The dying art of the knuckleball (cont.)

Phil Niekro had a Hall-of-Fame career with the knuckleball, winning 318 games.

So what does it take to master the knuckleball? "I don't know if I ever did master it," says Niekro, a Hall of Famer who won 318 games with the pitch. "Even by the time I'd retired. I don't know if anyone ever masters it."

There's far more mystery surrounding the knuckleball than hard knowledge. Physicists don't even agree, exactly, on why the pitch does what it does; pitchers report that they can't see the ball's legendary darting movement -- relying on their catchers for word of how well it's dancing -- and most fans have never truly glimpsed one in all its hiccupping glory, either. Viewed from, say, the first-baseline seats, a knuckleball looks totally ordinary, like a guy playing catch.

The pitch gets its movement from the disruption of the airflow around the baseball's seams. The physics are as dizzying as the pitch itself, but suffice to say that the disrupted air causes a pressure drop along the leading seam, and the ball follows the low pressure. As the ball rotates -- slightly, slowly -- the low-pressure spot changes and the ball will shift in another direction. Several other elements enter into the process, including wake, and the Magnus Effect (a physical phenomenon where a spinning object creates a whirlpool of rotating air), but the bottom line is that the knuckleball pitcher wants about half a rotation on the ball from mound to plate, maybe one full rotation, but any more than that and the effect is ruined. You're left with a junior-high fastball spinning toward a major-league batter.

So the knuckleballer needs to muffle spin. That starts with grip. Yet there is no one way to properly grip the pitch; in fact, there are almost as many different knuckleball grips as there have been knuckleball pitchers. Wakefield uses a two-seam, two-finger grip, with his right pinky flaring off the ball on delivery. Niekro used two fingers, straddling the seam; Charlie Zink, a Red Sox prospect with Triple-A Pawtucket, also straddles the seam, Niekro-style, but uses a part-knuckle, part-fingernail grip. "I actually stick my index knuckle on the ball," he says, "and then my middle fingernail." The hybrid grip is working for him: through Thursday, Zink was 8-2 with a 2.33 ERA and a 1.01 WHIP.

The next step after killing rotation is learning to repeat your mechanics. Wakefield may look like your neighbor's dad soft-tossing at a backyard barbecue when he sends his floaters plateward, but there's much more to his delivery than meets the eye. It's not a gimmicky, trick pitch. "That's the biggest misconception," says Kevin Cash, who replaced Doug Mirabelli as Wakefield's catcher last season. "There's a lot of thought and detail that goes into what he does. He throws the knuckleball, but he's a big-league pitcher. And what he does to major-league hitters at 65 miles an hour, some guys don't have as much success doing it at 95 miles per hour."

While a conventional pitcher throwing a fastball strides toward the plate to increase leverage, and flicks his wrist at his release point to increase spin, a knuckleball pitcher shortens up his stride and keeps his wrist stiff. He also pushes his fingers out behind the ball, straight at the catcher, to kill spin. And it all has to be done just so, every time, or you risk disaster. "You can throw a fastball poorly, and if you have a good arm, it still might work," says Hough. "But a poorly thrown knuckleball never works."

With all its moving parts, and the need to repeat very specific mechanics, the knuckleball delivery lends ready comparisons to the golf swing. Both Zink and Haeger, the White Sox prospect, considered pro golf careers before committing to baseball. "Mentally, just the patience in golf and having to keep the same tempo the whole way through. That really helps you out with throwing the knuckleball," says Zink. "You can't overswing in golf, and you can't overthrow this pitch. So it goes along with what I do really well."

Wakefield adds that, as with the golf swing, there's very little margin for error in throwing the knuckleball. He talks about "going around on one," or "getting too far on the inside of one." Translation: "I'm either hooking it, or slicing it." Either mistake can produce spin, which, in turn, can produce a ball traveling "475 feet in the opposite direction," in the words of former knuckleballer Jim Bouton.

It takes a certain type to throw a high-finesse, low-velocity pitch into the teeth of major-league hitting -- when everyone knows what's coming. "You gotta be pretty calm, and yet pretty competitive," says Hough. "It's not a pitch you can muscle up on."

"You can't care what other people think of it," says Niekro. "Because I was called every name in the book out there on the mound: 'knuckle-brain,' 'pus arm.' Which was okay, because I knew they were frustrated and they didn't like it, they were having a hard time with it."

"It's gotta be somebody that has a carefree attitude," says Wakefield. "I don't mean 'carefree' like you don't care, but that you're not full of care or any less care, you're just in the middle. Where you're willing to take your lumps and not get down on yourself, because when you lose the feel of [the pitch] for a while, it can be bad. But just try to stay as even-keeled as you can."

"I know I get along with all the other knuckleballers," says Zink. "So maybe there is [a type]. We're all really laid-back. I'm guessing that's gotta help."