The Books: The Only Game In Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker; edited by David Remnick; ‘Project Knuckleball’, by Ben McGrath

Next up on the essays shelf:

The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick

The Only Game in Town is a collection of sports writing from The New Yorker. So far, I have excerpted from the following collections: Life Stories (profiles), The Fun of It (Talk of the Town pieces), and The New Gilded Age (financial writing), and Secret Ingredients (food writing).

This piece is from 2004, and it starts as a profile of Red Sox knuckleball pitcher Tim Wakefield and then becomes a study of the knuckleball itself. That weird-looking pitch which baffles pitchers and catchers alike. Most knuckleballers have their own designated catcher who know how to track that thing down. I love a good knuckleball. I love that it goes so slow, and I love that people can’t hit it. Charlie Lau, famous hitting coach, is quoted in the piece: “There are two theories on hitting the knuckleball. Unfortunately, neither of them works.” Watching Tim Wakefield in action (and I’ve seen him pitch live a couple of times) is to understand just how bizarre a thing it is. It’s so against the grain of what a pitcher “should” look like that it is a wonder that it was developed at all. It is a rare skill, a bizarre skill. Ben McGrath’s piece describes how there are only a handful of really good knuckleball pitchers at any given time, and they all know each other, and keep an eye on each other, even if they’re on different teams. It’s a small elite fraternity. Knuckleballers are used to having people look at them pitch and say, “What the hell was THAT?” as opposed to a more admiring, “Oh my God, look at how fast that ball was.” So they are used to being underestimated and not taken seriously. Ben McGrath goes and hangs out with a high school knuckleballer and the kid says that it makes him upset that knuckleball pitchers aren’t seen as athletes, somehow. Because he’s 17 and he’s an athlete, so why do people not understand why he wants to throw THIS pitch?

There are many great quotes from hitters who fear Tim Wakefield. They can’t hit what he throws. These are major power hitters. AND, not only does he strike them out with a ball going only 69 mph, but they hurt themselves sometimes trying to hit it. They strain their back, they pull muscles. It’s one thing to swing and miss, it’s another thing to swing and miss and LOOK like you don’t even know what you’re doing. Players trying to hit a knuckleball lose all that grace that they mostly have, and they suddenly look like they’re flailing, reaching. It is very frustrating for them.

You can see Tim Wakefield’s knuckleball in slow motion here (starts around the .54 mark.)

And here’s a fun short piece about “the science behind the knuckleball”.

Here’s an excerpt, not about Wakefield, but about the knuckleball itself. I could read writing like this all day long.

The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick; ‘Project Knuckleball’, by Ben McGrath

The knuckleball – also known as the knuckler the fingernail ball, the fingertip ball, the moth, the bubble, the ghostball, the horseshoe, the dry-spitter, and, curiously, the spinner – has been around, in one form or another, for nearly as long as professional baseball itself, though for much of that it has been regarded with suspicion. Spinning is precisely what it does not do. In fact, a lack of spin is about the only identifying characteristic of the pitch. There is no right way to hold a knuckleball when throwing it (seams, no seams, two fingers, three), and no predictable flight pattern once it leaves the hand. “Butterflies aren’t bullets,” the longtime knuckleballer Charlie Hough once said. “You can’t aim ’em – you just let ’em go.” The pitch shakes, shimmies, wobbles, drops – it knuckles, as they say. Which is doubly confusing, because the term knuckleball is itself a kind of misnomer, a holdover from the pitch’s largely forgotten infancy.

Depending on how you look at it, the first knuckleball was probably thrown in the late nineteenth century, by a bricklayer named Toad Ramsey, or shortly after the turn of the century, by the famous junkball ace Eddie Cicotte. Ramsey, who pitched for Louisville in the old American Association, severed a tendon in his left middle finger (that was his pitching hand), and thereafter adopted a peculiar grip, in which he curled his middle fingertip on the top of the ball exposing the knuckle. His newfangled pitch probably more closely resembled what is now known as a knuckle curve – a pitch that, despite the name, bears little in-flight resemblance to Wakefield’s floater. (The knuckle curve, thrown today by the Yankees’ Mike Mussina, is released with topspin, or overspin, and so does not even belong in the flutterball’s extended low-spin family.)

