There’s not much to it. It hovers in the air if it feels like it, dances mid-flight, dips, ducks, and dodges, and the hope is that it lands in the waiting mitt of the catcher. The person throwing it doesn’t know what will happen once he releases it.
The knuckleball is a pitch. It’s a pitch thrown by less than 1% of Major League Baseball players. The pitch is a novelty. In a game of power of towering 500ft home runs and blazing-fast 100mph fastballs, the knuckleball ignores the seriousness of it all.
The knuckleball is not a serious pitch—Logan Roy would say as much.
Bobby Murcer of the New York Yankees said Trying to hit him is like trying to eat Jell-O with chopsticks. One MLB commentator said of the knuckleball, It’s like tumbling dice. It barely moves, and sometimes, it’s all movement. Tumbling dice, they say, but I like to think of a knuckleball as a cat. You never know what a cat will do or when it’ll turn on you. Mostly, it’s good, and sometimes, it destroys your place. Cats are quite derpy, and so is that knuckleball.
I find it fascinating that it’s thrown at all. The small tribe of MLB pitchers who throw the knuckleball interesting for the choice they made. Why did they choose it? Perhaps to lengthen their pitching careers. Perhaps they knew they couldn’t throw heat with the pitchers of the day, opting to lean into something craftier.
Once they made the choice to throw the knuckler, they joined that alumni group, and with that choice, a sense of brotherhood took root.
Joe Neikro won 121 games after he turned forty, which is a remarkable statistic (source), considering many pitchers don’t reach that age milestone as active pitchers. He pitched twenty-four seasons.
Tim Wakefield, a mainstay of the Boston Red Sox pitching corps, warming up often elicited moans and groans from fans in the stands who wanted to see Schilling or Martinez pitch instead. Timmy threw the flutter ball about as good as anyone for NINETEEN years. One Nine.
Throwing the knuckleball extends careers. Two of the longest-tenured pitchers, Charlie Hough and Joe Neikro, pitched over twenty years each.
The knuckleballer alumni are a small one: the Neikro brothers, Tom Candiotti, R.A. Dickey, a Cy Young winner, Wakefield, Hough, and so on…
What intrigues me about the knuckleball is its unpredictability, the willingness of someone who earns millions of dollars to throw it, and the team paying those millions to allow that pitcher to throw it at all.
Due to the nature of the knuckleball, it’s hard to know what will happen.
Daddy, why does that man throw the knuckleball? Nobody knows, Brett, nobody knows…
— Some kid, probably
A pitcher could choose a higher percentage pitch to toss, but these guys cut against the grain, and they throw the knuckler anyway. Is it a YOLO thing? It taps into that person who chooses to be a long-suffering fan of last-place finishers, losing sports franchises, Android over iPhone, Clippers over Lakers, Angels over Dodgers, my friends’ difficult-to-setup booking tool over calendly—I could go on. I won’t.
I like that these pitchers choose the least reliable thing to count on to maintain their careers. It’s a gamble—and all a pitcher can do is choose to do it and live with what happens next—like life. No?
I don’t judge, though. Throw the cursed thing and live with the consequences. In life, we do the same thing every day with our choices.
It’s a brave pitch for a goofy world.