I love professional sports, but it's true that it never really encourage difference. They're all about blending in, standing behind your leader and show abnegation if it's what the team requires out of you. A rare oddity of the conformist mold of team sports are knuckleballers in baseball. Nobody likes them. Nobody really trusts them either, but a pitcher with a half-competent knuckleball is going to find his way to a major leagues pitching rotation or, if already there, add 10 more years to his career. Who are these guys? Why are they weird and why are they being put up with in the pros? KNUCKLEBALL! is a documentary that investigates the nature of this unique phenomenon in professional sports.
A knuckleball is a baseball pitch where the ball doesn't spin (or spins very little). That causes the air to give the aforementioned ball a turbulent and unpredictable trajectory, making it extremely difficult for batters to hit. It's also difficult for the pitcher to control, so sometimes it becomes extremely easy to hit for a couple weeks, because it's a pitch that has to be thrown slowly. KNUCKLEBALL! is the story of the last two knuckleballers in the game in 2011: Boston Red Sox living legend Tim Wakefield and then-emerging R.A Dickey, and of how they became who they became in the major leagues.
The knuckleball is such a psychological oddity of professional sports because nobody can control it and yet it works. Since the idea of sports itself is about mastering your body in order to display athletic supremacy, the chaotic nature of the knuckleball is still not well excepted today by athletes, managers and fans alike. Tim Wakefield and R.A Dickey are therefore considered more like witch doctors than pitching professionals, and it isolates them in a way baseball players usually aren't. Wakefield and Dickey both go through slumps during the shooting of the movie and the criticism they face tend to disparage their entire career: "I don't want knuckleballers on my team. They're way too unpredictable."
R.A Dickey makes the best pitching faces. (Photo: Getty)
One thing I loved about KNUCKLEBALL! is that is explored the bond between the practitioners of this lost art. I was surprised there is a bond between them in the first place, but there is. They have to stand up for each other because the usual reaction to a struggling knuckleballer is: "oh, let's cut the knuckleballer from our team." I also loved how they shared their fear of contact-hitters, saying that the knuckleball is the perfect poison for big power hitters. I think it was Phil Niekro who said his worst nightmare was Bill Buckner, because his only wish was to get to first base, so he was very patient and disciplined at bat. There is such a deep psychological lore around the art of the knuckleball, and KNUCKLEBALL! does a great job at digging into the heart of it.
I haven't been following baseball since the Montreal Expos have fallen in disgrace and were sold out of town by scheming art dealer Jeffrey Loria. I do have a fondness though for this idiosyncratic, psychology-heavy sport. KNUCKLEBALL! is a competent and enjoyable documentary about one of the greatest unexplained mysteries of sports and those athletes who have put their career into something they have limited control over. This is ultimately the legacy of KNUCKLEBALL! It uses a baseball pitch as a metaphor for putting your future into something you can't control, but have faith in. It breeds a special, strange kind of men. A perpetually dying breed of professional athletes that have a unique perspective on their sport.