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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
After mostly recovering from a minor injury, Red Sox knuckleball pitcher Steven Wright was back in action last Friday against the Royals and “Feel[ing] Good One Day After Return to Mound,” reports John Tomase. It took a while for the pitcher to warm up, though. Wright’s outing didn’t go as planned. He allowed five runs […]
Steven Wright may have been sidelined as an All-Star, but the experience doesn’t seem to have thrown the Red Sox knuckleballer off balance. MLB News says: Forgive Red Sox manager John Farrell if he wasn’t all that broken up about Steven Wright not being given a chance to pitch in the All-Star Game. The way Farrell saw […]
Steven Wright was on hand on Tuesday and would have been waved over to the mound had the game gone into extra innings. It didn’t. As Wright explains it, “Because this game means so much, they wanted to make sure that if we went extra innings, we didn’t run out of pitching. So, instead of […]
Whether FanGraphs writer Eno Sarris has blasted as many “myths about the knuckleball” as he purports to have done in his interesting recent article depends in part on the extent to which baseball fans accept these “myths.” And sometimes it seems to come down more to word parsing than any prevalent misguided substantial conviction. How […]