Apparently there is a documentary coming out about this strange baseball pitch, and it has this great byline:
"To gain power you must first give up control"
I have NO interest in baseball, never have, but listening to this guy talk about what he does, and watching the trailer, makes me want to see this documentary! There seem to be many similarities between the weirdness of the pitch, how it manifests in the pitcher, it's undoubted efficacy, and the public's reaction to it, that connect this rare ability with that of very high level sword players ...
Fascinating.
Here's a quote from the radio interview :
"I really didn't have a need for a knuckleball because I threw the ball pretty hard and was going to be a first-round draft pick because I had the ability to throw the ball 94, 95 miles an hour, which usually puts you in as a top-round pick. And so I really didn't have a need for it. I could get guys out with the weapons that I already had. ...
"[Then, after] I had been a conventional pitcher for some time professionally and, you know, I had to come to terms with my own mediocrity. And that's a hard thing to do for an athlete. And thankfully I had shown the knuckleball enough in my practice sessions and occasionally when I threw it in a game where Orel Hershiser, the pitching coach for the Texas Rangers, said I think you can do this the full time, because what you're doing now as a conventional pitcher just wasn't going to cut it anymore. And so I had to take that next step and I did that in 2005." R A Dickey
So ... unpredictability trumps speed and power eh ....?
Sounds like my kind of thing :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment