Knuckler (5 page)

Radar guns often can be unnecessary.

"I remember blinking the first time I saw that," Lajoie recalled of the perspiration spray. "And then the ball was past me."

Thus, the question persists: if power is so highly regarded in baseball, why would anyone invest in a knuckleballer at all?

The answer: innings.

Lots of 'em.

On the whole, most people see the game of baseball from the wrong perspective. Final outcomes are reported in the form of scores like 4–3, 7–2, and 6–5 when they could just as easily be reported as 3–4, 2–7, and 5–6. Baseball, after all, is the only game in which the
defense
controls the ball. The idea is to prevent runs as much as to score them. Some would argue that run prevention is the far greater goal of the competition.

That explains why pitching has been, is, and always will be the most
valuable commodity in the game, the simplest foundation upon which any formula for success is built.

Without pitching, quite simply, a team has virtually no chance to win consistently.

Given that fundamental truth, the pitcher's simplest objective is the out. To win any regulation game, a team must record three per inning, 27 in all. For as much emphasis as has been placed on pitching statistics over the years—wins, for example, can be terribly misleading because they reflect a
team
accomplishment more than an individual one—certain elements of the game have been taken for granted and glossed over for so long that their meaning has been lost. Outs and, thus, innings are chief among them. During the course of a major league season, the average team totals somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,440 innings pitched, which translates into 4,320 outs per season. Those outs typically are distributed among the members of a pitching staff that undergoes constant change throughout the course of the year. Injured pitchers are replaced by healthy ones, and ineffective pitchers by the potentially more successful. In the end, in the modern era, the successful pitchers on any team record somewhere between 600 and 750 outs per year, placing their innings total somewhere between 200 and 250.

In 2009, during a major league season in which 664 pitchers recorded at least one out—this included some positional players forced to pitch in one-sided losses so as to preserve the health of the real pitchers—a mere 36 pitched 200 innings or more. That number translates into 1.2 pitchers for each of the 30 major league teams. Those 36 pitchers had earned run averages (ERAs) ranging from 2.48 to 5.04, and they pitched for teams that were good, bad, and everywhere in between. While their salaries ranged from the current major league minimum ($424,000 per season for Washington Nationals newbie John Lannan) to a whopping total of more than $23 million per year (for decorated New York Yankees ace C. C. Sabathia), the large majority of those pitchers earned millions of dollars per season and ranked among the highest-paid pitchers in baseball.

To the teams, the innings are what matter as much as anything. The outs are what they will pay for.

And there is nothing an effective knuckleballer can give a team more than a mountain of outs.

"Basically, the game of baseball is a .500 game," said Lajoie, noting that most players and teams lose as much as they win over any significant length of time. "I think it's the innings that become more important with a knuckleball pitcher and the frequency with which he can be used when you evaluate the contribution he can make to a staff."

In the end, it all adds up to the same thing: Outs. Longer outings. Shorter rest. More outs. In the baseball world, knuckleballers are marathoners capable of short sprints in between outings. Sometimes they can run one marathon after the next. And even though there have been only a few select pitchers in baseball history who have effectively thrown the pitch, the payoff has been huge for the teams with the good fortune to have had a knuckleballer on their staff.

Consider: since the start of the 1970 season, a major league pitcher has thrown as many as 330 innings in a season only 11 times; six of them were knuckleballers. (Right-hander Phil Niekro and left-hander Wilbur Wood each accomplished the feat three times.) Since Walter Johnson retired in 1927, no pitcher in the history of the game—including the ageless Nolan Ryan—has thrown more innings (or recorded more outs) than Niekro, who pitched 5,404 innings over the course of 24 full seasons, totaling 16,212 outs and
averaging
slightly more than 225 innings per season. During his career, Niekro finished among the league's top 10 pitchers in innings 11 times; for five consecutive years in the early 1970s, Wood finished in the top
five
of American League hurlers in innings pitched; and in the 1980s, after being named a full-time starting pitcher for the first time in his career, knuckleballer Charlie Hough ripped off a stretch of 12 consecutive seasons during which he totaled just under 2,745 innings and averaged 229 innings pitched, a total that placed him among the most valuable pitchers in baseball.

