The Knuckleball

Podcast Transcript

In the game of baseball, it might not seem at first glance that there is much strategy involved in the game.

However, there is an enormous amount of strategy that goes into every pitch in the game.

Pitchers have different pitches in their repertoire, which can rise, fall, and curve on their way to the batter in an attempt to fool the batter.

However, there is one pitch which is unlike any other. It is so challenging that only a tiny percentage of pitchers in history have ever thrown it.

Learn more about the knuckleball, how it works and why it is so rare on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

For those of you who don’t follow baseball or live in a country where baseball isn’t a major sport, you might be baffled by the subject of this episode.

While it is a baseball topic, it also touches on history, culture, and physics.

Before I can get into what makes the knuckleball so unique, I need to explain how baseballs work when they are thrown.

Baseballs are covered with leather. In particular, two pieces of leather that are sewn together to completely cover the ball. The stitches that keep these two pieces of leather together are vitally important to how the entire game works.

These stitches are raised slightly above the ball, which gives the pitcher a better grip on the ball.

Roughly speaking, there are two quantifiable attributes that scouts often look for in a pitcher: velocity and spin.

Velocity is pretty straightforward. It is a matter of how fast you throw the ball. Elite pitchers throw at speeds up to and over 100 miles per hour. The faster you throw, the less time the batter has to react.

Generally speaking, the faster you can throw, the harder it is to hit.

The other factor pitchers are often evaluated on is spin.

Spin plays a central role in determining how a baseball moves through the air after it leaves the pitcher’s hand. When a baseball is spinning, it interacts with the air in a way that creates pressure differences on different sides of the ball. This is largely due to the Magnus effect, a principle in physics that explains how the rotation of a ball can influence its trajectory.

As the ball spins, the surface on one side moves in the direction of the pitch, while the other side moves against it. The side spinning with the air flow creates lower pressure, while the side spinning against it creates higher pressure. This imbalance causes the ball to move in the direction of the lower pressure — essentially, the ball “breaks” or curves away from a straight-line path. The more spin, the more pronounced the effect.

Elite pitchers can achieve a spin rate of over 3000 rotations per minute or RPM.

Different types of pitches use different axes and directions of spin to produce unique movements. A fastball, especially a four-seam fastball, is thrown with backspin. This backspin counteracts gravity slightly and creates the illusion that the ball is rising or staying up longer than expected. It doesn’t actually rise, but it drops less than hitters anticipate, making it feel like it’s “jumping” at the plate.

A curveball does the opposite. It is thrown with topspin, which causes the ball to dip downward sharply as it approaches the batter. The topspin increases the downward pressure, pulling the ball down faster than gravity alone would. The result is a dramatic drop that makes hitters swing over the ball.

A slider is a bit of a hybrid. It’s thrown with a tight, angled spin — part sidespin, part topspin. This causes the ball to break laterally and downward, but with a sharper, more sudden movement than a curveball. It travels faster than a curve and breaks less, but the movement is sharper and more deceptive, especially to hitters who are expecting a fastball.

Then there’s the sinker, which is thrown with a bit of sidespin and forward tilt, causing it to drop and “sink” as it nears the plate. It often has arm-side movement, meaning it drifts toward the side of the pitcher’s throwing arm, and it’s effective for inducing ground balls.

What all of these pitches have in common is that the direction of the spin and the amount of spin determine the effectiveness of the pitch. Accomplished baseball pitchers will have several different pitches in their repertoire that they can use to try and get batters out. Batters, likewise, will try to determine what pitch pitchers are going to throw so they can anticipate where the ball will be.

There is, however, another pitch which is nothing like any of the pitches I just described.

The knuckleball.

A knuckleball is a type of pitch thrown with little to no spin. Unlike most pitches that rely on high rotation for movement, like fastballs or curveballs, the knuckleball’s lack of spin causes it to move erratically as it travels toward the plate.

With almost no spin, the ball is at the mercy of air currents, causing it to “dance” or “flutter” mid-flight. It might veer up, down, left, or right — often changing direction multiple times.

Unlike other pitches, where the ball is hopefully going in the direction and speed that the pitcher intends, the knuckleball’s behavior is fundamentally random.

That means that the batter doesn’t know where the ball is going to be, but neither does the pitcher or the catcher. More on that in a bit…

To throw a knuckleball, the ball is gripped with the fingertips or fingernails, not the knuckles, despite the name, usually pressing against the seams.

The pitcher pushes the ball toward the plate using the fingertips, trying to minimize spin.

Ideally, a good knuckleball rotates less than 1/4 to 1/2 turn from the pitcher’s hand to home plate.

Given the nature of the pitch, knuckleballs are thrown much slower than other pitches, often in the 65 to 80 miles per hour range. Because it is so much slower than other pitches, it often throws off a hitter’s rhythm, especially if they’re used to facing fastballs in the 90s.

So, a knuckelball, when done right, can be incredibly hard to hit.

Because it can be so effective, you would think that this is a pitch that most pitchers would have learned.

….and you would be wrong. Spectulacurally wrong.

In the history of Major League Baseball, as of opening day 2025, there have been 20,787 players who have played in at least one professional game since 1876.

Of that number, only 70 players have been pitchers who have thrown the knuckleball extensively. 70 out of almost twenty-one thousand.

The history of the knuckleball is as strange and unpredictable as the pitch itself. It emerged in the early 20th century, not from a scientific breakthrough, but from experimentation and improvisation. The origins of the knuckleball are usually traced back to a pitcher named Eddie Cicotte, who played in the early 1900s.

