K

by Tyler Kepner

  Candiotti would grow up to wear 49, too, like Hough and Wakefield, a tribute to the retirement age of the great Wilhelm. His was a typically wild backstory—an undrafted college pitcher with a nothing fastball, Candiotti tagged along on a summer trip with a buddy who was trying out for the independent Victoria (British Columbia) Mussels. Candiotti brought his fishing pole, not his baseball glove, but a scout recognized him, told him to hop on a mound, and signed him for $400 Canadian a month. The money did not go far. “I’m probably still wanted for dining and dashing up there,” Candiotti says.

  The Royals soon signed Candiotti, lost him in the minor league draft, and before long, without ever having pitched in major league spring training, Candiotti was on a big league mound for the Brewers. He told his catcher, Ted Simmons, that he threw an occasional knuckler, and tried one as a goof for his last warm-up pitch. Simmons startled Candiotti by calling it for his very first pitch in the majors. It sailed for ball one of a four-pitch walk.

  The knuckleball was Candiotti’s destiny, but he didn’t see it. The Brewers implored him to work on his knuckleball, but Candiotti resisted. The knuckleball was just for fun, a gimmick he had learned from his dad, and he was proud of his fastball and curve, even if they screamed Triple-A. Then he signed with Cleveland as a minor league free agent and a new teammate, soon to be 47, changed everything.

  Phil Niekro, back for more after that 300th win, played catch with Candiotti every day, comparing knuckleballs. Candiotti threw his as hard as he could, imagining a dastardly knuckler that would fool the hitter and the catcher and peg the umpire in the chest. Niekro told him to settle down, throw it softer, in the zone. You want them to hit it, he said.

  Oh, and one more thing: you shouldn’t throw anything else.

  “I said I still had a curveball!” Candiotti says. “He goes, ‘Trust me, this is what’s gonna keep you in the big leagues for a long time. Keep working on it and developing it.’ He was my own pitching coach. He’d sit next to me on the bench when I started. The other pitching coaches, they don’t know what to say to you.”

  Coaches can try. The good ones will study a knuckleballer’s mechanics and learn the proper checkpoints in his delivery. But unless you have thrown it, knuckleballers say, you just cannot relate. They tell each other to be their own coach, to know their pitch intimately. That is why they enjoy talking about it—with each other, with conventional pitchers, with writers. They have to immerse themselves in the culture of the knuckleball to even have a chance. R. A. Dickey would take a ball around with him in his car, steering with his left hand, practicing grips with his right.

  Rare is the knuckleballer who has not talked shop with the others in their small fraternity. Phil and Joe Niekro helped Wakefield. Hough helped Dickey. Candiotti helped Steven Wright. They all have a piece of each other’s success.

  “I always thought if each organization gave up two of their good athletes that aren’t gonna make it and see if they can make knuckleball pitchers out of them, me and Charlie Hough and Tim Wakefield can open a knuckleball school,” Phil says. “We’ll send these guys to it, evaluate them, work with them for a couple of months and report back to the organization: hey, he has a shot or he doesn’t have a shot.”

  It can be done. When the Brewers decided that a prospect named Steve Sparks had no future as a conventional pitcher, they told him to learn a knuckleball. Sparks had never tried it before, and as his first resource he scoured his childhood baseball cards, purchased with the money from his Tulsa World paper route as a teen. Sparks studied the grips of Hough and the Niekros, learning to minimize drag on the ball by making sure no fingers touched the seams. Before reporting to winter ball in 1992, Sparks met with Candiotti at the Astrodome, where Candiotti’s Dodgers were finishing the season. He peppered him with six pages of questions, and learned to lock his wrist by turning it inward slightly, keeping it from rolling over and imparting spin.

  Sparks would pitch nine seasons in the majors, weathering the American League in the steroid era. He was not Tim Wakefield, but he was a reasonable facsimile. As his career wound down, in 2004, Sparks put the knuckleball brotherhood above another payday.

