Knuckleball pitcher Tomo Ohka, whom we mentioned last month in a post about how he was working to impress “scouts from the Orioles, Royals, Rays, and Diamondbacks” with his pitch, is back in the game as a minor leaguer. The Baltimore Orioles are giving him a shot. The Baltimore Sun reported recently that four minor […]
No, despite a Blue Jay manager’s tantalizing and maybe even a tad patronizing public suggestion that their knuckleballer might not be left off of the team’s 2017 roster after all (“We’re open to R.A. Dickey, even”), Dickey is not returning to the Toronto Blue Jays. And no, despite his own retrospective musing about the ups […]
R.A. Dickey, the subject of our previous post on late-blooming knuckleballers, is only the most prominent of today’s knuckleball pitchers, including those who decided to specialize in it only after having already put in a few years of pro ball. (Which is, after all, the typical knuckleballer path. Few start out in pro baseball determined […]
Tomo Ohka, lately of Japan’s Yokohama Baystars (2010-2011; previously, 1994-1998), debuted last Wednesday as a knuckleball pitcher in the U.S. for the Bridgeport Bluefish of the Blue Jays organization. The Bluefish beat the Sugarland Skeeters 9-2; Pointstreak has stats for the game. (And YouTube has an imperfect-but-at-least-it’s-something video of Ohka pitching on that day.) JCCABulletin […]
Zach Clark, 30, Baltimore Orioles organization. “I got to the big leagues. I want to stay there. And conventionally, I’d probably have to be at my best all the time for that to be a likely scenario. With the knuckleball, maybe it takes me a little while to figure it out, but my career could […]
R.A. Dickey, recently seen at the Mohegan Sun Coaches’ Convention, said there that he agreed to be traded to the Toronto Blue Jays in 2014 because that’s “where I felt the biggest challenge was. I felt like my pitch was in a place where I could really challenge myself and see how good I could […]
Not long ago we relayed the news that 37-year-old Tomokazu Ohka—a former player with various North American baseball teams then with the Yokohama BayStars—has been developing a knuckleball as his top pitch in hopes of wangling his way back into Major League Baseball. Ohka had turned to the less-body-wrenching pitch after suffering a shoulder injury […]