But I wouldn’t be shocked at all if Grienke and/or Hillman and/or GMDM went to Joe Maddon and asked him NOT To put ZG in the bigger media spotlight by starting him.

We as Royals/ZG fans LOVE quotes like his, but if you were an average Joe fan in Baltimore or LA, and you heard ZG pull out some quotes like he does, you’d think the guy was slow.

That would be about the only way for him to be more awesome. I bet that he’s going to throw one knuckleball to some random batter sometime in the next few seasons. Just to show everyone he can, like the sloooooooooowwwwwwww curve.

Which is an excellent book, by the way, and I highly recommend it if you haven’t read it yet. The writer, Jim Bouton, was a young pitching phenom for the Yankees in the 60s. His delivery was so violent that his hat flew off his head a lot when he pitched. This led to some arm injuries that put the brakes on his career, and all of his electric stuff became a whole lot more hittable. The book is a day-by-day account of the 1969 season in which he resurrected his career by becoming a knuckleballer.

He talks a lot about the knuckleball in the book. He had to go to it because his arm had been damaged too much to throw other pitches effectively anymore. The knuckleball is a weird pitch because the harder you throw it, the straighter it goes and the easier it is to hit. There is nothing worse than a knuckleball that doesn’t knuckle. It’s batting practice. And there are so many factors that go into its effectiveness: how hot or cold it is that day, whether or not you’re playing in a dome, how humid it is, how much you’ve pitched recently, and a healthy dose of plain old luck. He had to completely change his mindset in order to keep from getting shelled, putting to rest any pipe dreams of getting his velocity back and being the power pitcher he was years ago and focusing instead entirely on the knuckler. The cool thing about it is that it has practically no effect on your arm. Bouton asked to pitch out of the bullpen when he wasn’t starting and to at least be warmed up every night in order to keep his arm rubbery enough to throw a good knuckler.

I find the knuckleball and the pitchers that throw it completely fascinating. But yeah, I think the reason that more guys don’t do it is that, unless you have a freakish arm, the knuckler has to be your bread and butter pitch. If you tried to mix it in with even an average velocity fastball and curve, the knuckleball just wouldn’t move right and you’d get lit up. And in a culture where the MPH is king and movement and control are less important, no one is willing to sacrifice pitching “like a normal person” in order to focus on a single pitch.

Can you imagine it? A lefty knuckleballer named Rowdy Hardy? It would be so awesome… and it would give him a much better shot of making it up to majors.

http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2009/7/10/944659/expanding-on-harrys-whiff-rate

I wonder what both the CBS writer and Greinke would think if they knew that information came from a (gasp) blogger…?

if TPJ threw knuckleballs?