  “My agent told me the Yankees wanted me to throw to them, to prepare for their playoffs with [Wakefield’s] Red Sox,” Sparks says. “He told me they said, ‘Name your price.’ I’d probably get a nice hotel and $10,000 if I wanted, I didn’t even know. But I just told them I’d rather not. Tim was a friend and it just didn’t feel right.”

  The benefits of having a knuckleballer are clear enough: at worst he can absorb innings in blowouts, save the other relievers, and make a spot start now and then. But opportunities are scarce, and most teams are too timid to try. The Red Sox invested eight seasons in the development of Charlie Zink—a knuckleballer from the baseball powerhouse Savannah College of Arts and Design—but gave him just one big league start, in 2008. Zink allowed eight runs.

  In 2016, the Rays hoped to take advantage of the humidity of their climate-controlled dome by cultivating low-cost knuckleballers. Their pitching coordinator, Charlie Haeger, had thrown the knuckler briefly in the majors, and they gathered a few prospects, including former position players, to try the pitch. In the end, they gave seven September relief outings to Eddie Gamboa.

  “A lot of organizations will shy from it because they don’t have anybody to instruct or they’re not familiar with it,” Haeger says. “It’s that uniqueness that people are maybe a little scared of at times.”

  In 2013, MLB Network hired Wakefield to coach five former college quarterbacks in a reality show called The Next Knuckler. Most of the contestants, Wakefield says, had no feel for the pitch, no chance at all. Josh Booty, who had played briefly in the majors as an infielder, won the contest, signed with the Diamondbacks, and never made it out of spring training.

  “I’ve probably worked with 12 guys,” Dickey says. “I’ve seen one that might have a chance. Might. It takes a complete surrender to doing what is necessary to cultivate the pitch, and a lot of guys don’t have that. Most guys have some entitlement, like: ‘I shouldn’t have to go on the back field at the minor league complex and grind it out against Gulf Coast Leaguers.’ It’s hard, because most guys come to this pitch when they’re older, and they’ve had somewhat of a career as something else. It’s a real struggle, having to start all over again from the ground up.”

  The success stories are the exception. The miracle is that anyone at all can throw the pitch consistently. Most pitchers like it when the wind blows in, to reduce the chances of home runs. Knuckleballers hate it, because more wind behind the pitch can cause it to whoosh away from the catcher or dive into the dirt. Most pitchers, unless they’re scuffing the ball, have no reason to fret about the length of their fingernails. Knuckleballers depend on it.

  Joe Niekro got a 10-game suspension in 1987 when, during a game in Anaheim, he emptied his pockets for umpires and an emery board and sandpaper flew out. He tried to explain that of course he had those products—he needs to groom his nails on the bench between innings. Did they really think he could dig them out of his pocket and deface baseballs in the middle of the field?

  “Put yourself out there on the mound with 30,000 people, six TV cameras, and four umpires around you, and you’ve got an emery board in your back pocket,” Phil Niekro says, still bothered by his brother’s punishment decades later.

  “Explain to me how you’re gonna take that emery board out of your back pocket and doctor the ball up, when everybody’s watching. You can’t do it. As soon as he threw the emery board out of his back pocket, the umpire threw him out of the game. If I was out there, they would’ve had to handcuff me. Until you show me something on camera that I’m using an emery board in my back pocket to take it out on the mound and scuff up the ball, you’ve got nothing, because you can’t do it. And if you did they would sure as hell see it.”

  The grip on a knuckleball is natural
ly unstable. The fingers and the nails must be strong enough to lock the ball in place as the pitcher whips his arm through the air. Use of the seams can vary from pitcher to pitcher, but the general rule is to leave them alone. Engaging the seams leads to friction, which leads to tumbling, which leads to trouble.

  The knuckleballer should have a short stride, the better to stay behind the ball and send it on its wobbly path. He should follow through down the center of his body, almost as if hitting himself in the protective cup, because finishing over either leg could cause that dreaded spin. (A benefit of this is that knuckleballers tend to finish in a strong fielding position; Niekro won five Gold Gloves and Dickey won one.)

