THE KNUCKLEBALL : It’s Not So Much That It Makes an Old Man Young, It Basically Neutralizes the Aging Process, Keeping an Old Man Effective

Considering how many old-timers have been rejuvenated by it, you’d think the knuckleball was what Ponce de Leon had been seeking. It’s a regular fountain of youth, in its own way.

Here, just grip the ball like this: Put your fingertips right on the old horsehide and just kind of push the ball to the plate. You feel younger all ready, don’t you?

In fact, the knuckleball has restored youth in plenty of instances. Turned back the clock. Made old men kick like boys, removed wrinkles, improved sex lives.

So OK, all it gives them is a couple of extra years in the big leagues. Old Poncey, who got nicked up by the Indians (the original Tribe) pretty good when he went back down to the Florida State League, probably would have settled for as much.

(The King of Spain on De Leon: “His heater comes to the plate like a wet ball of cotton. If he’s going to stay in our organization, he’ll have to develop an extra pitch--forkball, slider, something. He can work on it in Florida, what can happen to him there?”)

If De Leon never quite mastered the knuckleball, plenty since have. Hoyt Wilhelm nearly found life everlasting with the pitch. He stayed in the major leagues until he was 49 and then crabbed about a bad shoulder that finally forced him out, prematurely. The Niekro boys--or is it the Kniekro boys?--are in the 40s and still getting batters half their age out with the knuckler.

You call Wilbur Wood at his Boston Fish Market and he says, yeah, he’s 43, sure, but he’d still be pitching if some fool hadn’t used his knee for a croquet wicket. “I could be pitching today,” he snorts. Wood was cheated. He had to give it up when he was just 37, a knuckler’s prime.

You see, the knuckleball is baseball’s way of saying to God/General Manager, “Come back later. I’m busy.” It requires hardly anything of the arm and wrist itself and can be employed to good effect way beyond the point when other athletic abilities are exhausted. It’s not so much that the knuckleball makes an old man young, it’s that it keeps an old man effective. It neutralizes the aging process. You can use it forever.

So, given the magical properties of this athletic elixir and sport’s youth fixation, it is fair to ask why so few have turned to it.

There may be 20 pitchers retired each year, men whose arms once flashed blinding flannel as they delivered overpowering fastballs but who now couldn’t break a pane of glass.

Why wouldn’t they take up the knuckler? Add a few years to their careers, at about $350,000 per? What do all these pitchers with arms gone lame or just old have against ever-lasting youth, not to mention money in the bank?

It is indeed very fair to ask why this knuckleball (experts will soon be invoked to explain exactly what it is; you still won’t understand) is practiced regularly by only three men--Charlie (Spring Chicken) Hough, 37, Joe (Little Brother) Niekro, 40, and Phil (Older Brother) Niekro, 46. Evidently the knuckleball is not only hard to hit and catch, it is hard to pitch.

You’d think all you’d need is a little know-how and some confidence, right? All right, a lot of confidence.

You’re alone on the mound, and somebody impersonating Babe Ruth is at the plate. And you’re going to throw a ball 70 m.p.h. into his wheelhouse?

You need enormous confidence because here’s the thing about a knuckleball: A well-thrown knuckler comes to the plate without so much as one full revolution. It just floats and then darts. A badly thrown knuckler might spin on its axis, say, all of one time along the 60 feet 6 inches to the plate. It appears just to float, too, just doesn’t dart. So what’s the difference? Answers Charlie Hough: “About 400 feet.”

But more on that later. Before we go too much further, we better knuckle down and learn what this pitch really is.

This from the American Journal of Physics, Vol. 43, No. 11: “The knuckleball is the name given to a type of pitch in the game of baseball.” Fair enough.

We read further. “The ball is held with the first knuckles or the fingernails (hence the name knuckleball). As it is thrown, the fingers are extended in such a fashion as to inhibit the backspin normally possessed by a thrown ball. Indeed, it is commonly believed that a properly thrown knuckleball should have no spin at all. As a knuckleball approaches home plate, it changes directions erratically in an apparently random manner.”

This is proven, in the Apparatus and Experiments section, with a subsonic wind tunnel, a strip chart recorder, a drag and lift measuring device, foil strain gauges and a system of known weights and pulleys. There is a section on Lateral Force and The Trajectory, but let’s skip directly to Summary and Conclusions.

“There are two possible mechanisms for the erratic lateral force that causes the fluttering flight of the knuckleball. A fluttering lateral force can result from a portion of the strings being located just at the point where boundary layer separation occurs.

“A far more likely situation is that the ball spins very slowly, changing the location of the roughness elements (strings), and thereby causing a nonsymmetric velocity distribution and a shifting of the wake.”

OK, let’s all go out and pitch the knuckleball!