As for Tim Wakefield, whose career included stints as both a starter and a reliever, his value was infinitely higher in the former role. During his nine full seasons as a starting pitcher for the Red Sox, Wakefield pitched 1,810 innings, an average of slightly more than 201 innings per season during an era when most other pitchers were asked to pitch
less, when some were protected to a fault, and when conventional pitchers broke down more frequently while being asked to do
less.

"With the importance of innings pitched, why the hell hasn't there been more effort to teach this pitch?" asked Lajoie. "Hell, everybody throws a slider. To me, it should be part of a program where you pick certain guys to experiment with. Why not? The length of career is unbelievable on [knuckleballers].

"We have an unwritten rule in baseball: a guy with a good arm who plays a position and can't hit, you almost always try him as a pitcher before releasing him," Lajoie continued. "There is no reason in hell that we can't take a fully coordinated, athletically gifted person who loves baseball and put him in a program where he might be able to develop [as a knuckleballer]. Wakefield is actually getting to the point where he is the last of a dying breed."

Indeed, while the knuckleball will always exist, the population seems to be dwindling. By late in the 2009 season, New York Mets right-hander R. A. Dickey had boosted his fledgling career by joining the list of knuckleballers and was just starting to be regarded as a true knuckleballer who relied on the pitch the large majority of the time. But the knuckleball was being increasingly looked upon as a trick pitch. Few pitchers were throwing it and fewer were teaching it.

As Tim Wakefield approached the end of his career, a long and distinguished line of knuckleballers seemed to be fading with him.

The roots of the knuckleball can be traced back to the early 20th century and perhaps beyond, and knuckleball historians are often quick to mention the Hall of Fame career of knuckleballer Jesse Haines, who won 210 games for the St. Louis Cardinals from 1920 to 1937. And yet, almost all knuckleball discussions begin and end with Hoyt Wilhelm, who won 143 games and saved 227 others while pitching for nine organizations during a 21-year career that ranged from 1952 to 1972.

Wilhelm lived to the age of 80 before dying in 2002. He left behind a career that disproved many theories about the knuckler—specifically that the pitch cannot be as effective at the
end
of the game as it is at the beginning, something Wakefield also would prove—and spawned a
lineage of knuckleballers that began with left-hander Wilbur Wood.

"As far as I'm concerned," Wood said of Wilhelm, "he was the king of the pitch."

A New England native who turned 69 late in 2010, Wilbur Forrester Wood was affectionately known as "Wilbah" during a high school career in Belmont, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston where
r
's are forever optional and
w
's are in great supply. As an amateur, Wilbur Wood was a conventional pitcher who won a lot of games. He signed with the Red Sox as a free agent in 1960 and made his major league debut in 1961, though, as he put it, his fastball "was a few yards too short." Wood had dabbled some with the knuckleball as a youngster because his father was an amateur pitcher who threw a palmball, a spinless pitch that captured his son's attention.

"It had no rotation the way he threw it," Wood said of his father's palmball. "Who doesn't want to be like Dad?"

And so son emulated father.

Sort of.

After a relatively undistinguished career with the Red Sox and Pittsburgh Pirates from 1961 to 1965—he went a combined 1–8 in the major leagues before spending all of 1966 in the minors—Wood was traded from the Pirates to the Chicago White Sox during the off-season prior to the 1967 season. Wood cost Chicago a soon-to-be-30-year-old pitcher named Juan Pizarro, but the White Sox believed that Wood had a great upside as a knuckleballer, particularly if he had the proper guidance and tutelage to harness what was regarded as one of the game's most intriguing weapons.

As it was, the White Sox had the perfect mentor for Wood, an aging, longtime reliever who was coming off a 1966 season during which he went 5–2 with a 1.66 ERA and six saves despite having turned 44 that July.

His name was Hoyt Wilhelm.

For Wood, who was still just 25 entering the 1967 season, the opportunity to serve as an apprentice to someone like Wilhelm was an extraordinary opportunity—and for multiple reasons. For one, Wood was running out of chances. For another, aside from being "the king
of the knuckleball," as Wood put it, Wilhelm was one of the few men in baseball history who understood the challenges and nuances of the pitch and could provide Wood with a vital support group of one.

