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Knuckle Ball Pitch
Sports Painting
 Baseball Art by John Robertson
50" X 70'' acrylic/latex
on unstretched canvas

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 
A knuckleball (or knuckler for short) is a baseball pitch with an erratic, unpredictable motion. The pitch is thrown so as to minimize the spin of the ball in flight. This causes vortices over the stitched seams of the baseball during its trajectory, which can cause the pitch to change direction, including corkscrew, mid-flight. This makes the pitch difficult for batters to hit, but also difficult for pitchers to control. The challenge also extends to the catcher—who must at least attempt to catch the pitch—and the umpire, who must determine whether the pitch was a strike or ball.

The identity of the first pitcher to throw a knuckleball is uncertain, but it appears to have been developed in the early 20th century. Lew "Hicks" Moren [1906] of the Philadelphia Phillies was credited as its inventor. However, Eddie Cicotte apparently also came up with the pitch while at Indianapolis, and brought it to the major leagues two years later [1908]. Since Cicotte had a much more successful career (and also gained later notoriety as one of the players implicated in the Black Sox scandal), his name is the one most often associated with the invention of the pitch today.

As used by Cicotte, the knuckleball was originally thrown by holding the ball with the knuckles, hence the name of the pitch. Ed Summers, a Pittsburgh teammate of Cicotte who adopted the pitch and helped develop it, modified this by holding the ball with his fingertips and using the thumb for balance. This grip can also include digging the fingernails into the surface of the ball. The fingertip grip is actually more commonly used today by pitchers who throw the knuckleball, like Boston's Tim Wakefield, who has a knuckleball with a lot of movement, or hall of famer Phil Niekro, who had a very effective knuckler and knucklecurve. However, youngsters with smaller hands tend to throw the knuckleball with their knuckles. Sometimes these youngsters will even throw the knuckleball with their knuckles flat against the ball, giving it less spin but also making it difficult to throw any significant distance.

Regardless how the pitch is gripped, the purpose of the knuckleball is to avoid the rotational spin normally created by the act of throwing a ball. In the absence of this rotation, the ball's trajectory is significantly affected by variations in airflow caused by differences between the smooth surface of the ball and the stitching of its seams. The asymmetric drag that results will tend to deflect the trajectory toward the side with the stitches.