Last month, outfielder Blake Gailen with the Oklahoma City Dodgers displayed his knuckleball from the mound. The Oklahoman tells the tale in its April 15 story: It was supposed to be a last-ditch effort to survive the night. An inning, maybe two. It turned out to be so much more…. On a night where the […]
Archive | Tim Wakefield
RSS feed for this sectionThe Knuckleball Does Everything By Doing Nothing
Sports writer Tyler Kepner’s new book K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches (published just this April) includes a chapter on the knuckleball, “The Knuckleball: Grabbing the Wing of a Butterfly.” In part, we learn, the knuckleball is about being able to compete. Almost all knuckleballers were rejected by the game before they could […]
World Series: With Knuckleballer Wright Waiting in Wings, Boston Red Sox Face Los Angeles Dodgers
The first game of the World Series will be played on October 23 at 8:09 PM EST—and the Red Sox are in it, opposing the Los Angeles Dodgers after having bested the Houston Astros four games to one. The clincher against the Astros was played last Thursday, and much credit goes to “unlikely hero David […]
Come Back to Knuckleball Pitching, Steven Wright (When You’re Ready)
We’re hearing good reports of knuckleball pitcher Steven Wright’s progress, and keeping our fingers crossed that he’ll be in action again before this MLB season expires. Slow and steady wins the race, in this case. Wright acknowledges that he pushed himself and his post-op knee a bit too hard, too fast when he returned to […]
Is Your 2018 New Year’s Resolution About the Knuckleball?
The beginning of a new year is as auspicious a time as any to take a fresh look your career, assets and potential and to ponder whether it makes sense to make a fundamental change. We like knuckleball pitcher R.A. Dickey’s blunt explanation, in a Q&A with Nubyjas Wilborn, of why he decided to specialize […]
Prospective Knuckleballers Gotta Ask Yourselves One Question
Ryan Nagelhout of Uproxx.com remembers, and interviews, Tim Wakefield, who “had one of the most fascinating pitching careers in the modern Major Leagues.” But Wakefield rebuilt his career as a knuckleballer, catching on with the Boston Red Sox for 17 seasons in which he pitched the most innings in Red Sox history. He won 200 […]
Is the Knuckleball Sorcery?
The late science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once famously suggested that sufficiently advanced technology is “indistinguishable from magic,” presumably if and when the whys and wherefores of the technology are not understood. Perhaps, then, the dictum should instead be that baffling complexity is indistinguishable from magic. In this form, would Clarke’s principle apply to […]
Chris Nowlin on Finding Your Own Personal Knuckleball
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 […]
Knuckleball Pitching As a Team Effort
Knuckleball pitchers are the ones who pitch the knuckleball. They are the ones who are on the mound letting it loose. They also deserve the primary credit for choosing to make such a large change in their careers in order to stay in the game; for as we know, knucklers often adopt the knuckleball as […]
Knuckleballer Tim Wakefield in Hall of Fame?
Michael Clair makes the case for inducting knuckleball pitcher Tim Wakefield into the Hall of Fame at m.mlb.com’s Cut Four. Actually, though, Clair argues more broadly, if only semi-seriously that, “every dipsy-doodler tosser should be in the Hall.” After all, these are players who, when they realized they weren’t good enough hitters or that they […]