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 […]
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 […]
FanGraph’s August Fagerstrom recently conducted an interesting interview with Red Sox knuckleballer Steven Wright on how he does what he does with the knuckleball. On the basis of that report we’ve distilled five things not to do as a knuckleballer. Don’t be consistent. “That’s the biggest key to knuckleballs: you want to be able to […]
We always like the doubly-rare drama of knuckleballer versus knuckleballer battles. And it looks like one such clash is “possible on Saturday,” as CBS Sports reports, thanks to a game delay for the Red Sox v. Indians. This possibility is also—Mike Axisa’s all-caps—IMPORTANT: Price’s second start will have to wait one extra day and Steven […]
Sports Illustrated commentators Ted Keith and Stephen Cannella recently discussed Dan Johnson’s switch to the knuckleball (our topic last week). “I love these stories about guys trying to come back, trying to learn new positions,” Cannella (pictured) says in the video. But this is no ordinary such attempt, he adds. “This is a guy trying […]
The extent to which Russell Martin has managed to conquer the knuckleball as a Blue Jays/Dickey catcher in 2015 is not the main topic of eeliott29’s post for BlueBirdBanter (“Russell Martin, worth every last penny”), but neither is it marginal. In 2015, Martin brought the tools that summoned him his lucrative contract and in turn saved the […]
Eight years before R. A. Dickey achieved his prominence in 2012 as the first knuckleball pitcher to win the Cy Young Award, the then−Texas Ranger was up against Tim Wakefield of the Boston Red Sox. The New Yorker’s Ben McGrath remembers the game as the occasion on which he “first noticed” Dickey, “while writing about […]