ALL IN THE FINGERNAILS:

PROJECT KNUCKLEBALL: Vindication for an awkward art. (BEN McGRATH, 2004-05-10, The New Yorker)

It takes a certain kind of seven-year-old—possessed of an extraordinary sense of his own limitations, or else an unimaginative fantasy life—to watch a professional baseball game and immediately identify with the oldest, slowest person on the field, the guy who, if not for the uniform, could plausibly pass for a math teacher. Sean Flaherty, of Englewood, Florida, was that kid. In April of 1993, the expansion Florida Marlins played their first-ever game, and Sean’s dad pulled him out of first grade to watch at a local sports bar. The Marlins’ starting pitcher that day was the leather-faced forty-five-year-old Charlie Hough, still hanging on after all those years, throwing ghostballs in slo-mo.

“Sean was just mesmerized,” Mike Flaherty, his father, remembers. “From that point on, he grew his nails out, and we played catch every day. I had bruises all over my body.”

Sean Flaherty is now a senior in high school, and possibly the only full-fledged knuckleballer pitching for any secondary school, anywhere. (Like Wakefield, he throws knucklers at least eighty-five per cent of the time.) He is five feet ten and not an obvious athlete—his aspect is that of a firefly chaser—but next year, against all odds, he will be suiting up for the University of Miami, a Division I powerhouse. Sean is also hoping to become the first of his breed ever to be selected in the amateur draft, next month. (And also, presumably, the first pitcher ever drafted who cannot hit eighty on a radar gun. His knuckleball ranges from forty-five to sixty-eight m.p.h., and his fastball tops out in the seventies.)

The day of Tim Wakefield’s first appearance this spring, Sean’s team, the Lemon Bay Manta Rays, had a game of their own in Fort Myers, against the local Riverdale Raiders. Sean arrived at the field late, wearing a tuxedo. He plays tuba in the Florida West Coast Youth Symphony and was coming straight from a performance.

“Sean’s journey has been unique,” Mike Flaherty said, sitting in the bleachers. “He’s a pioneer—he really is.” During the regular season, Mike said, he and Sean catch all of Wakefield’s starts on satellite TV at the same sports bar where the journey began. Last year, they also made regular trips to Sarasota and befriended Charlie Zink. (Sean, who has been throwing the knuckleball for much longer, offered Zink some pointers.)

It was the fourth inning, and Lemon Bay was down, 10-3, by the time Sean took the mound. Riverdale, as it happened, was coached by the former Red Sox left fielder Mike Greenwell. (His son Bo is a freshman first baseman.) Greenwell, who said he’d hit knuckleballs quite well during his playing days, imparted what wisdom he could to his players: “Swing under it—the ball will always drop. Try to lift it.” (This undoubtedly beats the famous hitting coach Charlie Lau’s advice: “There are two theories on hitting the knuckleball. Unfortunately, neither of them works.”) Sean warmed up to the song “Eye of the Tiger,” played on someone’s boom box, and then floated his bubbles: three innings, four strikeouts, one run allowed.

After the game (Riverdale won, 11-5), I joined Sean on the field for a crash course in knuckleball catching. When I’d told Dave Clark, an amateur flutterball fanatic who sent me his “Knucklebook” manuscript, that I planned to play catch with a serious knuckleballer, he said I should make sure to wear a cup. “Wear a mask, too,” he added. “And stand behind the backstop.” I had neither a cup nor a mask, nor an oversized softball mitt (which is what big-league knuckleball catchers traditionally use), but I took my chances, and tried to remember the advice that Doug Mirabelli had given me earlier in the day: let it travel as far as possible; don’t reach out to meet it, or you’re asking for trouble. The first pitch did a little jig about midway, and then darted down and to my right. I got some glove on the ball, but not enough to squeeze it. On two occasions, the ball swerved particularly late—I’d like to believe these were instances such as Professor Adair described, where it is physiologically impossible to react—and struck my unprotected throwing hand.

“How’s it moving?” Sean called out at one point, to my surprise. Then I recalled something Wakefield had told me. “I can’t really see it,” he’d said. “They say it shakes a lot—it goes back and forth. The only thing I can see is the break down or the break to the left or to the right.” For the full visual effect, catcher is where it’s at.

“We call that one the spinner,” Sean said at another moment, after the ball he’d just thrown forged a path almost like that of a roller coaster turning over. The “spinner” is what Hoyt Wilhelm used to call his corkscrew knuckler, perhaps because the pitch itself—not the ball—appears to spin around an invisible axis. Accomplished knuckleballers manage to throw it once in a while, usually by accident—it seems to require a lone, slow rotation of the ball while in orbit. It is, in a sense, the profession’s prize elixir—“If you could bottle one up, that’d be the one you want to keep,” Steve Sparks says—and catching it is a slightly nerve-racking and dizzying experience. Not just for a novice, either: Mirabelli warned me that the corkscrew “kind of hypnotizes you.”

The first pitch of this season’s ongoing Yankees-Red Sox showdown was thrown by—who else?—Tim Wakefield: a lazily arriving called strike. Boston won the game, 6-2, and the Yankees’ three heaviest hitters, Alex Rodriguez, Gary Sheffield, and Jason Giambi, failed to register a hit. Notwithstanding the Game Seven relief appearance, with its Boone misfire (home-run balls remain his Achilles’ heel; no Sox pitcher has allowed more dingers in his Boston career), Wakefield has now beaten the Yankees in four consecutive starts, holding New York’s batters to a pathetic .163 average.

“I don’t want to see that thing again,” Giambi told reporters afterward, and later quipped, “They should pitch him every day against us.”

Wakefield didn’t lose his first game until the beginning of May, when he was outduelled on ESPN by an unheralded Texas Rangers pitcher named R. A. Dickey, who lacks an ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow. Dickey, seemingly an unwitting descendant of Toad Ramsey, throws a specialty knuckle-gripped pitch that he calls “the Thing,” which Boston’s general manager, Theo Epstein, described to me as “one-third knuckleball, one-third breaking ball, one-third split-finger.”

The neat thing is you can learn the grip in a matter of seconds and go out in the yard and toss a ball that barely rotates at all. That's not to say you'll earn millions, but it's the easiest physics lesson this side of a bowling ball.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 10, 2004 12:19 PM