Of course, you don’t really need a degree in astro-physics (though Joe Niekro has one in Astro-physics) to understand the pitch. Joe Ferguson, who has caught two of the three current practitioners and who probably has as much experience as anybody defending the backstop from nonsymmetric velocity, explains the mysterious pitch as follows: “It does one of two things. It goes this way or that.”

That’s probably as much science as we need here. Let’s just say that a knuckleball, if pushed to the plate as straight as possible, with between one-half and one revolution per 60 feet, will break like a son of a gun. Just believe that it happens. It’s like an act of faith.

Actually, there is empirical evidence that even a baseball fan can comprehend. Sometimes it’s a little ridiculous, to be sure.

Once Phil Niekro was pitching to Cincinnati’s Floyd Robinson when a pitch suddenly broke out of the strike zone and passed behind him. Robinson turned around and tried to hit the ball backward, toward the catcher. He missed it that way, too.

Normally, though, the aerodynamics aren’t as comic. All the same, they’re never commonplace.

A couple of weeks ago, for example, when Houston’s Joe Niekro was pitching to the Dodgers, did you notice catcher Alan Ashby throwing his body this way and that (see: Joe Ferguson on path of flight)? Did you notice that Niekro got two Dodgers to strike out on pitches that, though they may entered the strike zone, ended up near the backstop.

Son, you just saw yourself an actual knuckleball!

In fact, the best way to know when you’re in the presence of a knuckleballer is to watch not the pitcher but the catcher.

It’s not their favorite pitch, and you can actually observe their agitation.

First of all, the knuckleball comes to the plate at about 70 m.p.h., which is the approximate velocity of a fully loaded freight train as it pulls out of the yard.

If you can’t quite eat your lunch in the time it takes for a knuckleball to get to the plate, you can certainly steal second base. Also, with a pitch that either goes this way or that, it’s hard to know where to make your next hilarious pratfall.

Joe Ferguson, who caught Hough with the Dodgers and Joe Niekro with the Astros, says catching the knuckler is not really that big a deal. “Once you learn to relax,” he says.

All the same, he did use an extra-large catcher’s mitt when either Hough or Niekro was on the mound. “Might as well,” he says. “Any pitch that moves at the last second, you have that much more leather to put to it.”

That’s the other way to tell when a knuckler’s at work. Check out the catcher. Is he using what looks like a satellite dish to receive the pitches?

Of course, there are ways to catch a knuckleball, and then there are ways. Bob Uecker, whom they don’t call Mr. Baseball for anything, once explained a fool-proof method for the aspiring knuckleball catcher. “You wait till it stops rolling,” he instructed, “and then you pick it up.”

But we digress. Why aren’t there more knuckleball pitchers, if it’s so hard to hit and so easy on the arm to throw? Didn’t there used to be more?

The Washington Senators had an entire rotation of knucklers, right? Where are the Hoyt Wilhelms, the Eddie Fishers, the Wilbur Woods? Is the knuckleball pitcher going the way of the dinosaur? Is the knuckleball pitch going to be one of those baseball relics discussed at old-timers games?

First of all, the fact that there only three knuckleball pitchers around doesn’t signal a trend. Dodger Manager Tom Lasorda, the man who suggested Hough try a knuckler, says, “There have never been that many.”

Wood, who came up just after the Stone Age, says, “It’s always been like that. “There’s never been more than a couple at any one time. When I came up there was Hoyt Wilhelm and Eddie Fisher and Phil Niekro and Joe Niekro.”

Why is that? “First of all,” Hough explains, “it starts with kids and the fact that no Little League or high school coach is going to actively chase down a knuckleball pitcher. The kid who throws a fastball gets the first opportunity. The kid with the physical talent always gets the best opportunity.”

Agrees Wood, a man who won 20 games four seasons in a row for the White Sox: “It goes all the way back to when they scout you. They’re looking for the fastball. You can teach a kid a slider or a curve, but you can’t teach a fastball. You can’t increase somebody’s speed.”

This rings true. Imagine the scout who shows up at the ol’ schoolyard. “Hear you got a kid can throw the ball 70 m.p.h.,” he says. “Like to teach him the knuckleball, personally see he gets into the Hall of Fame. We been looking especially hard for somebody who can’t throw a ball through a sheet of paper.”

“Probably,” Ferguson says, “they see you throw the knuckleball, and it’s over for you.”

So if you don’t learn it in the bushes, where do you learn it? Some still do learn it in the bushes, of course. Phil Niekro practiced it with his dad, who wasn’t trying to fashion a big leaguer at the time but only trying to help Phil make the high school varsity.

It turned out to be a good idea. At 45, Niekro was still worth a $700,000 contract to the Yankees.

More typical, though, is Hoyt Wilhelm, who appeared in a record 1,070 games on his way to the Hall of Fame.

