Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Knuckleball

Episode Date: March 30, 2025

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. Sponsors Mint Mobile Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com/eed Quince Go to quince.com/daily for 365-day returns, plus free shipping on your order! Stitch Fix Go to stitchfix.com/everywhere to have a stylist help you look your best Tourist Office of Spain Plan your next adventure at Spain.info  Stash Go to get.stash.com/EVERYTHING to see how you can receive $25 towards your first stock purchase and to view important disclosures. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Austin Oetken & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the game of baseball, it might not seem at first glance that there's much strategy involved in the game. However, there's an enormous amount of strategy that goes into every pitch. Pitchers have different pitches in the repertoire, which can rise, fall, and curve on their way to the batter in an attempt to fool them. However, there is one pitch that is unlike any other. It's so challenging that only a tiny percentage of pitchers in the history of the game 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. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong?

ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. 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're 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 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's a matter of how fast you can 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.

So, 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 causes pressure differences on different sides of the ball. This is largely due to the Magnus effect, a principle in fact. 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 airflow 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 3,000 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-seem fastball, is thrown with backspin.

This backspin counteracts gravity slightly and creates the illusion that the ball is rising, or at least 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 curve ball does just the opposite. It's thrown with top spin, which causes the ball to dip downward sharply as it approaches the batter. The top spin 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 side spin, part top spin. This causes the ball to break laterally and downward, but with a sharper more sudden movement than a curve ball. It usually travels faster than a curve and breaks less, but the movement is sharper and more deceptive, especially to hitters who are expecting a fastball. And then there's the sinker, which is thrown with a bit of a side spin and forward tilt,

causing it to drop and sink as it nears the plate. It often has arm-side movement, meaning it drifts towards the side of the pitcher's throwing arm, and it's effective for inducing ground balls. What all of these pitches have in common, and there are more than the ones I listed, is that the direction of the spin and the amount of spin determine the effectiveness of the pitch. Accomplished baseball pitchers will have several pitches in their repertoire that they can use to try to get batters out. batters likewise will try to determine what pitch pitchers are going to throw so that 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 knuckle ball. The knuckle ball is a type of pitch thrown with little to no spin. Unlike most pitches that rely on high rotation for movement, like fastballs or curve balls, the knuckle ball's lack of spin causes it to move erratically as it travels towards 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 directions multiple times.

Unlike other pitches, where the ball is hopefully going in the direction and speed that the pitcher intends, the knuckle ball's behavior is fundamentally random. That means 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 knuckle ball, the ball is gripped with the fingertips or finger nails, not the knuckles despite the name, usually pressing against the seams. The pitcher pushes the ball forward towards the plate using the fingertips trying to minimize the spin.

Ideally, a good knuckle ball will rotate less than a quarter to half a turn from the pitcher's hand to home plate. Given the nature of the pitch, knuckle balls are thrown much slower than other pitches, often in the 65 to 80 mile per hour range. Because it's 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 knuckle ball, when done right, can be incredibly hard to hit. Because it's so effective, you would think that this is a pitch that most pitchers would have learned. And you would be wrong. In fact, spectacularly 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 been pitchers who have played in at least one professional game since 1876. Remember, only 70 players have been pitchers who have thrown the knuckleball extensively. 70 out of almost 21,000. The history of the knuckleball is as strange and unpredictable as the pitch itself. It emerged in the early 20th century, not from scientific breakthroughs, but from experimentation and improvisation. The origins of the knuckleball are usually traced back to a pitcher named Eddie Seacott, who played in the early 1900s.

Seacott 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 at the fingertips or the fingernails, the name knuckleball stuck. Seacott'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 Haynes 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 the Second World War, the Washington Senators fielded a pitching rotation that included four knuckleballers,

something that has never been seen since. 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 the brothers Phil and Joe Nekro, who brought the pitch into the spotlight in the 1970s and 80s.

Phil Necro in particular became the face of the pitch. winning over 300 games in his career and throwing the knuckle ball with such mastery that it earned him a place in the Hall of Fame. 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 knuckle ball in public view. But by the 2010s, it seemed that the pitch might be fading into obscurity. Until R.A. Dickey revived it with an extraordinary season in 2012. Dickie, who reinvented his career around the knuckleball after early struggles as a conventional pitcher, won the National League Saw 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 Seacott 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. And there's 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 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're not putting enormous amounts of spin on the ball. In fact, the goal is to put zero spin on the ball, and they 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 Necro played until he was 47. Hoyt Wilhelm, Charlie Howe, Joe Necro, and Tim Wakefield also had very long 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 knuckle ball is more or less an endangered species. It's rarely seen in professional baseball and barely taught at the amateur levels. Why? For starters, it isn't easy to do. It takes years to learn how to throw it well. Tim Wakefield has said it takes at least a year to begin to figure out how the pitch works.

There's also a very fine line between a good knuckle ball and a bad knuckle ball. If a knuckle ball rotates even a little bit, it doesn't float, and then it just becomes very easy to hit. At that point, you're just pitching batting practice. Because the pitch can behave so erratically, it also takes a special catcher to be able to catch it. Doug Neer Belly was the personal catcher for Tim Wakefield because he was one of the only catchers who could catch a knuckle ball. Catchers who work with knuckleball pitchers often have very high rates of dropped and passed balls. As the late Bob Euker, who was himself a former catcher once said, quote,

The way you catch a knuckleball 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's often overlooked in favor of more orthodox pitching mechanics. Most of the players in recent history, who were successful knuckleball pitchers adopted the pitch after failing at some other position or with other pitches. That being said, there is a small community of knuckleballers out there. There are knuckleball camps and knuckleball consultants, but you have to go out of your way to work

with them. One of the most famous recent cases was Iri Yoshita, known as the Knuckleball princess. She's a Japanese professional baseball pitcher who made history as the first woman to be drafted by a Japanese men's pro team at the age of 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. And this wasn't 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's a place for pitchers who take the time to master the knuckleball. I hope that there's some kid out there right now who understands that the odds of becoming a big league baseball player are very 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 Oaken and Cameron Kiefer. 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 as podcast of choice.

His goal is to be able to read, come talk on the Discord, and be part of the Completionist Club. What you do matters, and I appreciate you. Thanks, Emily. If your son's listening, tell him that I await his arrival on both the Discord server and the Completionist Club. And I'm proud to hear that he's making progress and is reading and on the podcast. I'm also personally glad to hear that both of you enjoy the show and find it a valuable part of your day. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostogram, you two can have it right on the show.