My 10-year-old daughter Elizabeth has started to write poetry. I don’t really have other 10-year-old poets to compare, but her poems seem to me to be pretty good. They are very much from the heart. She wrote what I thought was a really good one about a lonely tree and … oh, wait, you don’t care about this. And this is not the point.
No, the point is that at some point last week she mentioned that one of her friends also writes poetry. And she said, “Hey, maybe we can go into the poetry business together.”
This, as you no doubt guessed, got me thinking about Tim Wakefield.
When I was a kid—which doesn’t seem quite so long ago—becoming a knuckleball pitcher was a viable dream. I don’t really have any memory at all of Hoyt Wilhelm, but I do vaguely remember Wilbur Wood’s good years, and very well remember both of the Niekros, Phil and Joe. Charlie Hough was very much on my mind as a child, in large part because you couldn’t open a pack of a baseball cards in those days and NOT get a Charlie Hough card (along with a Sixto Lezcano). Tom Candiotti came along not too long after… You would have to say my childhood was more or less that Golden Age of knuckles…
You want to feel bad for a catcher … how about poor Geno Petralli in 1987? He had 35 passed balls. THIRTY FIVE! That is the most for any catcher since 1890s. And he set that mark in only 63 games as a catcher.
How did this happen? Well, it’s actually a fascinating tale. See, Geno Petralli had the misfortune of become Charlie Hough’s personal catcher for two months when Hough might have thrown the most uncatchable pitch in the history of baseball.
It went like so: Hough had his usual knuckleball, which was always difficult to catch as well as hit. But then on May 29, 1987, that pitch suddenly became a buzzard… From May 29 through the end of the season, Charlie Hough’s catchers had 58 passed balls. FIFTY-EIGHT in four months. That’s more than Randy Johnson had IN HIS CAREER (50). It’s more than Roger Clemens on Tom Seaver had in their career s(35). It’s more Greg Maddux (28) and Tom Glavine (15) COMBINED for their careers.
Here’s one: Dan Quisenberry’s catchers, in his 1,000-plus inning career, had ZERO passed balls.
... Like poetry, I can’t help but feel like the knuckleball is on the verge of disappearing. Of course, neither one is really disappearing. It just feels that way. That’s why it struck me so funny and touching when Elizabeth talked about going into the poetry business. I know there IS a poetry business out there, I know there ARE brilliant poets out there, but I honestly don’t come across them much in my life… I’m sad that [Tim] Wakefield is retiring because he was just so much fun to watch. But I believe that there will be another great knuckleball pitcher. Why? Well, I think of the last line of Woody Allen’s “Manhattan,” a line I often use when talking to my daughter. You’ve got to have a little faith in people.
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1. Zach Posted: February 18, 2012 at 05:44 PM (#4064133)I wonder if that's why the knuckleball and the submarine pitcher perpetually seem like they're on the verge of extinction? Although they're both effective strategies, they appeal more to pitchers who are facing a career crisis than to pitchers who are starting out.
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme
Of course, I love the knuckleball as well so... it was unlikely I wasn't going to greatly enjoy the article.
I always rooted for Wakefield (just like I did for the Niekros, Hough, Candiotti, and Dickey. I wonder if Haeger will make it back to the bigs?)
why isn't a passed ball an error?
and i see that with 4 hits 6 walks and all those passed balls that the game only took 2 hrs 23 minute and that the tigers pitcher threw a 3 hit shutout
Basically to keep them separate from catchers' errors that are similar to other fielders' errors (like throwing errors, or dropping pop-ups, or dropping the ball on a tag play, etc.). As far as figuring ERA, they're treated like errors.
DB
Or it's like being younger than I am which really pisses me off!
Or because then every caught pitch is a chance and every C not named Petralli has a .99999 fielding percentage.
Not necessarily. For example, an outfielder doesn't get a chance when he fields a base hit cleanly and then successfully throws it back to the infield, if no out is recorded.
DB
There will always be knuckleball pitchers. We may go a while before we see one as effective/successful (relatively speaking) as Wakefield, but he (and Dickey) won't be the last. Everything cycles around again in life.
The other thing you have to remember is that Wakefield's fastball was that slow because in order to throw the knuckleball effectively, you need to use that short-armed delivery with no real windup. If he used a conventional delivery, I'm sure Wakefeild had the arm strength to throw in the mid 80s or so.
You see the same thing from Dickey if you look at how much velocity he lost on his fastball when he started throwing it as a knuckleballer with the knuckleball delivery. He used to throw around 90, and now his fastball averages around 84.
Even though people have this perception that you don't throw a knuckleball hard, it seems like you can't be an effective knuckleballer without the arm strength to throw a fastball at least in the 80s (with a conventional delivery).
Well that's just it isn't it. To reiterate from the posts above, you need some serious arm strength. Not sure how many people ever reach the point where they can throw an 85mph fastball with some accuracy. Are we talking only top high school guys? Middle of the road high school pitchers?
Has anyone else ever had two very distinct knuckleballs?
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