Knuckleball Memories

The only time I didn't feel safe with Uncle Willie was when I was trying to catch his knuckleball.  When I was 9 or 10 years old I was "big for my age."  Willie was 15 or 16 and playing high school baseball in the spring and American Legion baseball in the summer.  He would find me sitting on Maw Rachel's front porch, one of my favorite places to hide from my little sisters.  He would toss me a catcher's mitt and say, "Let's throw the ball a little bit."  

We would find something to use as a makeshift home plate and put it down in the middle of the dirt (Red Dog) road that ran in front of our houses.  I would squat down behind the plate while he stepped off the distance to the pitcher's mound.

Willie was a really good baseball player, the first one picked if you were choosing up sides for a sandlot game.  He was a starter at shortstop or second base on the high school team and an All-Star for his American Legion squad.  He was a solid infielder but he wanted to pitch.  He had a good fastball, change-up, and a sweeping curveball.  He could control them pretty well and change speeds to keep a hitter guessing.  But he wanted to master the knuckleball.

The problem was that his knuckleball didn't want to be mastered.  He would get a grip on the ball with his fingertips and knuckles, windup, and hurl the ball toward the plate.  You could see the seams on the ball as it streamed toward the catcher's mitt.  They didn't move, there was no spin at all on the ball.  As a result, the ball would dip or rise, curve to the right or left, or some combination of these.  

Willie didn't know what the ball was going to do. The ball didn't know what it was going to do. And I, squatting there with it hurling toward me, sure didn't know what it would do.  Most of the time I could react fast enough to catch it.  Every so often however, a ball would look like it was heading for the center of the strike zone but then it would dip straight down, strike the ground about two feet in front of the plate, and ricochet off one of my shins.

That hurt! A lot. 

I would bite my tongue, retrieve the ball, and toss it back to Willie.  I couldn't yelp or cry or whine. I couldn't let Willie think I wasn't big enough or strong enough to be playing with him.  That would be far worse than any pain in my shin.

That "biting my tongue" thing was an example of the adolescent wisdom I learned from Willie.  I can remember him telling me, "When you stub your toe or hit your thumb with a hammer, just bite down on your tongue real hard. The pain from your toe or thumb won't feel so bad."  I bit my tongue a lot growing up.  Sadly, biting my tongue isn't helping me deal with the pain of him being gone now.

Clyde