Now Pitching

Tim Wakefield

Roger knows my favorite Red Sox pitcher is not Cy Young-winner Pedro Martinez or redeemed star Derek Lowe, but the quiet starter and knuckleballer Tim "Wake" Wakefield. (Although I also have a soft spot for closer Keith "Lights Out" Foulke.)

The New Yorker ran an article on Wake on May 17, 2004, detailing his entrance into the Majors, including his early history with the Pittsburgh Pirates (Go Bucs!), and explaining the unique nature of his favorite pitch. Here is an excerpt from that piece:

The knuckleball - also known as the knuckler, the fingernail ball, the fingertip ball, the flutterball, the floater, the dancer, the bug, the butterfly ball, the moth, the bubble, the ghostball, the horseshoe, the dry spitter, and, curiously, the spinner - has been around, in one form or another, for nearly as long as professional baseball itself, though for much of that time it has been regarded with suspicion. Spinning is precisely what it does not do. In fact, a lack of spin is about the only identifying characteristic of the pitch.

There is no right way to hold a knuckleball when throwing it (seams, no seams; two fingers, three), and no predictable flight pattern once it leaves the hand. “Butterflies aren’t bullets,” the longtime knuckleballer Charlie Hough once said. “You can’t aim ’em - you just let ’em go.” The pitch shakes, shimmies, wobbles, drops - it knuckles, as they say. ...

Here's hoping we make it to Spring Training in Fort Myers, FL in March.