He learned it from a newspaper picture he saw when he was a high school sophomore, but the method is not recommended. (Wilhelm still had to spend 10 years in the minors perfecting it.)

Wood threw it surreptitiously in high school though he learned the fine points from teammate Wilhelm when his fastball went south for good.

But however they developed it, they developed it over a long period of time.

Only Hough, a rarity, developed it quickly on his own.

Hough, who had a good arm when he came into baseball, lost it all after about three years in the Dodgers’ farm system. Arm trouble. “Seems I’ve always had a bad wing,” he says. So Lasorda, who was managing him in the Arizona Instructional League, told him if he wanted to stay in baseball he’d better develop an extra pitch. “Otherwise,” Lasorda remembers, “he was in trouble. “He was really struggling, on the verge of getting released.”

There wasn’t anybody to teach it, though. There never is. “A coach showed me very basically how to hold it,” Hough remembers. “But it was kind of a situation where I knew more about it than anyone else.”

With the courage allowed only very desperate men, Hough took this novelty to the mound and found that he could get people out, although he could also walk them. But within a year, in opposition to all knuckleball lore, he had perfected it. “The very first year I threw it, I won nine games in a month,” he says. “I could throw it right away. I was fortunate.”

Possibly Hough was able to win with it because he had more than just nonsymmetrical velocity going for him. Throwing the knuckleball requires more nerve than most men possess. You need the feel of a safecracker but the nerve of a second story man. “He has ice water in his veins,” Lasorda marvels.

Says Ferguson: “You need courage, and that’s what all three of these guys have. To come on the mound and throw one pitch and get it over--you’re standing out there naked when you throw the knuckleball.”

Lasorda knew Hough had mastered the pitch not when he got it to break, but when he found confidence in it.

“We’re playing Hawaii,” Lasorda says, “bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, and we’re winning by a run. Charlie’s on the mound, got a 3-2 count. Now I only had one rule for him. Never throw the knuckleball with three balls the count. He’s out there shaking this pitch off and that one. I go out to the mound. Catcher says Charlie wants to throw his knuckleball. I say, you want to throw this on a 3-2 count? You think you can get him out? He says yes. He strikes him out on a knuckleball. I call up the Dodgers that night and say, ‘He’s ready.’ ”

Ordinarily, the major leagues is a poor place to develop a knuckleball. “Everyone wants to throw a knuckleball once they get up in age or lose their arm,” Wood says. “But it’s something you do way ahead in time. You have it for the time you need it.”

Even the minor leagues can be a real poor place to develop a new pitch, Hough’s experience notwithstanding.

“I fooled with it,” says Lasorda, the quintessential minor league pitcher. “I had it down pretty good. In Syracuse one game, I struck out 9 of 10 with it. But it’s like opening a safe, you need a certain touch. If you lose that feel, it’s gone. It left me just like that, and I put the pitch in my back pocket. I wasn’t going down the tubes with that pitch.”

That’s the difference between a knuckleball pitcher and everybody else.

Another thing about the knuckleball, it’s unique among all pitches in that it requires total commitment. “In order to be successful with it,” Lasorda says, “it has to be your No. 1 pitch. It’s tough to throw and tough to stay with.”

Says Wood, who committed himself to the knuckler in 1967 when he noticed everybody was sitting on his curveball: “You have to make up your mind to throw the knuckler and throw it 95% of the time, not 50% of the time. It’s not your extra pitch.”

Says Hough: “I never knew anybody successful throwing it once in a while. You don’t wait until a 2-2 count and say, here’s my knuckler. It’s not done.”

The reason is a knuckleball pitcher must maintain the same grip, same delivery every pitch for the knuckleball to consistently go “either this way or that.”

Wood says the danger of alternating a curve with a knuckler is that some spin might inadvertently be applied to the knuckler. You know what a knuckleball with spin is called, don’t you? A base hit.

So, the knuckleball is not for everybody and may not be for more than three pitchers at any one time, weird fellows who can’t fathom the possibility of somebody pounding their 70 m.p.h. fastball into the seats. “What, hit my knuckleball? With a paddle? Get out of town, Jack.” Who can say that? Every day?

Well, the answer is there’s always somebody. “There’s got to be some kid out there,” Hough says, “some kid who can’t throw a lick, working on a knuckleball right now. You’ll find it from time to time.”

Maybe a kid, more likely some grizzled veteran, his once-lively fastball with all the hop of a cement truck, pulls this toy out of his back pocket.

Maybe his dad fooled around with it, showed him how to release it with his fingertips so the ball floated up to the plate motionless, like a big moon.

So this pitcher, too old or too desperate to recognize fear any more, stands on the mound, daring the hitter to hit it, the catcher to catch it. “Here’s some nonsymmetric velocity,” he says, “eat this.”

And the ball comes to the plate, ever so slowly, and goes, well, either this way or that. Young again, young again.