GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. — The old knuckleballer grips his favorite pitch with three fingernails. Most pitchers use two, but for him that makes the pitch wobbly, impossible to control. Jim Bouton, 78, uses his ring finger, too. This is the grip he showed Johnny Carson four decades ago on the set of “The Tonight Show,” and the grip he displayed for a recent visitor in his backyard, high up in the Berkshires.

Bouton still throws a couple of times a week. He built a concrete-block backstop in a sunlit corner of the yard, and he hits the strike zone most of the time. His hat does not fall off anymore, as it did in his Yankees days, back when he threw hard and beat St. Louis twice in the 1964 World Series. In a 15-minute game of catch, his knuckler hit the glove every time.

That’s not ideal, exactly; the best knuckleballs often zig and zag away from the mitt. But if it doesn’t quite dance the way it did for the Seattle Pilots, it remains Bouton’s pitch — slower now, but authentically him.

It is good for Bouton to have company, said his wife, Paula Kurman, who has a doctorate in interpersonal communications from Columbia. They have been married for 35 years and have lived here for more than 20, among the foxes and black bears, surrounded by pine trees. A cloud might roll by, straight through the screened-in porch, and there are no other homes in sight. Their children are grown and live elsewhere.