Story #10: "The Knuckleball Artist" (Chapter 1)

A disgraced major league pitcher’s last hope lies with a kid who might be as lost as he is. A bittersweet novella.

For Coach DiMaio, who taught a sixth-grader to pitch on Saturday mornings.

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Everyone called Reginald “The Yipper” Perry’s Volkswagen Beetle “The Sleepmobile,” but Reg called it by its given name, the “Última Última Edición.” It was the world’s last Beetle, rolled off the assembly line in Puebla, Mexico, on July 31st of 2003. The Última Última was burped out of the car wash and onto the factory parking lot on a Friday at 4:59 PM. One last factory worker, who’d clearly been drinking, ran out to tearfully spin the radio antenna on. Afterwards, thousands of workers lined up to kiss the Beetle’s hood ornament goodbye. It was a birth then a funeral.

Earlier that same afternoon, Reginald had placed a call from the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre AAA RailRiders clubhouse to order the Última Última from a dealership in his hometown of What Cheer, Iowa. A friendly Midwestern voice chirped that the last Beetle made in North America was now his. Well, almost his. Reginald was $100 short, but his hometown dealership gave him twenty-four hours because “we know you’re good for it, Reg.” Sure enough, first thing in the morning, he made up the difference on a loan from Bobby “The Boil” Boyle.

It was the same afternoon Reginald was called up to the Yankees. He was riding high. He barely paid attention to The Boil’s loan terms. The Boil sketched them with his finger onto the steamy tile wall of the team showers.

It proved to be a life blunder. It had all moved too fast for Reginald, too much arithmetic under pressure. Things like “interest rates” and “minimum payments” and “prepayment penalties” were not his strong suit, and what with the steam, and trying to protect his modesty with such a small towel, well, let’s just say Reginald was no mental math champion.

But what could possibly go wrong? He was Bronx-bound.

Flush with a career trajectory to the Yankees, and an agent saying something-or-other earlier about signing bonuses after such-and-such number of batters faced, Reginald scribbled his name below the shampoo fine print of the shower wall.

Reginald had a gift, and that’s what put him on a bus to Yankee Stadium. Reginald could throw a knuckleball.

His knuckler danced right and left and up and over until batters looked like they’d been waiting for three innings in a stadium men’s room. No one knew where that ball was going to go. Reginald himself didn’t know where it was going to go. Bats flew, umpires ducked, fans ducked. Entire sections were abandoned by hot dog vendors.

But batter after batter that knuckleball arrived in the catcher’s mitt with the soft thunk of a revolving door. You can’t imagine the silence that fell when he pitched. You could hear his pitches not spinning, which is exactly what the knuckleball does.

The Wilkes-Barre play-by-play announcers said making contact with a Reginald Perry knuckleball was trying to catch a bee between your pinkie fingers. He didn’t even have a fastball or a change-up or anything else. He was a one-pitch wonder on a bus to the big city. “We’ll sure miss you, Reg,” the boys all promised at the Greyhound bus terminal.

Things didn’t work out in the Bronx.

Let’s start with everything that happened after the first pitch at Yankee Stadium and get it out of the way. Afterwards, we’ll go backwards like Reginald wished he could for the next twenty-one years. Then we’ll talk about pitch number one.

The second pitch that Reginald threw at 5:00 PM sharp landed in the visitor’s bullpen. The third went into the press box. The fourth left the stadium and not courtesy of a baseball bat. His pitches were ruled so wild and so far from the direction of home plate that they needed an umpire huddle on how to treat them.

“I’m not sure we can consider them pitches, per se,” said the third-base umpire who had damn near been struck with one.

“No, per se, I don’t think we can,” said another. The four of them unhuddled with an agreement to treat those pitches as “throws to first” or “checks on a runner,” or possibly “requests to get a new baseball.”

But that generous decision was tested. Ten minutes into Reginald’s brief stint in the major leagues, the umpires rethought everything so they could get out of there that evening. They shifted to treating the pitches as out-and-out bad sportsmanship. Reginald was threatened with ejection, but even that didn’t work.

Finally, one of the umps called for the Yankees manager to come out to the mound. “The kid’s got the yips. The whole thing is bad for baseball,” the ump tried to keep his voice down.

“What if they catch it in the stands? We’ve got 46,869 fans in here this afternoon. The yips are like wildfire I’m telling you.

“Wildfire,” the other umps nodded and mumbled after him.

The old manager who’d seen everything could hardly argue. He thanked Reginald for his service with the Yankees, which was awkward given he had only technically thrown a single pitch.

The manager dropped a baseball into his hand.

“I’m sorry, son, but keep this one. It was your first pitch. I had the boys pull it to the side. Go ahead and keep the uniform, too. 21 is a nice number. Likely we’ll have to retire it now. Anyway, kid, no need to mix it up with the team laundry.”

Reginald took the ball, the only one he ever threw for a strike, slumped his 6’ 4” shoulders and walked off the mound to wild applause, and believe me, in the Bronx, it was not the nice kind.

Now if you don’t know what the yips are, then you’ve never had them, but once I tell you what they are, your chances of getting them are ten times greater than they were at the start of this story.

If there was a textbook definition it would be “the sudden and inexplicable loss of the ability to throw a baseball accurately or complete the simplest, completely unrelated task.” All the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot cure you of the yips.

Not that they don’t try. Every player who’s ever got the yips has tried all the locker room snake oil: burning gloves, jumping into stadium fountains, wearing women’s underwear. It is all rubbish, as useless as trying to stop the hiccups by drinking water backwards and upside down.

But it was the first pitch that haunted Reginald Perry.

It was the pitch he threw at Yankee Stadium at 4:59 PM on July 31st, 2003, the precise moment the Sleepmobile burped into the parking lot from the factory car wash.

There was baseball before that knuckleball, and there was baseball after. Reginald Perry’s first pitch was a bee pulling out her landing gear and dropping inside a tulip.

It was the greatest pitch thrown in the history of baseball.

Reginald knew the moment it left his fingertips. He was a spectator like everybody else, and after he threw it he closed his eyes for a moment and a big grin rolled across his face like a wave rippling through the bleachers. He felt the hot lights of the Yankee scoreboard.

It was perfect. Everything was perfect. Life was perfect.

But when he opened his eyes, Reginald Perry spotted a familiar face in the stands. He was sitting behind home plate wearing a RailRiders baseball cap and sneering straight at him.

It was The Boil.

At exactly 5:00 PM on July 31, 2003, the yips entered his heart so quick and quiet he wouldn’t remember hearing them come in.

“You can’t,” the yips whispered.

“I can’t,” he whispered back.

Next ➡️

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