  Hough urged Dickey to keep his mechanics compact by imagining he was pitching through a doorframe. Once he’s through it, Dickey says, he visualizes a vertical shoebox at the top of the zone and tries to put the pitch there. When he was at his best, in 2012, Dickey led the league in strikeouts by throwing a flat knuckler that stayed high; hitters expected it to fall and swung under it. He remained an effective starter thereafter, but that same strikeout pitch largely abandoned him. It bothered Dickey because he wanted to be trustworthy, to fight the notion that his pitch was not.

  “A conventional pitcher gives up 10 runs in a game? ‘Ah, it was one of those days,’ ” Dickey says. “If I give up 10 runs in a game? ‘I told you so.’ That’s the difference. And that’s across the board with guys in those offices, all across baseball.”

  One reason for the lack of trust, though, is that no other starter takes the mound with just one option. If another starter is struggling with one pitch, he tends to have at least two others. And while pitchers from the 1930s and ’40s may have incorporated the knuckleball into a wider repertoire, today’s knucklers don’t.

  It is all or nothing—the Niekro doctrine—and it is not all up to the pitcher, either.

  * * *

  ————

  The best advice for catching a knuckleball might have come from Mike Sandlock, who played for the Braves and the Dodgers from 1942 to 1946. He slipped back to the minors after that, and might have stayed there if not for his success with Johnny Lindell, a converted outfielder whose knuckler earned them both a promotion to the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1953. It did not go well: Lindell led the league in walks and wild pitches, and Sandlock in passed balls. Neither ever played in the majors again.

  “A knuckleball is like a dame,” Sandlock once said. “If you reach for it, you’re licked. You’ve got to wait until it reaches for you.”

  John Flaherty played 14 years in the majors and was used to weird events; in his debut, for Boston in 1992, he caught an eight-inning, no-hit loss by Matt Young. Back with the Red Sox in spring training of 2006, Flaherty was asked to replace Doug Mirabelli, who had been traded after serving as Wakefield’s personal catcher. Flaherty got a knuckleball glove from Wilson, caught some soft deliveries from Wakefield in the bullpen, and didn’t think much of it.

  Then Wakefield took the mound for batting practice and told Flaherty he would mix in some hard knucklers, too.

  “That kind of threw me off, because when he’s throwing them soft, you can kind of wait and let the ball catch you, so to speak, instead of you trying to catch the ball,” Flaherty said. “But when he started throwing them harder, then it’s like, ‘Oh shit, I don’t know where this is going.’ It was almost like it could be a hard slider, it could be a hard split going down, it could be a screwball. It kind of got in my head a little bit.

  “And then when we got into a game, he walked the first batter, Luis Castillo, who could run. And I said, ‘Wait, I haven’t even thought about throwing a runner out.’ So that was a whole other level. I turned to Tim Timmons, the home plate umpire, and I said, ‘You’re working the last game I’m ever gonna catch.’ In the first inning. He said, ‘No, no, you’re gonna get it.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to get it. That’s the problem. I don’t want to do this.’ And I caught him for another inning, it went pretty well, caught three more innings and then said all the right things to the media, how I’m gonna get it, I’m gonna work at it, it’s gonna be fine.

  “Then I walked into [manager Terry] Francona’s office the next morning: ‘Gone, time to go.’ Best decision I ever made.”

  In truth, Flaherty said, he was already wavering on how much he still wanted to play. But the knuckleball confirmed his feeling. He tried to imagine himself in the cauldron of Yankee Stadium, with a runner on third and a knuckleball darting somewhere near his regular catcher’s mitt (the oversized pillow, he said, had been uncomfortable). The effort it would take to roll with that knuckleball, and endure the embarrassment, was just not worth it.

  With Flaherty gone, the Red Sox turned to Josh Bard—and watched in horror as he committed 10 passed balls in April, seemingly well on his way to the modern record of 35 by the Rangers’ Geno Petralli, when he caught Hough in 1987. In hindsight, Bard says, he was the wrong man for the job. He was long-levered, big for a catcher at 6 foot 3, and liked to extend his glove to reach for pitches. The concept of letting the ball travel went against Bard’s instincts, and he constantly felt he was letting down the team.

