Phil Niekro, the Hall of Fame pitcher who confounded batters with his fluttering knuckleballs . Indeed, Bouton's famous best-selling book Ball Four (1970), while scandalous at the time for its unvarnished and often uncomplimentary portrayal of player behavior and coaching small-mindedness, is primarily a tale of the ups and downs of trying to hang on in the major leagues as a knuckleball pitcher.[29]. [30], The record for passed balls in an inning (4) was first set by Ray Katt of the New York Giants in 1954, catching Hoyt Wilhelm. Seams are you worst enemy. [33] It was tied by So the knuckleball can be very effective. As of 2021, four primary knuckleball pitchers are in the Baseball Hall of Fam e today. Now Niekro is gone, too, and while his pitch might return, there will never be another pitcher quite like him. The knuckleball that danced, dazzled and frustrated hitters and catchers alike, was a gift from Niekro's father, Phil Sr. A semipro pitcher in the Mine Workers League who threw 92 mph, the elder Niekro injured his arm and a coworker showed him how to throw the pitch. Although he may have never looked or pitched like a prototypical major league pitcher, he consistently fooled hitters throughout his career enroute to 318 pitching wins with his very hard to hit knuckleball. If a batter expects an Eephus pitch, they can sit back and swing hard to hit the ball, while a knuckleball pitch has random movement due to the aerodynamic force of the ball, which makes hitting it hard. Dennis is a Fellow of Information Privacy, a Certified Information Privacy Professional/United States and a Certified Information Privacy Technologist with the International Association of Privacy Professionals. Charlie Hough was 46, Tim Wakefield 45, R.A. Dickey 42. The ball completes between one-quarter and one-half a rotation on its way from the pitcher to the batter; the position of the stitches changes as the ball travels, affecting the drag that gives the ball its motion, thus making its flight erratic. Teams look for pitchers to throw harder, so teams shift their focus on pitch type and more about pitch speed. Philip Henry Niekro Jr. was born on April 1, 1939 in Blaine, Ohio, an unincorporated community near the Ohio-West Virginia border, and grew up in nearby Lansing, a town of just 634 people as of 2010. Over the distance from the pitcher's mound to home plate, the effect of these forces is that the knuckleball can flutter, dance, jiggle, or curve in two different directions during its flight. Before the ninth, manager Billy Martin sent Joe out to catch his warm-up pitches; the brothers embraced on the mound, and then Phil bounced his first knuckleball of the day off of Joes leg. Instead of throwing the typical repertoire of fastballs, sliders, curveballs, change-ups, sinkerballs, screwballs, split-fingered fastballs, etc.that most pitchers throw, he relied primarily on a very unique pitch known as the knuckleball that he and his younger brother Joe Niekro another highly successful major league baseball pitcher who won 221 games both learned to throw from their father growing up in Ohio.
