The knuckleball can be almost impossible to hit, and can extend a player’s career by years. So why do so many in the major and minor leagues distrust the pitch?

When Kevin Pucetas, a minor-league baseball player in the Texas Rangers organization, converted from a conventional pitcher into a knuckleballer, his biggest problem wasn’t one typically associated with the macho culture of professional sports: he needed to find a good manicurist. “I couldn’t keep nails on,” he said.

As Pucetas first began to throw the knuckleball, he developed a bad habit of splitting nails in the middle of games. Since a knuckleball pitcher’s grip is dependent upon the length and strength of his nails, this was no small matter. “It would hurt like hell,” Pucetas said. The day after it would happen, “I would have to go into nail salons and get acrylics, and it would always be a battle for me, especially on the road, because I would have to find a nail salon, and certain people do better stuff with nails.” But grooming is just one aspect of a pitch that in almost every way puts its practitioners at odds with baseball’s accepted conventions.

The knuckleball has been called an oddball pitch, a distrusted art, the baseball equivalent of a carnival act. When thrown well, the pitch moves in unpredictable ways, often more than once on its way from the pitcher to the batter, and in directions that not even the player who throws it can predict. The late Hall of Fame hitter Willie Stargell likened its movement to a butterfly with hiccups. Its speed is far slower than the average major-league pitch, inspiring fans to heckle and mock any player who dares attempt it. And it requires a different throwing motion than other baseball pitches. When properly employed, one former knuckleballer told me, it’s less a pitch than an “over-exaggerated game of catch”. A knuckleballer’s pitching motion looks more like your grandfather’s than that of a professional athlete.

Since the second world war, there have never been more than four knuckleballers in the league at any one time. Right now, there are three, and two of them are starting pitchers for teams at the forefront of the playoff race: the MLB veteran RA Dickey, of the Toronto Blue Jays, who as a member of the New York Mets in 2012 won the National League Cy Young Award; and Steven Wright, of the Boston Red Sox. In his first full season as a starting pitcher, Wright made this year’s all-star game. At the time, he had the best earned-run average of any pitcher in the American League. (The third knuckleballer in the league, Eddie Gamboa, of the Tampa Bay Rays, was called up from the minors at the beginning of September.)

As evidenced by Dickey’s and Wright’s success, the pitch can be one of the most effective in all of baseball. It can befuddle and infuriate hitters unlike any other pitch in the game. “To have the ball flutter and to render the power of the opposition totally useless, that to me is the pleasure in watching a knuckleballer,” said Dan Duquette, the executive vice-president of baseball operations for the Baltimore Orioles, a team that currently does not have a single knuckleball pitcher in its entire organization, including the minor leagues. The Orioles are not alone in this. Only a handful of teams have a knuckleballer in their system.

“There’s somebody out there, somewhere, that’s going to be a great knuckleball pitcher,” said Charlie Hough, 68, a former knuckleballer who retired from his 24-year pitching career in 1994. “I just don’t know where he is right now.” A more significant obstacle in finding that next knuckleballer is that most of those involved in Major League Baseball are not all that interested in doing so.

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Facebook Twitter Pinterest Phil Niekro is one of the few knuckleballers in the Hall of Fame. Photograph: Louis Requena/MLB Photos via Getty Images

G Richard Pfitzner Stadium, the home of the Potomac Nationals, the Washington Nationals’ single-A minor league team, in Woodbridge, Virginia, is nestled among a tree-lined enclosure, about halfway between the Occoquan Reservoir and Prince William Forest Park. The stadium can hold 6,000 people, but it rarely does. Single-A is near the bottom of professional baseball’s food chain. JD Martin had already spent time in single-A, in 2003, a couple years after he was drafted as a conventional pitcher at the age of 18 in the first round of the MLB draft, and again in 2006, after he had recovered from Tommy John surgery. In August, Martin returned there again, as a member of the Potomac Nationals, but this time he came as a 33-year-old knuckleball pitcher.

