Knuckleball: to hit a butterfly

(Spanish version)

On December 17, 2012, Robert Allen (R.A.) Dickey, starting pitcher for the New York Mets was traded to the Toronto Blue Jays.

With the transfer was signed a contract extension for 2 years and $ 24 million to add to the 5 million that was already by the Mets, plus an extension option for one further year and another 12 million.

On November 14 he received the Cy Young Award for best pitcher in the National League. The award was voted by thirty members of the BBWAA -acronym of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.

On November 10, Sporting News magazine -previously The Sporting News, which is considered the oldest and most important sports related magazine, selected him as the National League Best Pitcher of the Year.

On November 4 he was chosen Outstanding Pitcher of the Year by the MLB Players Association.

On July 10, at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City, he played in his first MLB All-Star Game.

Just three years before, at the beginning of the 2010-2011 season, Dickey played for the Buffalo Bisons, a minor league team, having gone through seven major and minor league teams since his debut in 2001 with the Texas Rangers, and had earned under $ 2 million along his fourteen year career.

On October 29, 2012, R.A. Dickey turned 38.

How can a professional athlete, even the usually long-lived baseball players, have a breakout season when he is about to turn 40? What did he do to have such a late bloom after a career that had gone virtually unnoticed?

He did this:

In the hypnotic imageabove, courtesy of James Greenhalgh, we see a confused Will Rhymes watching as a ball driven by an invisible puppeteer slowly passes thru the strike zone without knowing exactly when or how to hit it.

It is a knuckleball.

What is a knuckleball? (I)

The baseball pitchers generally have a combined repertoire of pitches in order to be as effective as possible in eliminating batters. All of them have a fastball in it, along with some kind of breaking ball (essentially a pitch with non-straight path, and whose speed is usually significantly lower than that of a fastball).

The goal of this alternating pattern is obvious: to prevent the batter from reading exactly where and even when the ball will be within his batting range.

Thus, the relationship between pitcher and batter becomes a sort of deception game similar to that of a goalkeeper and a soccer player in a penalty shot. The batter will try to guess what kind of ball the pitcher is going to throw or, eventually, be fast enough to find out as it is coming.