Cicotte, for his part, discovered early in his career that by pressing the knuckles of his middle and index finger against the ball’s surface, and steadying the ball with his thumb, he could produce a spinless pitch, which would behave erratically and set batters on edge. In 1908, pitching with the Red Sox, he took the nickname Knuckles – by which point others had already begun to figure out that the same flitting effect could be achieved, and with greater control, by simply clamping down on the rawhide with one’s fingernails. The actual use of the knuckles in pushing the ball plateward has essentially been out of style for ninety years.

All told, there have been about seventy pitchers who have entrusted their livelihoods, at one point or another, to the vagaries of the knuckleball (by the count of baseball writer Rob Neyer). Some have preferred to throw a faster, harder-breaking version of the pitch, which arrives in the 70-75-mph range, exhibiting only minor turbulence en route to a crash landing. Others have favored a more arcing, directionally indecisive floater – the Pittsburgh Pirates slugger Willie Stargell called it “a butterfly with hiccups” – which takes care to obey interstate speed limits. Neither enterprise is a growth industry. In the past fifty years, the fluttering ranks have dwindled to just a few per generation.

Once comfortably ensconced in the flourishing community of odd-ball pitches – spitball, palm ball, shine ball, eephus – the knuckleball has fallen victim, in recent decades, to a prejudice against deception and a fear of the unknown. If a kid throwing 95 mph has a bad outing, scouts chalk it up to growing pains; at least he can bring it. If a knuckleballer flounders, it is proof, somehow, that the craft itself – just look at it – is unreliable.

“Catchers hate it,” Jim Bouton, the author of Ball Four: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues, said recently. “Nobody likes to warm up with you. Catchers don’t respect it. You can pitch seven good innings with a knuckleball, and as soon as you walk a guy they go, ‘See, there’s that damn knuckleball.'”

The pitch is minimally taxing from a physical standpoint, and this affords its practitioners the ability to pitch in virtually any situation, on any day. Knuckleball pitchers seldom need to ice their arms after working. They lift weights only sparingly, and almost never get injured. The knuckleball favors old age – or at least doesn’t discourage it – and forgives weakness. These are considerable advantages, yet the pitch is, for the same reasons, taken as an affront to the entrenched jock ethic of blood, sweat, and tears.

“Baseball science isn’t rocket science,” Robert K. Adair, a professor emeritus at Yale and the author of The Physics of Baseball, says. “It’s a lot harder.” To understand how a knuckleball works, it helps to have a basic familiarity with Bernoulli’s principle, the Magnus effect, and the Prandtl boundary-layer theory, for a start. This must is easy: The stitches on a baseball interrupt the flow of air around the leather surface. Then it gets complicated. The air meeting the ball speeds up as it’s disturbed, to compensate for the initial holdup. This increased airspeed causes the pressure (on the side of the interrupting, forwardmost stitch) to drop. The ball follows the lower pressure.

That’s the short story, at least. Wake, drag, aerodynamic regime changes in midflight. All these and more come into play.When the knuckleball is dancing with particular verve and inspiration, as Wakefield’s did (pre-Boone) against the Yankees last fall, batters and their fans tend to argue, only half in jest, that it is unfair – unhittable, even. (“You’re better off trying to hit Wakefield when you’re in a drunken stupor,” the Yankees first baseman Jason Giambi said recently.) This may in fact literally be the case. “A knuckleball can change so close to the batter that he cannot physiologically adjust to it, so in some sense it’s impossible to hit a breaking knuckleball,” Adair says. “I mean, you can close your eyes and swing, and you might hit it …”

Grumpy catchers may well have a point, too. Maybe all those passed balls are not their fault. “The fastest possible voluntary reaction time of a person is about a hundred and fifty milliseconds,” Adair says. “And during that time the ball can change its direction so much that you can’t catch it.” Adair’s conclusion: “When Tim Wakefield is on, it’s pretty tough – tough to hit, tough to catch.”

And when he’s off? “All you need to know is that if you put any kind of spin on it at all it’ll travel about four hundred and seventy-five feet in the opposite direction,” Bouton likes to say.