Martin is 6ft 4in, and weighs 220lbs. He towers over many of his team-mates, and he has a build that would look at home on a professional basketball court. During his first stint in professional baseball, Martin was a finesse pitcher whose fastball barely reached 90mph. By today’s standards, that’s a hard sell in the big leagues, where every team looks for power, power, and more power.

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Martin’s most successful years came in 2009 and 2010, when he split time evenly between the Washington Nationals and the team’s AAA affiliate in Syracuse. But by 2011, he was back in Syracuse, entrenched in the minor leagues, when the Nationals’ pitching coordinator spotted him throwing a knuckleball while playing catch with a team-mate. Soon after, the Nationals told him they wanted to convert him into a full-time knuckleball pitcher – if he was interested. He wasn’t. Martin spent his next season with the Miami Marlins’ AAA team and the one after that with Tampa Bay’s. In 2014, he accepted a lucrative offer from the Samsung Lions to play baseball in South Korea. In Dickey’s autobiography, Wherever I Wind Up, he refers to the Korean and Japanese baseball leagues as the “places pitchers go to die”. Once you’ve gone there, Dickey wrote, “the chances of you ever coming back and playing in the big leagues are about zero.”

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Martin is not the first knuckleballer to turn to the pitch after a failed attempt at a big-league career. In 2005, after 10 years spent mostly in the minor leagues, Dickey, then 30, abandoned his career as a conventional pitcher and converted full-time to the knuckleball. Steven Wright was drafted by the Cleveland Indians in 2006 as a hard-throwing pitcher, but by 2012, at the age of 27, without ever having made it into the majors, he converted to the knuckleball. Tim Wakefield, who spent 19 seasons in the majors as a knuckleball pitcher, from 1992 to 2011, began his career as a first baseman but soon discovered he couldn’t hit. He converted to the knuckleball two years into his career. There has never even been a knuckleballer chosen in an MLB draft. In fact, in the last 60 years the only major-league knuckleballer to have entered professional baseball already throwing the pitch full-time is Phil Niekro, in 1959. He is one of only two knuckleball pitchers in the Hall of Fame. (The other is the late Hoyt Wilhelm, who pitched from 1952 to 1972.)

There are good reasons players wait until crucial, desperate junctures of their careers to turn to the pitch. For one, in order to throw the knuckleball, you have to completely overhaul the mechanics of your pitching motion. Instead of placing one’s fingers flat along the baseball to grip it naturally, a knuckleballer digs the nails of his index and middle fingers into the smooth part of the baseball. He keeps his hand behind the ball rather than on top of it. Instead of snapping his wrist on release to create movement, he keeps it locked. The motion toward home plate is more like pushing the baseball than throwing it. All of these factors combine to remove the spin and the rotation from the ball. The pitch gains its unpredictable movement from the friction of the air currents as they catch on to the seams of a non-rotating baseball. Whereas conventional pitchers rely on a full-body motion and “maximum effort,” a knuckleball pitcher uses mainly his upper body and puts forth only a fraction of his strength. As Pucetas said: “It’s a process of literally changing everything you’ve done since you were five.”

These adjustments are so drastic that there is no coming back from them. “Once you go exclusive,” the Texas Rangers’ pitching coordinator Danny Clark told me, “your fastball does back up [lose its velocity].” Conventional pitchers can convert to the knuckleball, but no knuckleballer has ever converted back into a conventional pitcher.

Yet in order to succeed with the knuckleball, there can be no half measures. The pitch is most effective when it’s thrown at least 80% of the time. “When you’re a regular pitcher, you’re trying to trick guys,” Wright told me earlier this summer in the visitor’s dugout at Yankee Stadium, while his team-mates took batting practice in front of us. The conventional pitcher’s advantage over a hitter comes largely from the fact that the batter doesn’t know which pitch he will be seeing, at what speed it will come, and at what location. “With the knuckleball,” Wright said, “you want them to think the knuckleball is coming the whole time.” There’s no need to try to fool the batter any more. The knuckleball does that on its own. “All I try to do is keep it within the plate,” Wright said. “I don’t know if it’s going to go right, left, down, up. I just throw it.”

