Gabriel is loving R.A. Dickey And The Phenomenon Of The Literary Knucklerballer
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Gabriel commented on Giancarlo Stanton Monster Homerun Sunday Versus the Cubs:
“Amazing home run. Few players in baseball can hit that ball so hard and far. Can't wait for Stanton to earn freedom from the glorified AAA team Marlins and play for a real MLB club.”
Don’t be fooled by the Jerry Seinfeld intonation of this question, because it’s a serious query: What’s the deal with knuckleball pitchers writing books?
Mets pitcher R.A. Dickey, the last knuckleballer left in the major leagues, has a book forthcoming, entitled Wherever I Wind Up. Sports Illustrated published three excerpts of it today – two rather pedestrian samples in which Dickey tells of the time he found a syringe in the Rangers clubhouse bathroom, and the time Buck Schowalter and Orel Hersheiser first pitched the idea of becoming a full-time knuckleballer, plus one startling tale from his childhood, when a female babysitter repeatedly sexually abused him one summer.
Dickey is an interesting (read: weird) guy and has probably written an interest-enough book, but it has me wondering about the curious phenomenon of knuckleballing authors.
Jim Bouton, of course, wrote Ball Four, a behind-the-scenes view of his life in the big leagues after he converted to the knuckler that is one of the best-selling (and best) baseball books of all time. Phil Niekro wrote a book, Knuckle Balls, and wrote another one in tandem with his knuckle-balling brother Joe, called The Niekro Files.
By the percentages, I would guess that knuckleballers have authored books with far more frequency than any other breed of athlete.
The narrative of the knuckleballer is one of the more interesting narratives in pro sports. Most knuckleballers end up that way because they fail at being conventional pitchers, and the conversion experience – of admitting defeat and radically remaking himself – is an intriguing one. It takes a certain kind of guy to be a major-league knuckleballer; most baseball men are too proud and macho to throw such a dandy of a pitch. Knuckleballers are baseball outsiders, prone to observation, prone to thinking in more sophisticated ways than your typical baseball meathead.
But I also think there’s a special appeal that the musings of knuckleballers have to us as fans and readers.
The slow pitch of the knuckleballers give us a tantalizing picture of the Joe-Average Everyman competing against real professional athletes, which makes us identify with the knuckleballer and his perspective. He can imagine ourselves in his shoes, which makes us think that he must see his surroundings the way we would see them.
This is well-mined territory in sports literature, most notably by George Plimpton, who wrote Out Of My League about his experience pitching against the National League All-Star team in 1960. He also wrote his well know Paper Lion about his experience taking snaps in an exhibition game as the quarterback of the Detroit Lions, wrote Bogey Man about his attempt to play pro golf in the 1960s and wrote Open Net about his time training as a goalie with the Boston Bruins. Plimpton also wrote for Sports Illustrated about sparring with Sugar Ray Robinson, playing high-level bridge, doing high-wire circus performing and getting whipped by pro tennis player Pancho Gonzalez.
The knuckleballer-as-Everyman is an illusion, of course. Some of us can throw a pitch 65 mph, but none of us can throw a 65 mph pitch that dances like a butterfly – let alone hit one. But it’s fun to dream – and read – about.
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The narrative of the knuckleballer is one of the more interesting narratives in pro sports. Most knuckleballers end up that way because they fail at being conventional pitchers, and the conversion experience – of admitting defeat and radically remaking himself – is an intriguing one. It takes a certain kind of guy to be a major-league knuckleballer; most baseball men are too proud and macho to throw such a dandy of a pitch. Knuckleballers are baseball outsiders, prone to observation, prone to thinking in more sophisticated ways than your typical baseball meathead.
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