Jeff Dunn at Internet Monk quotes from R.A. Dickey’s new memoir, Wherever I Wind Up, and sees spiritual truth in Dickey’s discussion of his signature pitch.
Dickey writes:
The knuckleball is the only pitch in baseball that works by doing nothing. Curveballs curve. Cutters cut. Sinkers sink. The knuckleball? You want it to float to the plate, rotation-free, and let the laws of entropy or aerodynamics or whatever else is in play take over from there, the air rushing around it, the seams creating a drag, the ball wobbling and wiggling and shimmying and shaking. Or not. Sometimes the knuckleball will be unhittable and sometimes it will be uncatchable, but rarely is it predictable. You can throw two knuckleballs with the identical release, the identical motion, in the identical place, and once might go one way and the second might go another way. It’s one of the first things you have to accept as a knuckleballer: the pitch has a mind of its own. You either embrace it for what it is — a pitch that is reliant on an amalgam of forces both seen and unseen — or you allow it to drive you half out of your mind.
I embrace it.
“Oh, that’ll preach big time,” Dunn writes. Very true. But, as far as I understand it, it also seems kind of Zen.
Dickey was on NPR’s “Fresh Air” last month for a fascinating interview with host Terry Gross.
(And speaking of Terry Gross and “Fresh Air,” don’t miss Gross co-starring in Mike Birbiglia’s fine short film — less than 7 minutes — “Fresh Air 2: 2 Fresh, 2 Furious.”)
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