Blue Jays knuckleballer not your typical athlete
TORONTO – You could not make up the R.A. Dickey story if you tried. The up-from-the-depths theme is familiar, even hackneyed. That part is easy. But as you frame in the multiple subplots and fill in the alleged facts, you start to realize no one would believe all of this stuff.
As wild and sometimes scary as his tale has been so far, Dickey’s incredible journey has just taken another ridiculous turn. The baseball part of his saga just might generate an improbably happy ending.
After rising from a ruinous personal life and a ruined career, he found astonishing success on the mound for the New York Mets last season. But they were, after all, the Mets, who were fun to watch mainly when Dickey was pitching.
So when it became clear a few weeks ago general manager Sandy Alderson was trying to trade his Cy Young Award winner, Dickey had one request.
“If you’re going to do this, please do it to a team that can win,” he told his boss.
On Saturday, moments after Alderson called him with the trade news, Dickey got another call from his new boss, Alex Anthopoulos. They met for four hours. And Dickey heard things he had never heard before from a general manager.
“I got to hear from the mouth of the leader of the organization what his vision was and how I fit into that vision,” he said. “It makes you feel good, that you felt wanted. You felt like you were going to make a difference. You felt like the place you were going had a real chance to do something special.”
The place is Toronto, the team the Blue Jays. Imagine that.
Dickey spent 48 minutes Tuesday on a conference call with reporters, first getting to know Toronto writers, then taking questions from familiar voices in New York. By the end, the Toronto contingent understood what their New York counterparts had known for three years: R.A. Dickey is thoughtful, articulate and open, his discourse virtually devoid of clichés, whether discussing his emotions or his knuckleball. He is no ordinary ballplayer.
As a boy, his life was scarred by sexual abuse and a troubled home life. As a man, his demons drove him to the edge of suicide. As a pitcher, his career was ordinary and worse before the Texas Rangers saved him in 2005 by suggesting he become a full-time knuckleballer.
In his first big-league start as a full-time knuckleball pitcher, he gave up six home runs and was quickly dispatched to the minors. This new pitch would take some time.
He was 34 in 2010, pitching for the Mets’ AAA team in Buffalo, when things changed. The turning point was a start in which he yielded a single to the first batter he faced, then retired 27 in a row.
“Finally, I wasn’t having to think about mechanics and I wasn’t having to think about where do you put your foot and where do you have your wrist and how high is your elbow,” he recalled. “It was a much more organic experience for me, where I could just go out there and instinctually perform and get the results that I wanted. From then on, it’s just been a real rapid growing period.”
That organic sense quickly lifted him to the big leagues, where he has enjoyed three straight remarkable seasons. In that period, he has thrown more than 600 innings with a 2.95 ERA. In parts of seven seasons before 2010, his ERA was 5.43.
And now, almost in the blink of an eye, he goes from a bad Mets team to a club that has not sniffed the playoffs in 20 years. But during that same blink, the traditionally tightfisted Jays opened the vaults, made a gigantic trade with Miami, signed two worthy free agents and acquired the best pitcher in the National League.
“I’m all in,” said Dickey. “I’m going to pitch my guts out for the Toronto Blue Jays, the fan base there. (Anthopoulos) knows what he’s getting and I know what I’m getting. I feel like that’s a good start to a good marriage.”