Knuckleball!

Last night I was in the mood to watch a documentary so I scrolled through Netflix and found Knuckleball!, which told the story of two recent knuckleballers and their baseball careers. One, Tim Wakefield, was until a few years ago a long-time pitcher for the Boston Red Sox and the other, R.A. Dickey, is currently a starting pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays but the documentary told his story of success with the New York Mets. It started off a little slow but by the end I was pretty moved. You hear about all these pitchers who are known for their power and fastballs but these two guys, developed a pitch that doesn't involve a lot of strength or velocity but brought them great success and notoriety. This being the knuckleball, of course. What made the documentary interesting was that both men didn't experience much success at first. Really, it was a lot like a roller coaster. They both ran into a lot of rejection and I mean a lot.

The documentary goes into why the knuckleball is a very unusual pitch and the uncertainty of its result. While it is a very deceiving pitch traveling at sometimes as slow as 60 MPH it can also be a wild pitch that is very hard to catch and can hurt as much as it can help. Many pitchers today do not have the knuckleball in their cache of pitches and don't ever learn it.

Tim Wakefield was on top of the world when he first became a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, which was after he completely failed at hitting and a coach noticed his knuckleball as he was goofing off with a teammate. He switched to pitching and won an astounding number of games that year becoming a knuckleball legend but the very next year he lost more than won was cut from the team. When he signed with the Red Sox not too long after his career took off but was demoted from starting pitcher to the guy who would come in if one of the other starting pitchers weren't performing as well as the could for a long time. During one game, he fills in for a starter who had been out for the flu and completely shocks everyone with an unbelievable outing. Once again, he became a starting pitcher and eventually won 200 games by the end of his career at the age of 44.

The documentary obviously fills in the gaps I left out about the ups and downs of his pitching career but I'll leave that for you to learn by watching it. Something that really stuck with me and applies so well to the careers of both Tim Wakefield and R.A. Dickey and probably to everything else anyone can do is to accept defeat but do not be defeated. If you love something, stick with it. Work on it. Persevere. If you are rejected one time or many times don't give up. If Tim Wakefield gave up when he was not performing as a position player he would have never even gotten the chance to be a pitcher and win any games let alone 200 games. I'm going to try my hardest to remember that whenever I experience defeat or rejection or failure. It's something we should all think about.

I'm going to leave it at that. It's about time for me to go to my internship.

Until next time,

Caroline