  “It was the only thing in my life that the harder I tried at it, the worse I got,” Bard says. “You felt a ton of tension, and the only way to deal with it was to almost not care about it. That’s not really in my DNA.” He smiled: “I was more of a chaser than I was a catcher.”

  With nowhere else to turn, and Wakefield set to face the Yankees on May 1, the Red Sox panicked, trading Bard and a young pitcher to San Diego to reacquire Mirabelli. They whisked him from the airport to Fenway Park, Mirabelli changing into his uniform in the back of a police cruiser careening through the tight city streets. The Red Sox stalled, delaying the first pitch by eight minutes, and Mirabelli left his protective cup behind in the car. But he made it in time to guide Wakefield through seven strong innings of a Red Sox victory.

  A decade later, another Boston knuckleballer, Steven Wright, would emerge as an All-Star. His primary catcher in the first half, Ryan Hanigan, sat across the locker room from Wright one day, the skin on his bruised lower legs the color of old bananas. Nothing felt natural about catching a knuckleball, Hanigan said. A catcher wants to snag other breaking balls—except for the high curveball—before they dart out of the zone. Letting the knuckler get deep was testing him, and Hanigan was only barely passing. Wright had given him a choice of six or seven gloves, none of them a good fit. The job wiped him out mentally, too.

  “There’s so many innings in a year, you’ve got to relax as a catcher,” Hanigan said. “But there’s no relaxing. You have to catch it in an action stance. You have to be up on your legs, engaging your muscles, not what you’d call sitting back. He’s a lot more taxing for me than anybody else, by far.”

  Even a two-strike count can bring a well-founded sense of dread for a catcher. Consider the plight of the Rangers’ Orlando Mercado, working with Hough on June 16, 1986. Hough took a no-hit shutout into the bottom of the ninth inning in Anaheim, but lost it on an error and a single. That happens. Later that inning, though, Hough lost the game on a strikeout. A third-strike knuckler bounced away from Mercado for a passed ball, and Hough was too stunned to cover the plate. Wally Joyner, who had reached second on another passed ball, dashed home from there to end the game.

  In the archives of Baseball-Reference.com, this was the first game ever to end on a strikeout–passed ball—and the knuckleball just had to be the culprit. Robert K. Adair, the physicist, concluded that hitting the knuckleball squarely is essentially an accident, and suggested a strategy of striking out and hoping for a passed ball. Bob Didier agrees.

  “When I managed in the minor leagues, I told my team the best way to hit a knuckleball pitcher is get two strikes, swing, and start running,” Didier says. “Because the catcher probably ain’t gonna catch it.”

  Didier had never played above Class A
when he reported to spring training with Atlanta in 1969. That March the Braves traded their starting catcher, Joe Torre, and another catcher got hurt. Didier was young, but he had a few hits—and somehow, despite no prior experience with the knuckleball, he could handle Phil Niekro. He made the team.

  “You know how you block a ball in the dirt and you put your body in front of the ball? I did that with the ball in the air,” Didier says. “I tried to center my body behind my glove and if I missed it with my glove, it caught my body and it would kind of stay in front of me. I would have 10 or 12 balls a game when Niekro was pitching that missed my glove and hit my chest at 60 or 65 miles an hour. Keep your body behind your glove and hopefully behind the ball, and use whatever you could—legs, stomach, chest, shoulder—to just keep it in front.”

  That first season, Didier led the majors in passed balls, with 27. The toughest pitches, he said, were the ones from Niekro that would swoop over his left shoulder. Then the Braves traded for Wilhelm, and Didier battled the corkscrew action of his softer knuckleballs.

  “After a game, I felt like I’d caught a doubleheader or a 15-inning game or something,” Didier says. “I was just worn out, fighting that. I can’t think of another word, other than fighting a knuckleball.”

  Pitchers can help in that fight. Sparks created a prototype for a knuckleball catcher’s glove—the Pro Sparks model, by Rawlings—with reduced weight in the padded area and special attention to the curved webbing, to keep balls from escaping on tag plays. And with so little margin for error in the running game, knuckleballers tend to work especially hard on their pickoff moves.