"The way my career was going, I had to do something or I had to pack it up and go home," Wood said. "It was great because you had someone [in Wilhelm] to talk to. A lot of pitching coaches and managers, they don't know a lot about the knuckleball. It's not like they can talk to you about it like it's a curveball or a slider. They don't know that much about it. Johnny Sain [the team pitching coach who won 20 games in a season four times as a pitcher with the Boston Braves] was one of the best pitching coaches around. He came right out and said, 'I can't help you with the knuckleball.' Especially in the beginning, it really helped [having Wilhelm as an adviser] because I had someone to talk to when things were going wrong."

In 1967, during his first season with the White Sox, and pitching largely as a relief pitcher, Wood appeared in 51 games and had by far his best major league season, going 4–2 with a 2.45 ERA and four saves. A year later, with Wilhelm still watching closely—Chicago had the most unusual potential to summon knuckleballers out of its bullpen from both the left
and
right sides—Wood pitched in a major league–leading 88 games while going 13–12 with a 1.87 ERA and 16 saves. Following that season, the White Sox lost the then-46-year-old Wilhelm to the Kansas City Royals via the major league expansion draft, though by then the student had learned enough from the teacher to have become equipped with his own diagnostics program.

From 1968 to 1970, during a span covering three full major league seasons, nobody pitched in more major league games than Wilbur Wood—and the competition wasn't even close. While going 32–36 ("Basically, the game of baseball is a .500 game"), Wood made an impressive 241 appearances, 33 more than his next-closest peer. While posting a 2.50 ERA and amassing 52 saves, Wood pitched precisely 400⅓ innings—also the highest total in baseball among all relief pitchers. Wood had developed into such a force that, following the 1970 campaign, the White Sox did a very logical thing.

They increased his workload.

And they made him a starter.

Over the next five seasons, from 1971 to 1975, Wood started 224 games, more than any pitcher in baseball, and won 106, more than any pitcher in the game except eventual Hall of Famer Jim "Catfish" Hunter. Of his 224 starts, an incredible 199 came on fewer than four days of rest. (The next-closest man on the list, power left-hander Mickey Lolich, made 140 starts on fewer than four days.) During those five seasons, Wood ranked among the major league leaders with a 3.08 ERA. He recalled regularly pitching two games a
week
—the first in a weekly Sunday doubleheader and then, on just two days of rest, another on the following Wednesday. For a salary that ended up in the range of $125,000 per season during the most productive years of his career, Wood essentially did the work of two modern pitchers, who might earn somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million—or more—
each.

"I went through a period where I pitched on Sunday and Wednesday for about two and a half years," Wood recalled. "I was filling two spots because of the doubleheader. The team didn't have to find another starter," he explained, and at a time when three days of rest was customary for pitchers, "that kept everybody else on a four-day rotation."

Indeed, for as much as Wood gave the White Sox, the benefit to the team was even greater. Because Wood was taking up so much of the workload as well as pitching on short rest, the White Sox could handle everyone else on the pitching staff with greater care and boost their productivity.

Along the way, Wood's durability became the stuff of legend, particularly during a 1973 season in which he led the league with 359⅓ innings pitched, a total of 17⅓ innings
fewer
than the mind-numbing 376⅔ innings he pitched in 1972 and the highest total in baseball history since World War I. (Of the five highest single-season innings totals posted since 1919, Wood's 1972 and 1973 seasons rank as numbers 1 and 5.) During a doubleheader against the New York Yankees on July 20, 1973, Wood accomplished the rare feat of starting both games of a doubleheader, something no pitcher has accomplished since. And while White Sox manager Chuck Tanner remembered starting Wood
in the second game solely because Wood did not record an out among the six batters he faced in the first inning of the first game—as it happened, the White Sox lost both games—no manager today would even consider such a maneuver under similar circumstances for fear of injuring a pitcher in whom his bosses had made a multimillion-dollar investment. The idea of such caution made Wood chuckle.