Why There's No Market in MLB for the Knuckleball
In my long journalism career, I only wrote one pure sports story – about baseball’s dwindling batch of knuckleball practitioners. It appeared in USA Today on July 2, 1998, under the headline, “Knuckleball blues.”
It’s one of my favorite stories, and I can draw a lesson from it for my work these days helping startups create market categories.
As in: Even if a product works really well, it will fail if there is no real market for it. (The “build it and they will come” philosophy generally does not work.) The lack of a market for the knuckleball is why there is currently one player throwing the knuckleball in the major leagues, even though a good knuckleball pitcher can be immensely effective.
To report the story, I traveled to Oakland to spend some time with Tom Candiotti, then a knuckleball-throwing starting pitcher for the A’s. At the time, there were three other knuckleball pitchers in the majors (Tim Wakefield, Red Sox; Steve Sparks, Angels; and Dennis Springer, Rays). I got to hang out in the A’s locker room before and after the game, enjoyed a brief chat with Rickey Henderson, and sat by the dugout during play.
I witnessed and wrote about the slowest pitch in baseball. A knuckler clocks in at between 40 MPH and 65 MPH, in a game that values pitchers who fire fastballs that top 95 MPH. The knuckleball, as baseball fans know, doesn’t spin and wobbles unpredictably on its way to the plate, which is both its blessing (batters don’t know where it’s going) and its curse (the pitcher and catcher don’t know where it’s going, either).
I wrote about one moment in the game that captured a lot about the knuckleball. Candiotti was on the mound. Joe Randa of the Detroit Tigers was at bat. Candiotti wound up and tossed a knuckleball toward the plate.
“It veers at the last second on the batter. Randa turns and the pitch hits him dead-on in the back. Randa doesn’t flinch. He trots to first, acting more like he’s been hit with a shuttlecock than a pitched baseball. The umpire pulls out a new ball and throws it to Candiotti – faster than the pitch that had come in.”
I also interviewed knuckleball legends Charlie Hough and the late Phil Neikro. It turns out that knuckleballers stick together, for the same reasons the weirdo geeks hang out together in high school. “When you’re having trouble with your knuckleball, you’ve got to sit down with someone who’s been through it,” Neikro told me. “So we all know each other. We’ll talk for hours. Other pitchers won’t know what we’re talking about, and they’ll get up and leave.”
I had so much fun with this story.
I was, in fact, first drawn to the story idea because there’s something bizarre about the pitch’s demise in baseball. The knuckleball was invented, baseball scholars say, by a pitcher named Toad Ramsey in the 1880s. In all the time since, the pitch has only been mastered by about two dozen major leaguers. But, astonishingly, three of them (Neikro, Hoyt Wilhelm, Pop Haines) are in the Hall of Fame. So about 12.5% of all knuckleball pitchers became Hall of Famers.
Think about what that says about the effectiveness of the knuckleball. There have been about 20,500 players in major league history. If 12.5% of them made the Hall, there would be 2,562 Hall of Fame players. You know how many players are in the Hall? 270. Less than 1%.
Why, then, does the game just have one knuckleballer today, Matt Waldron of the San Diego Padres? And even he bounces up and down from the minor leagues. The pitch is blatantly effective. Knuckleball pitchers come with other attributes managers and front office types should value, like they can pitch more often because the knuckleball is easy on the arm, and they can pitch till they’re old. Candiotti was 40 when I interviewed him.
It comes down to market perception. The market has been conditioned to dismiss the knuckleballer in favor of flame-throwing fastballers. I explained it in the story:
“Most baseball people seem to think the knuckleball’s disadvantages outweigh the advantages, so there’s a negative spiral at work. The major leagues send the message that they only want hard throwers, so only kids who throw hard tend to become pitchers. No prospect is going to waste time practicing the knuckleball, so it becomes more scarce. Fewer coaches get comfortable with it, so the anti-knuckleball message gets stronger.”
If I look at that through a business lens, it sounds like some of the companies that build a really cool product, and then hardly anyone knows what to do with it. Think of the Segway – amazing piece of technology, but…who thinks about desiring a Segway? Unless you’re a mall cop or city tour guide.
And if that’s true, the situation for knuckleballers isn’t going to change even if another truly great knuckleballer comes along. In business circles, the only way to change this would be to condition the market – in this case, Major League Baseball coaches, scouts and executives – so it believes it needs knuckleballers. Maybe a knuckleball evangelist could launch an educational and thought-leadership campaign that makes the case for having a knuckleball pitcher in every starting rotation.
Yeah, that’s not going to happen.
But it is the only way attitudes would change. So, in all likelihood, the knuckleball will remain a remarkable oddity – the Segway of pitches.
Postscript: Candiotti today is an announcer for the Arizona Diamondbacks. He retired in 1999, and at the time ranked in the top 100 pitchers all-time in starts and strikeouts. He was also inducted into the International Bowling Museum's Hall of Fame on June 27, 2007. I can only wonder if he threw knuckleballs down the lane.
Phil Neikro died in 2020. Charlie Hough is 75 and lives in Honolulu. And Joe Randa, apparently unharmed by Candiotti’s pitch, works for a Kansas City Royals minor league team.
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