Image credit:
Matt Waldron #61 of the San Diego Padres pitches during the first inning of the game against the St. Louis Cardinals at PETCO Park on September 22, 2023 in San Diego, California. (Photo by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images)
SAN DIEGO — In recent years, the knuckleball has gone the way of the northern white rhino and the Amur leopard.
It is not extinct yet, but it is very close.
In that way, Matt Waldron is a conservationist. The Padres rookie righthander brought the knuckleball back to MLB, and proved it has a place in the modern game.
Waldron, 26, took over the Padres bottom rotation spot and helped stabilize the unit after season-ending injuries to Joe Musgrove and Yu Darvish. He’s not a traditional knuckleballer in the Wakefield-ian sense – he has a low-90s fastball, mid-80s cutter and upper-70s slider and throws them all in addition to his knuckler. But he ramped up his use of the knuckleball in his most recent start, and his best outings followed.
Waldron threw his knuckleball a season-high 34 times against the A’s on Sept. In his next start against the Cardinals, he threw his knuckler nearly a third of the time and pitched 5.2 innings with one run allowed and a career-high nine strikeouts.
In his latest start, Waldron once again cooled the knuckleball.
“Obviously I knew nobody else was throwing it,” Waldron said. “I just treat it as a weapon that I use.”
A decade ago, many knuckleballers still roamed the MLB. RA Dickey famously rode his knuckleball to the 2012 National League Cy Young Award. Journeyman Steven Wright became an all-star in 2016 on the strength of his knuckler.
But both retired at the end of the 2010s. Before Waldron, the only major leaguer to throw a knuckleball in the 2020s was righthander Mickey Jannis, who made one relief appearance for the Orioles in 2021.
Waldron, with his five starts and 35.1 innings this season, is the first major league starter to throw a knuckleball even semi-regularly since Dickey retired in 2017.
“Whenever you see some swings and guys struggle with it, you wonder why there aren’t more knuckleball guys,” Padres manager Bob Melvin said. “It’s a big pitch for him, especially here in the big leagues.”
Melvin’s question is one that is often asked: where are all the knuckleballers?
There are a few factors at play. For one, learning a knuckleball – and finding a catcher who can handle one – is very difficult. Second, the game’s increasing emphasis on speed and de-emphasis on strength from starting pitchers directly contrasts with knuckleballers’ ability to throw a high number of pitches at a lower velocity. .
While modern pitching philosophies are more centered on throwing high-velocity fastballs above the strike zone, Melvin further theorizes how calling balls and strikes is what discourages teams from improving knuckleball pitchers.
“The strike zone also, right now, is probably more beneficial to guys who throw over the zone with more velo,” Melvin said. “That shifted a little bit in my career. What I’d like to see is maybe a little bit lower zone and guys that, you know, that have a little bit of difference and maybe a little bit longer. But that’s not where we are now.”
Despite the limitations, Waldron showed a knuckleball can still be effective in the modern game.
Waldron threw 30 knuckleballs on 96 pitches in his last start against the Cardinals. The Cardinals managed just three runs in the game – a groundout, a popout and a home run by shortstop Masyn Winn on a floater that Waldron left hanging. He threw half of his knuckleballs for strikes, an impressive number given the unpredictable nature of the pitch, and produced an array of called strikes, swinging strikes and foul balls where the hitters barely get a piece after swinging wildly off balance.
While Waldron used his knuckleball more as a setup pitch than a breakaway pitch — only one of his nine strikeouts came on a knuckleball — it nonetheless put Cardinals hitters in an uncomfortable position.
“It’s a big wrinkle,” Cardinals outfielder Lars Nootbaar said. “We just try to treat it like a splitter, but knowing in the back of your mind that he got that, it’s an outlier pitch that you don’t see so it’s hard to prepare for that. And not to mention that he would get it until the mid-90s. So yeah, I mean, it’s definitely a wrinkle.