Another reason players turn to the pitch late in their careers is that if the transition is successful, it can add years onto their careers. Dickey is 41. Wakefield pitched until he was 45, Hough until he was 46. Niekro was 48 when he retired.

“It’s always a reclamation project or a lifeline pitch,” said Pucetas. Like JD Martin, Pucetas was drafted as a traditional pitcher who lacked power and survived on craft and guile. He became an all-star at every level of the minor leagues – A, AA, and AAA – but was never called up to the majors. In 2013, then with the Frisco Rough Riders, a AA team within the Texas Rangers’ organization, Pucetas’s coaches spotted him throwing the knuckleball during a workout. They asked him to throw the pitch during games. Impressed by what they saw there, they offered him a contract with a few months of guaranteed money if he was willing to convert full-time to the pitch.

“I don’t want to say it was a pride-swallowing issue,” Pucetas said, “but it was. I could still throw in the 90s, and I was still getting people out.” Pucetas spoke to me over the phone from the campus of Spartanburg Methodist College, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he is currently the pitching coach for one of the best junior college baseball programs in the country.

His reaction was not unique. In 1984, when Tom Candiotti, who would go on to pitch for 14 years as a knuckleballer in the majors, was asked by the Milwaukee Brewers’ assistant general manager to convert to the pitch, he took issue with the suggestion as well. “We got into a confrontation,” Candiotti, now a radio announcer for the Arizona Diamondbacks, said. The executive told him that as a traditional pitcher he wasn’t good enough to succeed. “I said: ‘If you think I’m not that good, why don’t you grab a bat and we’ll go out there right now,’” Candiotti said. That didn’t happen. Instead, Candiotti began to mix the knuckleball into his games. Two years later, he was throwing the pitch in the majors for the Cleveland Indians, and leading the league in complete games.

Still, vanity remains one of the principal reasons there aren’t more knuckleball pitchers in the majors. Very few are willing to even try it.

When I asked Danny Clark, the Rangers’ minor-league pitching coordinator who worked with Pucetas when he was with the team, how many pitchers would convert to the knuckleball if they were given the option of throwing the pitch full-time or being cut from the team, he laughed and said, not many. “Unfortunately a lot of ego is involved,” he said. “It’s not a macho-type pitch.”

And yet, Pucetas said: “You really have to have a lot of balls to throw the pitch. It’s a scary thing. You’re 60 feet away from the best hitters in the world, and you’re throwing a pitch at 65mph. If it doesn’t do anything there at the plate, if it doesn’t separate, you can get your head taken off.”

And not only literally. The MLB record for most home runs given up in one game, six, is shared by several pitchers. Since 1940, three pitchers have suffered that ignominy. Two of them have been knuckleballers: Dickey and Wakefield.

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Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pitchers such as RA Dickey have revived their careers with the knuckleball. Photograph: Wendell Cruz/USA Today Sports

Two days before I met JD Martin in Virginia, he’d pitched a single-A game against the Frederick Keys in Frederick, Maryland. It was only Martin’s fourth game for Potomac. He’d been competing with the knuckleball for only three months. But the Keys might not have believed that. Through four innings, Martin had a shutout and a 4-0 lead.

Because of the pitch’s unpredictable movement, it’s not only a hard pitch to hit. It’s a hard pitch to catch, too. Shin guards are as important for a knuckleball catcher as they are for a soccer player. Every knuckleball catcher will be among the league leaders in passed balls. It’s not a sign of the catcher’s quality. It’s an unintended byproduct of having a knuckleball pitcher on the mound. Knuckleball pitchers have their own statistical black holes. In addition to being susceptible to allowing home runs, more often than not they will lead the league in hitting batters with pitches and in walks. The strike zone, sometimes, can be hard to find.

In the fifth inning of the game against Frederick, Martin learned all this the hard way. He walked a batter, he hit a batter with a pitch, he threw a passed ball. Another difficulty knuckleball pitchers have is keeping runners from stealing base. The pitch is so slow that players have more time to run. In that fifth inning, the base runners ran on Martin. He also gave up three hits. By the time the inning was over, the game was tied at four. It was a perfect example of the fine line between the precarious and the disastrous a knuckleballer treads when the pitch is not at its best. It was also a good example of why managers traditionally hate putting knuckleballers on the mound. The pitch has so many variables.

Pucetas got to witness that managerial distaste firsthand at his last stop as a knuckleballer, the single-A Myrtle Beach Pelicans, in 2014. Joe Mikulik, then the Pelicans manager, is known for his fiery temper and outrageous displays following an ejection. When Pucetas pitched, Mikulik would park himself on the top step of the dugout and try not to blow up at every stiff-legged Pucetas delivery to home plate. Mikulik never said anything to Pucetas, but he didn’t need to. “I could tell that he didn’t enjoy it at all,” Pucetas said with a laugh. “I could tell the knuckleball wasn’t his favorite idea.”

Ultimately, it may not have been the Rangers’ favorite idea, either. Less than a year into Pucetas’s full-time commitment to the pitch and less than two weeks after his guaranteed contract expired, the team cut him.

“It was an organization decision to go elsewhere,” Clark, the Rangers pitching coordinator, said. “It was time to move on.”

“The executive is looking at it as I’ve got a limited number of innings I can allocate to pitching prospects, and how many do I want to allocate to a guy that the percentages and the odds say is such a long shot?” said Mark Shapiro, the president and CEO of the Toronto Blue Jays. Shapiro was in the Cleveland Indians’ front office when they decided to back Wright in his conversion from a traditional pitcher. He was instrumental in getting Wright the support necessary to develop the knuckleball. Wright ended up throwing the pitch in five seasons in the minors before he finally won an extended stay in the majors. But by then, the Indians had already traded him to the Red Sox. “It took a long time,” Shapiro said of Wright’s breakthrough, but he could have been talking of the length of time necessary for any knuckleballer to succeed.

“The athlete’s ability to continue to persevere despite the challenge is probably as much of a demarcation as the organization’s willingness to commit,” Shapiro said.

“The biggest determining factor of every knuckleballer who’s had any kind of success is they’ve all had the same temperament,” said Steve Sparks, who threw the pitch for 10 years in the majors, from 1995 to 2004, and is now a radio announcer with the Houston Astros. “They don’t get easily frustrated, and they’re really laid back.”

In his autobiography, Dickey describes Charlie Hough, who along with Niekro is considered the reigning godfather of the pitch, as having “the leathery look of a character from an old Western, a guy who has smoked too many cigarettes … [who] looks as if he’d spent most of his life squinting and the rest of it in a saloon.” He frames Hough as an outlaw and a loner. It’s a fitting description for any knuckleballer, who’s an outsider even among his own kind, pitchers.

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Facebook Twitter Pinterest Charlie Hough had ‘the leathery look of a character from an old Western, a guy who has smoked too many cigarettes.’ Photograph: Focus On Sport/Getty Images

“No manager really wants a knuckleball pitcher … until he wins 15 in a row,” said Hough, who is now a senior adviser of player development for the Los Angeles Dodgers, when I spoke to him by phone from his home in southern California. Hough was referring to Tim Wakefield, who, in his first season with the Red Sox, in 1995, started out with a record of 14-1. Wakefield would go on to be an instrumental figure for the Red Sox on the road to the team’s two World Series wins in 2004 and 2007. In his 17 seasons with the Red Sox, he totaled at least 140 innings in every one of those years but one, which led one announcer to declare: “At the end of the world, you’re going to be left with cockroaches and Tim Wakefield.”

One of the great benefits of the pitch is that, due to the lack of strain it has on a pitcher’s arm, a knuckleballer can log a seemingly unlimited number of innings over the course of a season. In 1972, the Chicago White Sox’s knuckleballer Wilbur Wood led the league in innings pitched, with 376, and in games started, with 49. The next year, he even started both games of a doubleheader, a feat that hasn’t been repeated since.

At one point in the mid-2000s, Wakefield was the only knuckleballer left pitching in the game. But his success set a precedent that enabled Dickey to emerge as a knuckleballer, and it gave the Indians the evidence they needed to offer Wright the support to develop the pitch. When Dickey won the Cy Young Award in 2012, a new wave of knuckleball pitchers emerged, including Pucetas. This year, in addition to the Nationals signing Martin, the Tampa Bay Rays had at least four knuckleball pitchers in their minor league system. When I asked the team about its budding knuckleball program, a spokesman said: “In the case of our organization, we are not eager to share our thoughts and possible plans involving our knuckleballers or any knuckleballers.” Whether the silence was out of shame or competitive secrecy was unclear. What is clear, though, is that this recent spate of signings means little for the future of the pitch.

Despite Wakefield’s repeated reliability, in only a handful of his 17 seasons with the Red Sox was he ever assured of an opening day roster spot. Moreover, the great number of innings a knuckleballer can potentially give a team is no longer as valued as it once was. When former knuckleballer Tom Candiotti led the league in complete games in 1986, he threw 17 of them; the 2015 league leaders (there were six of them) threw four. Last year, the Kansas City Royals won the World Series with a bullpen that took over the game from the starters after the sixth inning. Most teams today try to configure their pitching staff the same way.

“The game is a game of percentages and numbers, with [a sophisticated] ability to measure opportunity cost,” Shapiro said. As time goes on, the opportunities for knuckleballers to get the necessary time to develop, he said, will probably occur “less and less in a game that’s so analytically driven.”

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Knuckleball pitchers belong to a kind of family, its members bound together by the pursuit of the same uncommon endeavor. In Dickey’s book, he credits Hough with helping to rescue his career. When Wright came up, he trained with Candiotti and Hough. Pucetas traveled to Houston, where he spent time with Sparks, who had been taught by Niekro. Martin has consulted with Wright. This fall he will pitch in MLB’s instructional league, where he hopes to work with Wakefield.

When I spoke with Hough, I asked him if there was a game in which he felt he’d gotten over the hump as a knuckleballer. To his own surprise, he said there was. In 1970, he was in AAA pitching for the Spokane Indians against the Hawaii Islanders. The Indians led by one run in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded and two outs. Winston Llenas, who would go on to have a six-year major-league career with the California Angles, came up to bat. Llenas was a devastating hitter, and he had gotten ahead in the count against Hough, three balls and one strike. If Hough missed the strike zone again, he would walk Llenas and bring in the tying run. The catcher didn’t want to risk that, and he signaled for Hough to throw a fastball. Hough shook him off. The catcher signaled again for a fastball. And Hough again shook him off. After the two repeated this several times, the manager, future Hall of Famer Tommy Lasorda, came out to the mound and asked the pair what was going on.

As Hough recounted it, “the catcher said: ‘He wants to throw a knuckleball 3-1 here with the bases loaded and the tying run on third,’” suggesting that Hough had lost his mind.

Hough continued: “Lasorda looked at me and said: ‘You going to throw it over the plate?’ And I said: ‘Yeah, I’ll get him.’ I threw two knuckleballs and I struck him out. I just had the confidence at that time to throw it.”

That confidence serves a knuckleballer well, in a game that often doesn’t. “Every year, they’re trying to replace you with some guy with a great arm,” Hough said. “So we have to believe in ourselves.” Because most of those in the game refuse to believe in them.