Knuckleball a mystery even to engineers
Students built a machine that could throw pitch, but it proved unpredictable
“The mystery of the knuckleball prevailed over our efforts.” PROFESSOR DAVID SINTON MECHANICAL ENGINEER
R.A. Dickey often speaks of submitting to his fickle pitch, embracing its unpredictability and accepting the mystery.
He has described the knuckleball as a “metaphor for letting go.”
Engineers, by nature, are less inclined to leave such mysteries unsolved. Armed with their pesky math and science, they want answers.
As such, four mechanical engineering students at the University of Toronto set out to “demystify” the knuckleball by attempting to build the world’s first pitching machine that would replicate the notoriously capricious pitch on a consistent basis.
“The idea was if we could control everything maybe we could get a knuckleball to be the exact same every time,” said Alex Gordon, who coincidentally shares a name with the Kansas City Royals’ all-star left fielder and is one of four since-graduated students who worked on the project last year.
On paper, it seemed doable. If they could control all the variables — velocity, air conditions, the orientation of the ball — theoretically they should be able to propel the ball exactly the same way every time.
In practice, however, the students found that while they could build a machine that consistently threw knuckleballs, they could not duplicate, nor predict, the exact trajectory from one pitch to the next.
“The amount of control you need to throw the same knuckleball every time is unbelievable,” said Martin Côté, who along with Gordon, Jessica Tomasi and Queenie Yuan built the prototype as part of their fourthyear design project — adapting a regular pitching machine with PVC tubes, motors and a series of sensors that modulated the velocity and automatically set the ball in the same orientation before every pitch.
“The mystery of the knuckleball prevailed over our efforts,” said Professor David Sinton, a baseball-loving mechanical engineer who came up with the idea and supervised the project.
Unlike conventional baseball pitches, a knuckleball — which is gripped with one’s fingernails as opposed to knuckles — works by limiting the amount of spin on the ball. The best ones make just half a rotation before they reach the plate. The lack of spin makes the ball unstable and vulnerable to air flow, which interacts with the ball’s seams to create an unpredictable turbulence.
The students found that even the slightest change in conditions — from a small scuff on the ball to the tiniest tilt in its orientation — changed the pitch’s behaviour. “One thing we learned about knuckleballs,” said Côté, “is that they’re so sensitive to everything. That’s why it’s really, really hard to throw the same one twice.”
That’s true as well for Dickey, who always prefers to use a fresh ball and often speaks of how changes in humidity or other weather conditions can have a dramatic effect on the movement of his pitches.
On Saturday in his start against the Tigers, Dickey was hit with his ninth loss of the season. He gave up 11 hits and five earned runs in 52⁄ innings.
3 Sinton and his students had more in mind than just an esoteric experiment. They figured a knuckleball machine could have commercial potential, not only as a training tool for hitters, but also catchers. What they found in surveying baseball coaches across the U.S. and Canada, however, is that the rarity of knuckleballers meant they had little use for a pitching machine that specialized in the marginal pitch.
And like the small fraternity of bigleague knuckleballers — Dickey refers to his forebears, Tim Wakefield, Charlie Hough and Phil Niekro, as the “Jedi Council” — the students say they started to feel a certain kinship with purveyors of the pitch. They watched Dickey’s starts together and read his autobiography. They also watched videos online of Dickey’s best pitches to gauge how their machine stacked up against his best work.
None of that helped with the nittygritty practical engineering of the project — though they did at one point discuss building a bionic arm to “throw” the pitch — but it did give them a better appreciation of his craft. Dickey’s descriptions of his pitches and the elements that work for and against him also proved insightful.
Due to the limitations of their working area, they often had to test the machine in the middle of the night, firing knuckleballs down the engineering building’s empty hallways between midnight and 5 a.m. So like the pitch itself, they were misfits relegated to the margins.
Having spent the better part of a year trying to solve the mystery of the knuckleball — something Dickey says he is still trying to do — Tomasi, in particular, said she felt an emotional connection with the pitcher. “I feel like we understand him now.”