COOL

I just got my copy of “Management by Baseball,” the new book by my buddy Jeff Angus (of the blog of the same name). Because he knows I’m a fan, he sent one along - and included a Wes Covington baseball card (he played outfield for the Phillies).

Anyway, I was reading his chapter on the challenges of coaching knuckleball pitchers (both literally and metaphorically, because this is a business management book) and because I identify with the personality type, I got curious about the physics of the pitch. I came up with a pitching site that’s too geeky even for me.

I’ve always been partial to junk ball pitchers (I love the mental game), so naturally the knuckleball appeals to me.

The knuckleball?also known as the knuckler, the fingernail ball, the fingertip ball, the flutterball, the floater, the dancer, the bug, the butterfly ball, the moth, the bubble, the ghostball, the horseshoe, the dry spitter, and, curiously, the spinner - has been around, in one form or another, for nearly as long as professional baseball itself, though for much of that time it has been regarded with suspicion. Spinning is precisely what it does not do. In fact, a lack of spin is about the only identifying characteristic of the pitch. There is no right way to hold a knuckleball when throwing it (seams, no seams; two fingers, three), and no predictable flight pattern once it leaves the hand. ?Butterflies aren?t bullets,? the longtime knuckleballer Charlie Hough once said. ?You can?t aim ?em?you just let ?em go.? The pitch shakes, shimmies, wobbles, drops?it knuckles, as they say. Which is doubly confusing, because the term ?knuckleball? is itself a kind of misnomer, a holdover from the pitch?s largely forgotten infancy.

Yes, I do love me some iconclasts.

Anyway, Jeff’s book is great. If you’re a management type, you should buy it. But don’t take my word for it:

No other management book I’ve read delivers so much insight and fun in such a compact package. And no other baseball book, period, teaches you so much about management — and yourself. I nominate Jeff Angus for Manager of the Year. - Stephen Manes, Columnist, Forbes Magazine.