THE LAST KNUCKLER?
Dickey could close streak
The knuckleball as metaphor is nothing new.
Jim Bouton threw the sports world a wild knuckler with his inside baseball book, Ball Four, revealing the off-field romps of Mickey Mantle and the New York Yankees that baseball books just didn’t do in the mythmaking era of the late 1960s. Every athlete-tell-all book in its wake is in some way a tip of the cap to Bouton.
The non-metaphorical knuckler was the pitch itself, which Bouton felt compelled to develop after hurting his arm and losing a foot or so off his fastball.
His juicy revelations aside, Bouton argued in Ball Four that the knuckleball was a pitch worthy of respect, even if traditional managers grew ulcers at the mere thought of sending a starter out to the mound to toss a pitch at batting practice speed, not knowing where it might end up (their worst fears? — 30 rows deep in the bleachers).
“A lot of times I release that ball, and I’m at the mercy of the ball,” says Blue Jays knuckleballer Robert Allen (R.A.) Dickey, by phone, “and the climate, the wind and everything else. There has to be a real Zen mentality to surrendering to the pitch once you let it go.”
At some level, the knuckleball has reached cult status — have you seen the Knuckleball! 2012 documentary? Or Dickey TV ads? At baseball clinics, kids flock to Dickey, asking him to demonstrate, for a thousandth time, the grip on his knuckleball, the key to making the ball dance, dart, float to the plate — the pitch Willie Stargell famously described as “a butterfly with hiccups.”
“I think people relate to it well because it’s kind of a working man’s pitch,” says Dickey, another in a long line of pitchers who developed the knuckler out of necessity.
“John Doe can come to the game and see that I throw most of my pitches at 75 miles an hour and think, ‘well, I can maybe do that!’”
And yet, for all the pitch’s lore, now that Tim Wakefield has retired from the Boston Red Sox, Dickey, a Nashville native, is the last active knuckleballer in the major leagues.
Age 39, he jokes that he has to hang on until the next wave of knucklers comes through, or run the risk of ending a streak of about 100 years in which there has been at least one knuckler in the bigs. (To glean the history of the pitch, check out the website of the International Knuckleball Academy).
Has the pitch garnered more respect today than when Jim Bouton was tossing knucklers for the Seattle Pilots in 1969? Dickey believes it has, to a point.
“I think we’ve progressed as an industry,” Dickey says. "I think if you can get people out, they don’t care if you kick it over the plate, much less use a knuckleball. Like with any pitcher, I think the thing you want to be is trustworthy.
“What most knuckleballers have trouble with is being trustworthy. It’s tough to throw a pitch that doesn’t spin, over the plate for strikes all the time. Sometimes, you can have some pretty ugly outings. But at the end of the year, you look back over the course of 34 starts, and you’ve actually been a really valuable commodity. So, my hope is that you’re judged on your performance, not on the pitch that you throw.”
By his own admission, Dickey’s performance this season has been so-so. He grades himself a “six out of 10.” This was before his latest hard-luck outing, eight innings of work in a 4-1 loss to the Oakland A’s Thursday, dropping the record to 6-8 with a 4.18 ERA.
A notoriously slow starter, Dickey foresees a better second half. The entire ball club has to imagine a resurgence, after faltering in June (12-15, after a 5-0 start) losing their first-place status. Dickey figures the club will probably add an asset or two, but still believes in the team as it is. Remember, he says, this same group on paper was predicted to do great things a year ago.
Dickey considers himself just a piece of the puzzle, although he was brought in to be the ace of the staff. Lefty Mark Buehrle leads the club in wins with 10 and has a 2.60 ERA. Dickey leads the team in strikeouts with 94, and is second on the staff in innings pitched only to Buehrle. His knuckler is still elusive. What’s hurt Dickey are the 16 home runs.
“The thing that’s tough, when you win a Cy Young, people think you should win one every year and that’s always a difficult position to be in,” Dickey says. “At the same time, I have one goal and that’s to win a World Series, that’s the whole reason I came to Toronto. I thought we had the personnel to do it.”
The first knuckleball pitcher to win a Cy Young Award (he was 20-6 with the 2012 New York Mets), Dickey has his own version of knuckler as metaphor. Every five days, he sends that blind-faith pitch toward home; meanwhile his ongoing Dickies campaign (associated with the Dickies clothing line) features everyday people who have faced their own knuckleball pitches in life. (See the Dickies Facebook page for details on how to share personal stories and win weekly prizes).
“They’re giving people a platform to share their narrative,” says Dickey, who has his own story of overcoming odds to reach the big leagues, including being sexually abused as a child, then getting drafted and offered a large bonus only to have it dramatically reduced because he had no ulnar collateral ligament in his pitching arm.
“That’s part of my narrative,” he says. “What connects us as human beings is that we all at some point have to step through some adversity. It’s an opportunity to share what they’ve been through and maybe impact other people for the good.”