Knuckleball master Dickey chases 20 wins, stirs memories

It was April 2006, and I was hunched in a crouch at the Arroyo Grande baseball complex in Henderson. I was 49. I was much too old to be hunched in a crouch.

About 50 feet away, near the bleachers, stood Ralph McNeal, who once had barnstormed with the Pittsburgh Crawfords of the Negro Leagues. Ralph was 71. He was much too old to be throwing knuckleballs.

That's why he was standing about 50 feet away. He said it had been at least 20 years since he had thrown a knuckleball 60 feet, 6 inches. He didn't know if he still could float one up there at regulation distance.

Plus, as I recall, the baseball diamond was padlocked.

I wanted to write about the dying art of throwing a knuckleball. It was right around Opening Day, when men who are much too old to be pitching and catching have been known to try it anyway, because it makes us feel young, or reminds us of playing catch with our fathers.

Ralph unleashed a 50-foot knuckleball that danced like a dervish. It cracked off my shin. And then I wasn't thinking pleasant thoughts about my old man anymore. I was thinking I wish I had worn a cup.

Afterward, Ralph and I talked about the dying art of throwing a knuckleball. Tim Wakefield and a guy named Jared Fernandez, who was trying to hang on with the Brewers, were the only ones left in 2006.

There was a third, Ralph said. R.A. Dickey of the Rangers. In his first start for Texas, Dickey had allowed six home runs in 3 1/3 innings against the Tigers. He was sent down to Triple-A Oklahoma City after one game. Take the folly floater with you, he was told.

The next season, during a road trip to Omaha, Neb., Dickey tried to swim across the Missouri River.

What Ralph and I didn't know, what almost nobody knew, is that Dickey had been sexually abused when he was 8, and that he would have an extramarital affair, and that his wife would throw him out of the house.

He was searching for something when he dived into the Missouri River. He didn't find it. He didn't make it halfway across. But then he found his way to a therapist. It sounds sort of hokey, but after nearly drowning in the river, he had been reborn in it.

In 2010, when he was 35, Dickey won 11 games and lost nine for the Mets with an ERA of 2.84. In 2011, he went 8-13, but his ERA, 3.28, still was outstanding.

During the offseason, inspired by Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," which he had read as a youngster, Dickey climbed Mount Kilimanjaro to raise awareness for human trafficking in India.

While all of this was happening to R.A. Dickey, Ralph McNeal started writing his second novel. Called "The Last Knuckleballer," it's due by Christmas or, at least, Opening Day next year. Awhile back, he sent me the first few chapters to critique. It's about a withering 45-year-old knuckleballer who in the first pages is summoned from the bullpen to save the World Series for the Cubs. Against the Yankees.

I emailed back, saying I really enjoyed his literary chops, but that the story seemed far-fetched. The Cubs? In the World Series? Hyperbole to the max.

But Ralph's story is no more preposterous than what is going to happen today at Citi Field in New York.

In a few hours, Robert Allen Dickey, 37, the only knuckleball pitcher remaining in the major leagues, will be bidding for his 20th victory. He's 19-6, with an ERA of 2.66, a leading candidate to win the National League Cy Young Award.

He will be pitching for Wakefield and Wilbur Wood and Charlie Hough and Tom Candiotti and Steve Sparks and the Niekro brothers, though Joe is gone now. Hoyt Wilhelm, too. He will be pitching for old-timers who recall the 1945 Washington Senators, who had four knuckleballers in the starting rotation: Dutch Leonard, Johnny Niggeling, Mickey Haefner and Roger Wolff.

He will be pitching for Bob Uecker, who famously said "the way to catch a knuckleball is wait until it stops rolling and then pick it up."

He will be pitching for Geno Petralli, Hough's personal catcher, who was charged with 35 passed balls in 1987.

I am going to try to watch Dickey pitch against the Pirates today. I will think of my friend Ralph McNeal, and of taking batting practice in high school, in one of those coin-operated 90 mph cages - unaware that the next day we would be playing East Chicago Roosevelt, and they had a pitcher named Milan Chobanov, who threw nothing but knuckleballs. At least to me.

I will be thinking, too, about playing catch with my old man when he came home from the steel mill, before supper, and when I started to get bored he'd throw me a knuckler, and my eyebrow would raise like John Belushi's.

But most of all I will be thinking of Petralli, and that I hope in 1987 he was smart enough to wear a cup.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.