. The final knuckleball dipped down and away, and Burroughs swung over it to end the game. The brothers took the ball to the hospital the next day.
“He had a smile on his face,” Phil says. “I walked up and gave him that ball and said, ‘This is yours as much as mine,’ and put my Yankee hat on him. The doc came in and said, ‘He’s been up all night waiting for you guys to get here.’ So we stayed the next few days, and in a couple of weeks he was home. I got to pitch another couple of years, Joe got traded to Minnesota and got to the World Series, and I think that’s what he wanted to see in his lifetime: both his boys, one got to the World Series, the other won 300 games and then 18 more. Because he was struggling for about two years there, and then after Joe and I both retired, he passed. But that’s why he was hanging on.”
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When knuckleballers meet, they bond instantly. They are all Jedi knights, possessors of a shadowy power few can understand or believe. The old recognize it in the young.
“I grew up a Dodger fan in Northern California,” Tom Candiotti says. “I can’t remember the exact year, but my older brother takes me to a Giants game, and the Dodgers are coming out before BP, stretching. Charlie Hough comes out to left field and I’m down the line there at Candlestick with my glove. And he goes, ‘Here!’—and he throws me a knuckleball. So I throw one back to him like that, and he goes, ‘Hey, kid, that’s not bad!’ He throws me another one, I throw it back. So we played catch for about five minutes with me in the stands, just throwing a knuckleball, and I go, ‘That was cool, I played catch with that number 49 guy out there!’ ”