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The Elusive Butterfly .
When I was a young girl, maybe about four years old, I tried to catch a butterfly. Actually, my mother helped me because I was always a little wary around insects, even pretty, colorful ones . We got a net and went out to the backyard to try to catch a monarch dining in Moms flower bed. We never actually caught it- it would flutter out of the way as soon as the net came near it. It kept us busy for a while, until we finally gave it up. did everyone have this much trouble catching a simple, defenseless butterfly?
Later in life, I found out that some of the toughest men in America – major- league baseball batters occasionally have the same problem. The only difference is they are equipped with a large wooden bat instead of a net and fluttering object of their frustration is not a motley winged insect but the knuckleball. The knuckle is a near-impossible pitch to hit: former New York Yankee Bobby Murcer once said that trying to get a hit off knuckleball Phil Niekro was ” like eating a Jell-O with chopsticks”. ( qtd. In Cohen). Big-leaguers approach it the way I approached butterflies as a child with the utmost wariness.
Unlike ” normal” pitches, where the spin determines how the ball moves, a knuckleball is thrown with very little spin. The pitcher grips the ball with the fingertips or fingernails ( not with the knuckles as the name would indicate), keeps the wrist stiff, and ” pushes” it forward with almost no spin. Dennis Springer, a major-league knuckleball pitcher for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, offers this advice relative to gripping and throwing a knuckle ” I grab the baseball like I am throwing a palm ball, then I raise my first two fingers ( forefinger and middle finger), putting my fingertips into the ball. I try to keep a stiff wrist when throwing the ball so that when I release the ball, it comes out of my hand without spin”. It is also thrown very slowly, sometimes at almost half the speed of a fastball. The sportswriter John Romano, writing about Springers pitching, says, ” Thrown softly, the knuckleball is incapable of breaking anything. Except maybe a betters spirit”. Springer throws it at only about fifty to sixty-five miles per hour. In comparison, Nolan Ryans fastball has been clocked at upwards of a hundred miles per hour.
The idea behind the knuckle is that if it is thrown with little or no spin, it will be more susceptible to forces in the air on its way to the plate. The physicist Robert Watts explains that : as a knuckleball approaches home plate, it changes directions erratically in an apparently random manner” ( 960). Because of this random approach, a batter has difficulty predicting the balls movement and making contact. Unfortunately, the pitcher and catcher often dont know what its going to do either, leading to wild pitches and passed balls. As Springer says, Ð I have played catch with guys who throw good and I hate itÐ Some guys really do have a good one that will move all over the place”.
But is this theory of a knuckleballs susceptibility to every gust of wind true? Scientist have studied a baseballs aerodynamics in order to figure out what makes a knuckle ” dance” the way it does. A baseball is not an entirely smooth sphere: its stitches give it rough edges. Scientist focus on Ð the role of the baseballs stitches in creating turbulence in the airflow”. ( ” Why Does the Knuckleball” 364). According to Robert Adair in The Physics of Baseball, turbulence results when imperfections disrupt air flowing over a smooth surface. With pitches that spin, turbulence is not a factor because the ball moves forward and spins fast enough to overcome the effects of turbulence on its way to home plate. However, when a baseball is not rotating much , the stitching can unbalance it and greatly alter trajectory ( 29).
In other words, the stitches cause the air around a knuckleball to become turbulent, which in turn causes it to bounce around in the air: ” at first the seams aerodynamic influence might be pushing the ball outside, away from the plate ; then, suddenly, a small shift in the seams might reverse the force, causing the ball to plunge back across the inside corner” (” Why Does the Knuckleball ” 366). The slight rotation of a knuckle causes that Ð Small shift”. So a knuckleball thrown wit Hough any spin is useless. Through wind-tunnel testing, Robert Watts ways, scientists have found that if the knuckleball is thrown in such a fashion that it has no spin at all, it can only curve laterally in one direction. The single exception can occur in the remote possibility that the strings are initially positioned so that they disturb the point of boundary layer separation and bring about the oscillating wake phenomenon ( 963).
Watts means that a non spinning baseball will move only one way, unless the seams are perfectly aligned in a way that causes turbulence regardless of spin. In baseball speak, a no spinning knuckle is said to behave like a ” batting practice fastball”, meaning it travels straight and is easy to hit. Ð Too much spin could prove disastrous, however, since the inertia of the ball would not allow a significant deflection ” ( 963). A knuckleball