Shades of 1992

I watched a bit of last night's ALCS Game Four, and I have to admit, watching Tim Wakefield throw that knuckleball sure brings back memories of the awful 1992 NLCS. That was the year Wakefield first emerged, coming up from AAA to the Pirates in the second half of the season. He went 9-2, and in that year's NLCS against the Braves, he went 2-0 and would have been the MVP had not Francisco Cabrera somehow managed to complete the sale of his soul to the Devil just in time for the bottom of the ninth in Game Seven, thus condemning the Braves for all time to being Baseball's Most Evil Franchise.

Anyway, Wakefield's knuckleball still looks the same: a slow pitch that floats toward the plate and then drops like a rock just as the batter thinks, "Geez, look at that thing, I'm going to hit that into the upper deck" and then swings-and-misses.

(For those not up on baseball, a knuckleball is a special pitch that is thrown with as little spin on the ball as possible, so that its motion to the plate is wildly unpredictable. A knuckleball that looks like it's in the strike zone usually ends up anywhere but in the strike zone, so a knuckleball pitcher who does it right can totally confound opposing hitters not through pinpoint control, but through the laws of chaos, basically. Knuckleballs also tend to result in a lot of wild pitches and passed balls, because the catcher has no more idea of where the ball's going than anyone else. True knuckleball pitchers are rare because the pitch is so nutty.)