Knuckler by Tim Wakefield Read Free Book Online

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