Like champagne, penicillin and other amazing innovations, Waldron’s knuckleball didn’t happen.
Waldron had a standard repertoire when Cleveland drafted him in the 18th round in 2019 out of Nebraska-Omaha. He has a 92-94 mph fastball, a fringy slider and a fringy changeup. The Padres acquired him as a player to be named later in the 2020 deadline trade that brought Mike Clevinger to San Diego, an afterthought in the blockbuster, nine-player deal.
In the following spring training, Waldron was playing catch with fellow minor league righthander Chase Walter when he decided to throw a knuckleball just for fun.
“He was really funny and I was just bugging him like ‘Yo, check it out,'” Waldron said. “I just vented it to him. He’s like 6-(foot)-7. I just like to see him dance a little bit and like, just take it easy.”
A Padres development staff saw Waldron throw a knuckleball and was intrigued. The team asked Waldron to dump it for Rapsodo’s tracking system and wanted what the analytics showed. The Padres then ordered Waldron to throw it 10% of the time in a spring training game. After that, it was decided that the knuckleball would become a permanent part of Waldron’s arsenal.
The addition changed the trajectory of Waldron’s career. In a matter of weeks, a pitch he threw as a joke to break up adversity in minor league camp transformed him from an organizational righthander to a pitcher with a legitimate path. heading to the big leagues.
“To use it as a weapon,” Waldron said, “I never thought about it.”
Not everything is smooth sailing. In his first two starts at High-A Fort Wayne after the knuckleball was added, Waldron surrendered 11 hits and six runs (five earned) in 9.2 innings.
“I had to get rid of the bad parts and, like, learn to get past them,” Waldron said. “The first game was bad. It was really ugly.”
Eventually, he learned to control the notoriously temperamental tone. He became one of the best pitchers in the Midwest League after his rocky start and earned a promotion to Double-A San Antonio at the all-star break. He continued to improve and earned a promotion to Triple-A El Paso the following year. While he struggled in the notoriously tough pitching environment of the Pacific Coast League, he still showed enough to earn his first big league callup in June and work his way into the Padres rotation by the end of August.
Like the pitch itself, Waldron benefited from the fact that most of the young players he faced in the minors had never seen a knuckleball. To young hitters, the pitch is roughly the equivalent of a floppy disk or dial-up internet – a relic from an earlier era they don’t know about.
The same is true in the big leagues, especially against young lineups like the A’s and Cardinals. Waldron’s knuckleball presented them with a conundrum: How do you prepare for a pitch you’ve barely seen?
“I don’t think you are,” said Nootbaar, 25. “I think you’re trying to hit other things, really.”
Melvin has a personal appreciation for how hard it is to track a knuckleball. A 10-year major league catcher, he was on track for a flawless defensive season with the Orioles in 1990.
That ended when he had to catch a knuckleballer.
“I went into the last week of the season with no passed balls and no errors,” Melvin said. “Daniel Boone came into the big leagues, a lefthanded knuckleballer for Baltimore, and one night I had a passed ball and interfered with the catcher, so it ruined my season.”
If a true knuckleball revival is to happen, it will take time. Aside from Waldron being the only active pitcher with one in the majors, they are few and far between in the minors. Twins righthander Cory Lewis, who finished this year at High-A Cedar Rapids, is the only even semi-prominent prospect to throw a knuckleball. Righthander KC Hunt, a non-drafted free agent the Brewers signed this year out of Mississippi State, threw a knuckleball in high school but dropped it in college.
Beyond that, these are slim pickings.
But Waldron showed there was an opportunity to take advantage of modern hitters’ unfamiliarity, and resulting discomfort, with the knuckleball.
Like many other rare specimens that have come back from the brink of extinction, the knuckleball is back in the big leagues.
“Just let them think about it all the time,” Waldron said. “I don’t know when I will throw up before the game. It just happens. And to keep that routine and not focus on the percentages, I just throw it at all the numbers and see how it works.