Making Knuckleballers (split from IGT, 6/18/2012)

[Edgy MD]

Wasn't this pretty much Showalter's suggestion to turn Dickey into a fulltime knuckleballer? This is pretty much Frankenstein's monster coming back to get him, isn't it?

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

Yes if you'd like a big sappy column on Showalter's vision and regret, John Harper wrote one in the Snooze today.

[Edgy MD]

If Showalter really had vision --- if anybody did --- they'd identify knuckler candidates and start 'em on the butterfly track a lot earleir.

I wonder why every system doesn't have three knuckleballers at any given time.

[MFS62]

Edgy DC wrote: I wonder why every system doesn't have three knuckleballers at any given time.

The catchers' union has been strongly objecting.

Later

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

Everything I've read indicates the knuckler is antithetical to everything about baseball: It requires pitchers to throw soft not hard, abandon other parts of their repertoire, requires more of catchers, and has a high degree of difficulty so the success rates are bad. IIRC the Red Sox back in the Theo-is-a-genius era were working on a whole cadre of them but I don't think any of them panned out. The Mets quietly ended the Zac Clemmens experiment.

[Edgy MD]

I think folk have to make themselves less failure-averse. In an industry where the vast majority of pitchers fail to blossom anyhow, I think what they fear is looking bad with a non-traditional failure. (As if that's somehow worse.) Nobody wants to expend the energy defending themselves against the "You messed up a young pitcher!" argument.

But if one in three such experiments work, isn't that meaningfully better than the success rates of non-knucklers?

[Ceetar]

Edgy DC wrote: I think folk have to make themselves less failure-averse. in an industry where the vast majority of pitchers fail to blossom anyhow, I think what they fear is looking bad with a non-traditional failure. Nobody wants to expend the energy defending themselves against the "You messed up a young pitcher!" argument. But if one in three such experiments work, isn't that meaningfully better than the success rates of non-knucklers?

Aside from developing full-time knucklers, what about just working with the pitch anyway? That's what Dickey did. He'd thrown knuckleballs his entire life, maybe one or two. So when he was forced to it as a last resort, he wasn't unfamiliar with it.

[Benjamin Grimm]

My sense is that pitchers don't want to become knucklers until they've exhausted every other opportunity. And sometimes they're well into their 30's before they get to that point.

But so many pitchers wash out of the minors before they're 25. You'd think that there would be a good number of them who would be willing to try the knuckleball as a last-ditch effort to hang on.

[metsmarathon]

i think dickey is surely starting to show that you can throw a knuckler harder, as his averages 77 or so mph. since there's no additional leverage applied by his fingers as he releases the ball, it's really not that much different from a change. i'd be curious to see how his arm motion differs from a pitcher who throws upper 80's to see if there's an appreciable difference in radial velocity and other such metrics.

unlike wakefield, he appears to be a regular, non-flame-throwing pitcher who happens to throw a knuckler.

[Edgy MD]

El Thing wrote: You'd think that there would be a good number of them who would be willing to try the knuckleball as a last-ditch effort to hang on.

That's what I'm thinking.

For some of these guys, the end of the line means losing their visa and going back home to cut sugar cane. You don't think they'd throw it between their legs if the coach suggested it might extend their careers?

But I'm guessing that it's the always vulnerable management that views it as a risky proposition, and for those guys to turn their career over to a gimmick pitch, they may have to go through indy ball to do it, where management isn't as charged with the long-term development of their players, and sideshows are often part of the marketing.

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

I don't think knuckleball skills are or even can be selected for, so almost by definition it has to be among a subset of pitchers who've failed to stick otherwise. Showalter mentioned that few are prepared to take it on psychologically since it sort of requires a rejection of everything you've ever learned and a willing step down in machismo.

[Ceetar]

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: I don't think knuckleball skills are or even can be selected for, so almost by definition it has to be among a subset of pitchers who've failed to stick otherwise. Showalter mentioned that few are prepared to take it on psychologically since it sort of requires a rejection of everything you've ever learned and a willing step down in machismo.

Which is why it probably helps to have thrown it before, in limited use. That will also foster the belief that you can pick up the pitch and use it.

It probably equates to the Rick Ankiel and Adam Loewen too. It's just a completely different thing that it might as well be hitting. And guys don't often get the shot to do either in the minors on the companies dime.

[Edgy MD]

I kind get the feeling it's about time that Lance Niekro re-emerged as a knuckler, with the family recipe tucked in his back pocket.

[Benjamin Grimm]

Is he Joe's son? Or Phil's son?

(Holy crap! After I typed that I realized that that's the exact question I used to get when I was a kid, from my grandmother's relatives! My father's name is Joe and his brother's name was Phil!)

[Edgy MD]

Lance, like you, is Joe's son.

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

Has anyone seen this yet?

[youtube:21vrncgq]09pfeKtEj2I[/youtube:21vrncgq]

[Frayed Knot]

The story on Dickey transforming into a knuckleballer - and it's consistent in both RA's book and in recent Showalter articles - is that Buck and then pitching coach Orel Hershiser agreed that Dickey was one of the few they thought to be competitive enough and willing enough to put in the work to make a go of it, the implication being that most pitchers wouldn't or couldn't and, with a lot of failure and frustration sure to follow, that only with a select few would it be worth the effort.

I think just about every big league pitcher (and probably half the position players as well) can throw a knuckler, but that's a long way from being able to pitch with one.

[seawolf17]

Lance Niekro tried it in 2009; got whacked around in the minors and retired to coach.

Part of it is coaching, I'd think. You'd need someone to have the patience to coach you as well someone with the patience to catch you.

[Edgy MD]

Turns out, according to The Post that R.A. has a few disciples after all.


R.A. and high schooler Stephen Orso during spring
training.

[metirish]

Edgy DC wrote: If Showalter really had vision --- if anybody did --- they'd identify knuckler candidates and start 'em on the butterfly track a lot earleir. I wonder why every system doesn't have three knuckleballers at any given time.

Peter Gammons was saying yesterday in the 'Fan that after Wakefields initial success in the 90's some teams did in fact try and develop knuckeballers but for all the things listed above it just isn't easy.

[Edgy MD]

I'm certain it's not. It wasn't for Dickey.

But making players never is. And it seems the big enemy to persisting with such a program is just that sad reality that it's easier emotionally to fail conventionally.

I had a friend named Andrew who realized that nobody got laughed at on the basketball court for a missed shot unless it was an airball. It was a shortsighted epiphany, however, and during one game, he adpted a modus operandi --- to be certain to hit the rim with each shot, and so avoid peer derision. Fantastic bricks with no chance of success from their very conception would fly at the rim and clank back into play. It wasn't until the third such horizontal missile that everybody else on the court doubled over in laughter. Perhaps I was the only one, as failure-averse as I was, to know Andrew's true motivation, and everyone else thought he had just adopted an insane shooting technique. Andrew, furious that his scheme was backfiring, protested that he was hitting the rim! He was no worse than the rest of us chuckers routinely missing with our arcing shots.

He sought to protect his status by pursuing what he saw as a conventional failure, and so sacrificed any possible chance at success.

[soupcan]

Damn Edgy. I thought your story about Andrew was going to end with "...and to everybody's surprise, Andrew ended up actually making 90% of his shots!"

I was just about to start an entirely new training regimen with the hoop in my driveway.

[MFS62]

In Ball Four, Jim Bouton wrote about trying to learn, then master, the knuckler. It made for an interesting read.
I've seen many knuckleball pitchers, from Bud Podbelian (Casey called him "Poodlebean") to Hoyt Wilhelm to lefties Bud Daley and Wilbur Wood to the current guys. But I don't recall any of them who threw it as hard, or consistently for strikes, as R.A.

Later

[Ceetar]

I've got a baseball in my car. maybe I should start practicing at lunch.

[Edgy MD]

Phil Niekro was the original manager of the Silver Bullets chick baseball team and his brother Joe the pitching coach. As many of their players came to them from the softball track, a few pitchers stuck with a sidearme to underhand motion. And considering her coaching, naturally one of them went with an underhand knuckleball. Crazy trying to get one of them over from 60 feet away.

[Ceetar]

Edgy DC wrote: Crazy trying to get one of them over from 60 feet away.

Not that crazy if you're at Hofstra.

[Edgy MD]

Lisa Martinez --- the only underhand knuckleballer known to baseball.

[metsmarathon]

my basketball strategy is to only shoot when i'm either spinning, falling, or fading away. that way, when it goes in, i look awesome, and when it doesn't, well, it was a tough shot to begin with.

actually, the truth is, my mechanics and training is so awful, that my shooting percentage actually increases when all i can do is quickly pick up the rim and heave the ball towards it. set shot, awful. turn-around fadeaway, awesome. turn-around fadeaway while getting mauled by a tiger, superbalicious!

i imagine that htrowing a hard knuckleball may in fact be easier than a slow knuckleball, in terms of getting strikes. i don't know why i should htink that. but i do. i imagine the harder throwing motion to be somewhat more repeatable, if its a natural one, whereas a slowed-up motion might be less natural to a trained pitcher, and therefore more problematic. the alternative is to start throwing the knkuckleball early, so as to build-in hte desired velocity as you learn to pitch, rather than to adjust after the fact.