Why is the Knuckleball So Hard a Baseball Pitch to Hit?

After Bouton retired in 1970, he continued to pitch semiprofessionally in his free time exclusively as a knuckleballer, and launched an unprecedented return to the majors in 1978. He's done a fair amount of thinking about the pitch.


"It's part of Bernoulli's principle, how air lifts airplane wings," he says. "Because the knuckleball is moving through the air without spinning, air currents that flow over and under the ball are not equal, creating a disturbance immediately behind the ball."


"Or," he continues, "think of the


old musket balls from colonial times. When they came out of the muskets they would be accurate for only 15 or 20 feet, then they would destabilize, because of Bernoulli's principle. Then they invented rifling in the barrels of guns. When a bullet comes out of a gun, the spiral grooves cause it to spin like a football. It's that spinning that keeps it on target." A knuckleball is like a musket ball-unpredictable.


Pitchers don't need to know the science, though. "All you need to know is that if you put any kind of a spin on it at all, it'll travel about 475 feet in the opposite direction," Bouton says.


"Contact hitters, the guys who wait until the very last moment to get their bat on the ball, are the most effective against the knuckler," Bouton points out. "Free-swinging home run hitters can be totally helpless."


The knuckleball invariably taps a wellspring of humor, and Bouton offers one last laugh. "Remember what Bob Uecker (the announcer and former big league catcher) had to say about how to handle the knuckleball? You just wait until it stops rolling and then pick it up."