Phil Niekro Is Ready to Share Secret

The nice thing about Phil Niekro is, he doesn’t look his age.

He looks much older.

A reporter once noted that Phil is 48 but you’d never know it. He could easily pass for 59.

He’s four years older than his manager. He’s only four years younger than Sandy Koufax, who has been retired for 21 years and in the Hall of Fame for 16. He has been getting out the sons of guys he was getting out 25 years ago.

As pitchers get older, they lose velocity on their fastballs. For Phil Niekro, no problem. His fastball never had any velocity to begin with. “My fastball never exceeded the federal speed limit,” he says. “A beach ball could beat it to the plate.”

His money pitch is even slower. A knuckleball, it has been said, is a pitch that is reluctant to leave the pitcher’s hand and keeps trying to find a way to go back. It’s the only pitch in the game that seems to have backspin on it. It comes up to the plate like a hound dog exploring an empty lot. Ballplayers call it the moth, the dancer, the bubble.

Hitters hate it, but so do catchers. Niekro’s is credited with turning Bob Uecker into a stand-up comedian. Uecker, his catcher in Atlanta, coined the deathless explanation for how to catch the knuckleball: “You wait till it stops rolling, then you pick it up.”

Most knuckleballers turn to the pitch when the hop leaves their fast one or the curve doesn’t break. Phil Niekro came out of the playpen with his. He could throw a knuckler when he had to do it with two hands. His father, a coal miner, used to take his son and namesake out in the backyard of their eastern Ohio home and teach him a pitch that would do figure-8s on the way to a plate.

It puts no strain at all on the arm. “All you do is let go of it,” Niekro says.

The beauty of the pitch is, not only does the batter not know what it’s going to do, neither does the pitcher.

And, sometimes, neither does the umpire. Ron Luciano once was silent as a knuckler finally found the batting zone and the catcher snapped, “What was it?”

“What was what?” asked the umpire.

“The pitch!” yelled the catcher.

“Oh, did it get here yet? I went out for coffee,” Luciano grumbled.

Another time, batter Bill Madlock watched a ball come up to the plate, veering and dipping and, finally, winding up halfway up the first-base line.

“Strike!” said umpire Art Williams.

Madlock very quietly took off his helmet and batting gloves and handed them and the bat to Williams. “Here, you hit that,” he invited. “I can’t.”

Explains Niekro: “It’s the only pitch you can’t call till it hits the catcher’s mitt.”

It’s a pitch designed by Rube Goldberg. On a dotted line, it would look like the graph of a kickoff return by a 150-pound scatback. It drops into the strike zone like an uninvited guest.

It’s very galling for 20-year-old young bucks, full of bursting strength and energy, to find themselves being made fools of by a guy old enough to be their grandfather.

The league ribs him. “Hey, Knucksie, could Babe Ruth hit that thing?” Or, “Knucksie, how did you pitch to Ty Cobb with the bases loaded?” Or “Knucksie, who was better in your prime, you or Walter Johnson?” Or “Hey, Knucksie, when you started to pitch did a foul count as a strike?” And, “Who was President? Lincoln?”

Actually, when Niekro started to pitch, Eisenhower was President. When he was born, Roosevelt was. Franklin, not Theodore.

Satchel Paige titled his autobiography, “Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever.” Niekro is gaining on him.

He threw his first big league pitch in 1964. It was a knuckleball. He has won 318 big league games. Ten pitchers have won more. Only one, Steve Carlton, is active.

Of his 318 wins, only 31 were racked up before his 30th birthday. That’s because hitters and catchers are not the only ones who hate the knuckler. Managers do, too.

Charlie Hough once quoted his manager, Walter Alston, as asking him: “What kind of pitcher can you be when these guys (catchers Steve Yeager and Joe Ferguson) can’t catch you?”

What kind of pitch can it be when you don’t know where it’s going when it leaves your hand?

“I can throw it for a strike,” Phil Niekro insists. “Three out of five times.”

For a knuckler, that’s pinpoint control.

There are only three genuine knucklers in the game today. Phil, his younger brother, Joe, and Hough, now with the Texas Rangers.

Brother Joe recently got caught sandpapering balls but Phil says he has no need of artificial aid. “I can throw a knuckler with an orange,” he boasts.

The Toronto Blue Jays opened their title drive by acquiring Phil from Cleveland, where he won 18 games in a year and a half. The Blue Jays are hoping there are a few more key strikeouts in the ageless arm that has struck out 3,353 batsmen, seventh most in history.

Phil Niekro may be the first guy to have to go to Cooperstown in a wheelchair. On the other hand, he may be the only guy just as effective in a wheelchair as in spikes. “I can pitch as long as I can breathe,” he says.

If the pitch is so good, why don’t more players learn it? The bad news for the batters is, they may. Niekro is shortly bringing out a cassette on how to throw the knuckler. “Anyone can learn it,” he says. “I can teach it the same way my Dad taught me.”

For the rest of baseball this may be like the news that Willie (the Actor) Sutton is bringing out a book on bank-robbing. But the good news is, first you have to find a guy with guts enough to stand out there with nothing to protect him but an 18-m.p.h. pitch at the age of 48. That may be harder to teach than any pitch.