We reported early in 2016 that Josh Turley, now of the Toledo Mud Hens, was using the knuckleball as one of several pitches. At that time, pitching coach Mike Henneman was urging Turley to throw the knuckleball more often, advice he seems to have heeded. In a recent interview with Turley, the Toledo Blade asked when […]
Steven Wright has signed a one-year, non-guaranteed contract with the Red Sox to pitch in 2018. “Wright, 33, was limited to five starts in 2017 before a knee injury cut short his season,” NESN.com recalls. “The knuckleballer, who’s also under team control through 2020, was a surprising All-Star in 2016, posting a 13-6 record with […]
After the Atlanta Braves edged out the Oakland Athletics 4-3 in their Saturday, July 1 game, R.A. Dickey said of his performance that he “had a good enough knuckleball where I was getting a lot of weak contact. Even the inning they scored their run, it was little nubber up the middle, a ground ball […]
In a recent post at his Knuckleball Nation site, IKA’s Chris Nowlin (bio here) suggests that which of various equally effective knuckleball grips you adopt depends on personal “feel” that can’t be determined by formula—and also depends on how short you cut your fingernails. Once you’ve reduced any variables and put yourself into position to […]
R.A. Dickey, who just turned 42, is getting more than his share of goodbyes for someone who has not yet decided whether to hang up his baseball cap. May it all be embarrassingly premature. In any case, Dickey’s ponderings in an interview with John Lott at TheAthletic.com (“R.A. Dickey has much to fill his life without […]
Knuckleballers Steven Wright (#35) and former Boston Red Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield (the suit) have been coaching pitching coach Carl Willis, who joined the Red Sox team in the middle of last season. As manager John Farrell recalls “with a chuckle,” coaching assistance from the coachee seems to be normal when a coach suddenly must contend with so different […]
How do you trick a hitter into thinking he’s about to swing at yet another knuck when you’ve got very different pitch up your sleeve? And why would you ever want to do that, anyway, if you know how to effectively throw so tricky a pitch as the knuckleball? To answer the second question first: […]
If you’re regularly pitching a knuckleball at the pro level, it should be, by far, your primary pitch. That’s what the full-time knuckleballers tend to say. As we noted last week, during his struggle for mastery of the knuckleball Eddie Gamboa felt obliged to restrain an admittedly excessive tendency to revert to fastballs, a pitch […]
Up-and-coming knuckleballer Steven Wright has often been compared to his predecessor in the Red Sox organization, longtime knuckleball pitcher Tim Wakefield (for example, by Chris Smith, as we noted in our May 31 and May 18 posts). At Baseball Prospectus, Ryan Morrison (“How Steven Wright Is Righting the Ship”) begins by comparing the two players—well, […]
What ratio of knuckleballs to secondary pitch has the best chance of rebuffing batters before they can get on base? At FiveThirtyEight, Neil Paine argues that R.A. Dickey may be under-exploiting his top pitch, the knuckleball—even though close to nine out of ten of his pitches are knuckleballs. His headline is certain about it: “Game […]