Cicotte was looking for a way to reduce spin on the ball and stumbled upon a grip that involved digging his knuckles into the seams. Though later iterations of the pitch would be thrown with the fingertips or fingernails, the name “knuckleball” stuck.

Cicotte’s version of the pitch baffled hitters with its unpredictable movement, and soon others began to experiment with it. In the 1920s and ’30s, pitchers like Jesse Haines and Dutch Leonard helped popularize the knuckleball further. During the mid-20th century, a small but persistent group of pitchers began to adopt it as a full-time weapon, including a few who threw it nearly exclusively. What made the knuckleball special was that it allowed pitchers with otherwise average velocity to become effective hurlers.

In the 1940s, during WWII, the Washington Senators fielded a pitching rotation that included four knuckleballers, something that’s never been repeated.

Throughout the decades, the pitch remained a fringe technique, usually passed down informally from one practitioner to the next. There was no official instruction manual, and most coaches didn’t know how to teach it, which only added to its mystique.

In the modern era, the knuckleball’s torch was carried by legends like Hoyt Wilhelm, one of the first relief pitchers enshrined in the Hall of Fame, and later by brothers Phil and Joe Niekro, who brought the pitch into the spotlight during the 1970s and ’80s. Phil Niekro in particular became the face of the pitch, winning over 300 games in his career and throwing the knuckleball with such mastery that it earned him a place in Cooperstown.

Tim Wakefield kept the tradition alive into the 2000s, spending nearly two decades with the Boston Red Sox. His success with the pitch, including pivotal postseason appearances, kept the knuckleball in public view. But by the 2010s, it seemed the pitch might be fading into obscurity — until R.A. Dickey revived it with an extraordinary season in 2012. Dickey, who reinvented his career around the knuckleball after early struggles as a conventional pitcher, won the National League Cy Young Award that year.

There are four pitchers in the Hall of Fame who used the knuckleball extensively, and there would be five if Eddie Cicotte hadn’t been banned from baseball for betting on the 1919 World Series.

In fact, knuckleball pitchers have been three and a half times more likely to be inducted into the Hall of Fame than regular players.

There is also something else.

As baseball has become more specialized, there has been greater and greater demand for pitchers who have high velocity and high spin rates.

The problem is, pitching this way puts incredible stress on a pitcher’s arm. Pitchers have been pitching fewer innings in an attempt to put less stress on their arms. Most teams now have pitch counts that a player cannot go over for this reason.

However, knuckleball pitchers don’t have these problems. They are not putting enormous amounts of spin on the ball. In fact, the goal is to put zero spin on the ball. They also aren’t throwing very hard.

The result is that the few knuckleball pitchers that have found success have been able to have extremely long careers. Phil Niekro played until he was 47. Hoyt Wilhelm, Charlie Hough, Joe Niekro, and Tim Wakefield all also had lengthy careers.

So, you’d think that there would be demand for this type of pitcher who has demonstrated success in the past and can throw more innings in more games without damaging their arms?

But, again, you’d be wrong.

Today, the knuckleball is more or less an endangered species. It’s rarely seen in professional baseball and barely taught at amateur levels.

Why?

For starters, it isn’t easy to do. It takes years to learn how to throw it well. Time Wakefield has said it takes at least a year to begin to figure out how it works.

There is also a very fine line between a good knuckleball and a bad knuckeball. If a knuckelball rotates even a little bit, it doesn’t float, and it becomes very easy to hit.

Because the pitch can behave so erratically, it takes a special catcher to be able to catch it. Doug Mirabelli was the personal catcher for Tim Wakefield because he was one of the few catchers who could catch a knuckleball. Catchers who work with knuckleball pitchers often have very high rates of dropped and passed balls.

As the late Bob Ucker once said, “The way you catch a knuckelball is to wait for it to stop rolling and pick it up.”

Perhaps more importantly, it’s unconventional and often discouraged in youth development.

Coaches may not know how to teach or refine it, so it is often overlooked in favor of more “orthodox” pitching mechanics.

Most of the players in recent history who were successful knuckelball pitchers adopted the pitch after failing at other positions or with other pitches.

That being said, there is a small community of knuckleballers out there. There are knuckleball camps and consultants, but you have to go out of your way to work with them.

One of the more famous recent cases was Eri Yoshida, known as the “Knuckleball Princess.” She is a Japanese professional baseball pitcher who made history as the first woman to be drafted by a Japanese men’s pro team at age 16.

Inspired by knuckleballer Tim Wakefield, she taught herself the notoriously difficult pitch at the age of 14 and developed a unique sidearm delivery.

Yoshida later played in U.S. independent leagues, becoming the first woman to play professional baseball in both Japan and the United States.

This wasn’t a totally a marketing gimmick either. She won games with her knuckleball.

There probably will never be a lot of knuckleball pitchers in baseball at any level. However, I think there is a place for pitchers who take the time to master the knuckleball.

I hope that there is some kid out there who understands that the odds of becoming a big league baseball player are slim and that the best strategy might be to learn the pitch that very few have ever mastered, the knuckleball.

The Executive Producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The Associate Producers are Austin Oetken and Cameron Kieffer.

Today’s review comes from listener Emily over on the Discord server. They write.

Gary, my highly dyslexic, extremely curious, and intelligent 11-year-old loves your show. We drive an hour each day to a special reading school, and you are his podcast of choice. His goal is to be able to read, to come talk on the Discord, and to be part of the completionist club! What you do matters, and I appreciate you!

Thanks, Emily! If your son is listening, tell him that I await his arrival on both the Discord server and the completionist club, and I’m proud to hear he is making progress in his reading and on the podcast.

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