Johnson Throws the Knuckleball

Spring training is here. Decisions must be made. Listen in.

Look, y’all. We have to talk about Johnson. One slot left in this pitching rotation and nobody has even brought up his name. So, I will. The scouting report says he’s got a four-seamer that scrapes the low-to-mid nineties. When he sleeps good and eats right. Which, we all know, happens ten feet south of never. Down on the farm, on any given night, he’s got a belly full of hooch and he kills the lights about the same time the rooster drags his ass out of the henhouse to do his job. He’s got a cutter that might stone a straight-outta-highschool slugger in single A, but up here in the bigs, it’s nothing but teeball. I heard he tried a sinker once and the grounds crew had to dig it out of the dirt with a trench shovel. But Johnson throws the knuckleball. And a pretty good one too. 

Hardy-har. I hear you laughing. The knuckleball, sure. The geezer’s pitch. Phil Niekro was, what, two hundred years old when he finally hung up his glove? Every single one of us can picture Niekro on the pine with more ice taped to his elbow than what sent the Titanic to Davy Jones’ locker. Hell, the only reason Niekro himself wasn’t on board that boat is because he got called up. Niekro retired in, what, 1987? And the Titanic sank in 1912? That would’ve been about the time of his first spring training. 

Look at Morrison, Jimenez, Van Druten. It’s honestly hard to tell the difference which is hotter, their fastballs or their lives off the diamond. Morrison is sending swimsuit models to voicemail. Regularly. I know, because he told me. He told everybody in the clubhouse. Including that poor kid from Make-A-Wish. Jimenez drives his Ferrari as fast as he throws. And Van Druten, by God, he asked the front office if Balenciaga could make the uniforms next year.

Meanwhile, Johnson puttered up to the stadium in a hatchback with more rust on the quarter panels then paint. When I saw his gut, I almost said congrats because I thought he was pregnant. I asked him if he wanted to get something to eat and he said, “Nah, Coach. I smoked a pack of Marlboro’s on the way over. I’m full.” But he was holding a baseball the whole time we talked. Knuckles on the seams tall as rabbit ears. 

Brass tacks, Johnson has the natural brain power of a ball peen hammer. That’s beyond dispute. And nobody here could un-dummy him, not if they tried the rest of their lives. But his brains are beside the point. We’re not looking for Einstein. We’re looking for a pitching staff. I know you all saw his last tape from winter ball. Hell, he practically made the baseball stop mid-air and pick dandelions. And then it started up again, like a housefly, smack into Tommy’s glove. Who was at the plate at the time, Butchie Reynolds? He’s headed to Cooperstown now, sure. The only batter ever to strike out swinging on one, single pitch.

But more than that, it occurs to me that Johnson has a pretty solid handle on something that the rest of the boys don’t. And never will. With that knuckleball, Johnson figures on one thing true as the floor I’m standing on right now: This isn’t his world. He didn’t make it. Nobody voted him king of it. But—and this next part is all the difference—he’s no stranger here and he knows it. He’s got associates in the way the wind blows, a pal in the force of gravity, a good friend in Mother Nature’s physics department.

Morrison, Jimenez, Van Druten and all the rest, when they walk out to the mound, they’ve got one thing on their minds: Zip their pitches in so dazzlingly fast, and with so much friggin’ torque, that the universe would tip its caps and say, “Hot damn, son, I’ve never seen anything like that before.” They throw despite the sunshine, despite the air. Despite the hide of the ball and the stiches and how it all feels in the palm of the hand. 

And maybe their way works. Two times out of three or, hell, even nine of ten. But that tenth time is Butchie Reynolds coming around on them, parking one high and hard and long, long gone. 

Watch Johnson, the next time we stick him on the hill. Really watch. The ball jumps from his knuckles, but once it’s out of his hand, well. It’s out of his hands. But it’s not in nobody’s hands. He’s just handed it over to some friends for the rest of the ride. And they take their turns. A little bump here, a push there, a nudge thisaway, a knock thataway. See, Johnson makes a partner out of the powers that be. The breeze and the temperature and all, sure, but, hell, the very spirit of the game. Those other guys, they’re so damn fired up on the sound of their own names in the mouths of bikini women or their own reflections in their rocket-cars’ rear view mirrors that they never realized what Johnson has always known: Him, up on the mound all by himself, doesn’t magically turn everything else in the ballpark into his bitterest enemy. He don’t have to beat everything. Only the man in the batter’s box. Johnson, more than anybody else in all of big-league ball, knows exactly who he is and why he comes to the ballpark. 

Now, we’ve got to trim this team. Shed some good kids, some good ballplayers. Some of them will shine on other rosters and we’ll woulda-coulda-shoulda all the way to hell and back. Some of them will fade away, open up used car lots, settle down in the suburbs, raise up families, and tell their children about their little flashes of frosted-over glory. It’s the same every year. Everybody at this table knows it. Only don’t let Johnson go. The game needs him. The summertime needs him. Old codgers like us, who could baseball in our sleep, we need him. Maybe more than anybody. So, for the game, for what it was and what it will be: Slide Johnson into the final rotation slot. 

Paul Luikart is the author of the short story collections Animal Heart (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016), Brief Instructions (Ghostbird Press, 2017), Metropolia (Ghostbird Press, 2021) and The Museum of Heartache (Pski’s Porch Publishing, 2021.) He serves as an adjunct professor of fiction writing at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia and lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee.