Knuckler: The Phil Niekro Story – Wilfrid Binette, 1970 ½★

A Pitch that Roared, a Book that Bored

Some sports books are like this one: Written on the fly to cash in on an athlete’s brief moment in the sun, certain in the knowledge no one will be reading it in a few years when said athlete’s time is long over.

I mean, this particular pitcher had just enjoyed his first big season, leading the Atlanta Braves to their first-ever postseason appearance, and he’s already 30 years old. How much longer would you think he had?

Phil Niekro’s 23 wins in 1969 were a career high, but as it turned out he still had a lot of victories left in the tank: 266, to be exact. His career was like some cross between a fine wine and a Clydesdale.

The nub of the story with Niekro comes down not to any particular game or season, but rather a pitch: The knuckleball. Niekro’s mastery of the knuckler punched his bottomless-pasta-bowl meal ticket of a career.

Credit baseball star Joe Torre with that foresight, as quoted in Knucker:

“Niekro can last forever. When he’s throwing the ball over the plate they’re swinging at it. He’ll throw five or six pitches an inning and it’s all over. If he can get it over, they won’t take it. They’ll swing at it and miss it.”

When it left his right hand, Niekro’s knuckleball danced and darted and dove like nobody else’s, not that many others threw knucklers then or now. He spent longer than normal in the minors trying to gain some control of it. Once he did, a Hall of Fame career was born.

Phil Niekro in his younger days as a major-leaguer. His 1.87 earned-run average in his first full season, 1967, led the majors. He went 11-9 that year. Image from http://happybday.to/Phil-Niekro.

“I’ve tried several ways to hit him and I’ve never been able to do a good job,” Ron Santo, a fellow Hall of Famer then playing third base for the Chicago Cubs, reveals in Knuckler. “If you see it you just don’t know which way it’s going to break.”

Catching Niekro is a challenge, too, the Braves’ Bob Didier explains: “I kept telling myself to move with the ball to the left or to the right but that’s impossible because you don’t ever know exactly which side of the plate the ball is coming, so you can’t get yourself ready to catch it, block it or knock it down.”

“No brains or ability are required to catch a knuckleball,” author Wilfrid Binette sums up. “Only guts.”

Binette’s focus on this aspect of Niekro is a smart play. “Knucksie” was his nickname and the pitch his legacy. I just wish Binette hadn’t run out of things to say so quickly.

Knuckler is unique that way; a book of some 130 pages in wide-spaced print that manages to run on too long anyway. It is a collection of chapters each running two to three pages. No narrative or author’s sensibility is employed, just the barest of descriptors.

Chapter 1’s title: “It Takes Determination.” The opening sentence of Chapter 2 reads, I kid you not: “It’s nice to want to play baseball.”

These opening chapters seem tailored to a young-adult audience, in a grotesquely patronizing way any child would resent then or now. Binette even explains what the word “determination” means, and how youngsters should take heart from Niekro’s example. He didn’t play Little League, his first exposure to baseball coming as a freshman on his Bridgeport High School team in east-central Ohio. He wasn’t the biggest kid, or the fastest arm. He just worked real hard.

Phil Niekro's only postseason decision came in the first-ever National League Championship Series game, a 9-5 drubbing to the New York Mets. Opposing Niekro that day in October 1969 was Tom Seaver, the only pitcher to get more votes than Niekro for that year's National League Cy Young Award. Image from https://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/october-4-1969-mets-and-braves-play-first-nl-championship-series-game.

“You’ve got to take interest in the sport and stick to it,” Binette quotes Niekro saying. “Just because the boy across the street has a go-cart doesn’t mean you have to have one also. You need to make up your mind what you want to do and you need to practice, practice, practice.”

After these first three chapters, the book loses this pedantic tone and becomes an account of Niekro’s journey to the majors. Chapters give a brief summary of a specific year Niekro spent in the minors. Instead of talking down to you, the author’s voice becomes dry and remote.

At one point, very early, Niekro was almost released when he was on the Class D team in Wellsville, New York. The year was 1959; Niekro’s earned-run average after ten appearances a whopping 7.46.

“I begged and begged and begged...” Niekro says. “It would have killed me if I had had to return home and tell my parents that I had been cut.”

Apparently this did the trick. I’d love to know how, but Binette doesn’t say. Niekro got sent to another team, Class D McCook in the Nebraska State League. There Niekro won seven games and struck out 48 in 52 innings. No details are given about what Niekro did differently. He just started winning, and didn’t stop until he reached the majors.

You try hitting this. Niekro when he pitched for the New York Yankees late in his career. GIF from https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/gif-phil-niekros-insane-top-to-bottom-knuckler/.

All the time, Binette seems to relate these stories second-hand, like he pulled them from a scrapbook of Niekro quotes rather than sat down with the man himself to hash out what makes him tick or how he felt at various points in his career. What kind of guy was Phil? Quiet, amusing, demonstrative, what? Not a clue is given.

That was my biggest problem with Knuckler. Written for kids or not, there’s no excuse for it being so bare of personality.

Niekro offers anodyne comments of the managers he met along the way to the Braves, which had yet to move from Milwaukee to Atlanta by the time he made a brief debut there in 1964. The following year, he pitched his first start, against another future Hall of Famer, Juan Marichal, who already won 22 games that season. Marichal’s San Francisco Giants were then riding a 14-game winning streak.

“I knew I’d have to be at my best and then some,” Binette quotes Niekro recalling.

Binette doesn’t relate details, just that the Braves won 9-1 behind two Hank Aaron home runs and five innings of solid work from Niekro. It was Niekro’s only start that season.

Phil Niekro may have looked old before his time, but when he threw it was the batters who often appeared feeble. His 300th win at age 46 came in a complete-game shutout. He saved all his knuckleballs that day for the final batter. Image from https://www.scoopnest.com/user/70sBaseball.

Not much baseball actually shows up in this book. Basically, it boils down to Niekro having control problems throwing his knuckleball in the majors, then not having those problems anymore. Maybe Niekro didn’t want to share any trade secrets and so put it all down to hard work, but being able to hone a skill in as demanding an environment as professional baseball deserves more attention than Binette provides.

There are a lot of photos, mostly garbage shots of Niekro standing around with other players for publicity tours or else local businessmen. A number show Niekro at a bar he owned, The Knuckler Lounge. I can hear Binette or someone at publisher Hallux asking Braves publicity to send them whatever they had to fill out their book. Not much care went into the selection: some photos show Niekro out-of-focus.

An outsized amount of attention in Knuckler is spent on Phil’s younger brother. Joe Niekro also had a long career as a starter, breaking in with the Chicago Cubs in 1967. Sometimes he pitched against Phil.

In his introduction to Knuckler, sportscaster Milo Hamilton, who called Braves games then, draws heavily on these Phil-Joe “Brother Battles” and Phil’s resentment of same. “It bothered him to the point that he finally said, in effect…‘either get us on the same team, or in different leagues,’” Hamilton writes.

Binette also plays up this discomfort of two brothers squaring off against each other while their ballclubs market same as if it were Spartacus or something. They started games against one another four times already when Knuckler was published and five more times thereafter, making for nine out of the 21 times such a thing ever happened in major-league baseball. The way Binette frames it, you would think it some cruel initiation rite rather than a cool way to celebrate two brothers making it big in the same game.

Phil Niekro (right) was not the only Niekro to master the knuckleball. Little brother Joe (left) did, too. In the majors the brothers amassed more victories than any other pair of siblings, 529. Even Cy Young and his sister can't beat that. Image from https://90feetofperfection.com/2012/06/07/the-niekro-brothers-ebbets-field-the-oakland-larks-thurman-billy-the-splendid-splinter/.

Binette manages one amusing anecdote involving the Niekros’ father, Phil Senior, nervously showing up at the ballpark not quite sure what to root for, but like every other halfway engaging moment in this book, it passes quickly. As Truman Capote said, there is writing and there is typing. Binette ain’t doing much of the former here.

Binette does relate some aspects of Niekro’s game outside of his knuckleball. He was a fine fielder and a decent batter. His 18 sacrifice bunts in 1968 tied a National League record. Then there was his pick-off move, which kept runners on first honest while his pitches danced.

Most of the attention is on the knuckleball. Ernie Banks tells Binette it is Niekro’s only pitch apart from a curveball, though Willie Mays rates his slider and fastball as “good.” Whoever’s right, it was Niekro’s knuckleball that mattered. Once the Braves found someone who could catch it (initially Bob Uecker, a journeyman catcher better known today as a sportscaster and TV star), Niekro was off and running.

And that’s about all the insight I could glean from Knuckler, a shame because Niekro’s story is unique and Binette had a chance here to catch it while it was still forming. Today, people talk about Niekro with such superlatives as best over-40 player, or best never to have pitched in a World Series. He pitched over 200 innings a season every year but one from 1967 to 1986, and in 1979 performed the never-again feat of winning 21 and losing 20 for the cellar-dwelling Braves. It was by any yardstick a singular career.

To be fair, all this lay in the future when Binette sat down to write Knuckler. Still, a story about a guy making it big on one pitch should offer more in the way of story than this. Binette didn’t seem to care, though, and so neither can you.