The Knuckleball and Other Good Stuff

With the Pigs facing knuckleballer Charlie Zink today I did some web searching about knuckleballs. In my high school/Legion ball days I had a pretty decent knuckleball. Not that I was the only pitcher on the team who knew how to throw it, but I was the only one with the guts to actually use it in a game. It worked great as a changeup. The first few times I threw it the batter just froze. How many teens these days have ever seen a knuckleball thrown at them? Might be a good pitch to teach your kids…

Another memory that coincides with the knuckleball is the old timer who taught me how to throw a spitball. While not gutsy enough to try this one in a game, he described it as “Squeezing a watermelon seed from between two fingers to pop it out.” In practice this pitch went everywhere except where I wanted it. After some time I was able to control it and it had basically the same effect as a really good split fingered fastball. Unfortunately this is an illegal pitch and my fingers were too small to throw a splitfingered fastball so I joined the Marines at 17 instead of pursuing pro ball…

In fact, the split fingered ball was known early on as a dry spitter. Doing some research I found that pitchers in the spit ball era would purposely spit tobacco juice on a ball to darken it, making it harder for the batter to see it especially in lower light games. (remember they didn’t have lights way back when.) This all came to a head when Cleveland Shortstop Ray Chapman was hit in the head and killed by a spitball in 1920. The spitball had actually been partially banned in 1920 where teams were allowed to have two pitchers in their lineup who were allowed to throw the pitch. This was changed after Chapman’s death to ban all spitballs except for exisiting spitballers who grandfathered in could use it until their career was over. Chapman remains the only player to ever die during a MLB game.