This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.
Dear reader,
Please excuse this brief diversion from the musings of my colleagues on the coming baseball season. I’ve found myself in the midst of an existential crisis, and I need to work it out. My task is to chronicle what to expect from R.A. Dickey this season. But after spending a day with him, I was left doubting my own place in this process.
It was Dickey’s first day in Toronto as a Blue Jay. We were driving along University Avenue with members of the Jays’ media staff and a cameraman from 60 Minutes, who was filming a story on him. I asked Dickey about a profile of him written by one of my favourite American sports writers, Gary Smith. Having written about Dickey for this magazine when he was a Met, I wanted to know how Smith’s approach differed from mine. “He was incredible,” Dickey said. “Please don’t take this the wrong way. He’s just a pro’s pro. And more than that, he’s very insightful. He has the ability to dig beneath the surface.” A thoughtful dissection of the reporting process, I thought.
I asked him what it’s like being interviewed on a daily basis in a media hub like New York City. “You’re always trying to figure out what their angle is,” he said. “They’re trying to shape this some way, and figuring that out is exhausting. You can’t take them at face value. You’ve got to be on your game.” He politely noted that not all reporters have an angle, and that when he knows who is going to be interviewing him, he usually looks them up online. “I’ll read a lot of their work, so I’ll know the style they write from.” This is when I start to get nervous. First, I wonder, what does R.A. Dickey think I’m thinking? What does he think my angle is? What exactly is my angle? And, if he’s read my work, what does he think of it? Maybe he didn’t like it. Oh, man. Dickey has thrown me a knuckleball. And then he freezes me with a changeup: “Teach me a little bit about the provinces,” he says. “How many are there in Canada?” But now I’m busy worrying that Dickey might be able to do my job better than I can. That my editor might decide to skip the middleman and ask Dickey to preview himself. My livelihood is at risk. “What’s that? There’s, um… what, we’ve got…” Oh. My. God. No… “There are 10 provinces, right?” he helps. “Right,” I answer, closing my eyes and swinging late at the pitch. “And with the territories now, we’ve got… um… three.” Contact—but a blooper right into his mitt. I’m out.
You see the dilemma, right? A sports writer’s task is supposed to be easier than this. Athletes generally aren’t smarter than you. Richer, yes. Better looking, sure. Physically superhuman. But on a purely intellectual level, this is not supposed to happen. A sense of cerebral superiority is all we have. I’m not the only writer to be baffled by a Cy Young winner who studies your questions like an opposing team’s lineup. That day, during his introductory press conference, the media crowded in to get a glimpse of the marquee piece of an off-season that took the Jays from a middling afterthought to a legit contender. “Oh my God! Oh my God!” a reporter mock whispered as Dickey was ushered in. He wore a blue-and-red gingham dress shirt, with a matching red tie and blue sweater. A nice touch. When Toronto’s GM Alex Anthopoulos presented him with his No. 43 jersey as cameras flashed, Dickey accidently put it on backwards. “How many people does it take to put on a uniform?” he quipped. And everyone erupted. Sure—but you’re not going to get off that easily, Dickey. We have questions. Is a 38-year-old pitcher really a good investment? Isn’t that knuckleball voodoo just a gimmick? You won 20 games for a bad team in the National League—but what about the real-deal AL East? The thing is, they’re easy questions to answer: 1. Yes, if he’s a knuckler. 2. A 234-inning, 230-strikeout gimmick? 3. Ask his friend, Cy Young.
He then proceeded to say All The Right Things with eloquence, sincerity and humility—and the perfect touch of high expectations for the Jays’ must-win season. Twitter went nuts. Reporters gushed. Veteran Toronto Star columnist Richard Griffin aptly described Dickey—in both story and appearance—as a younger version of The Most Interesting Man in the World from the Dos Equis beer ads.
Knowing that Dickey is an avid reader, I lent him a collection of Ernest Hemingway’s work as a young reporter with the Toronto Star in the early 1920s. It seemed a fitting way to welcome him to town and a great way to try to let him know that, you know, I get it. Though I’m now fairly certain that he was on to my less-than-altruistic motivation, Dickey accepted it with an appreciative “Golly” in his Nashville drawl, and said he’d have its 478 pages finished before the season started. I assured him he didn’t need to return it anytime soon. He had a lot on his agenda during that trip in early January—like finding a new home for his wife and four kids and preparing for a trip to India with his two daughters to visit a clinic in Mumbai that helps girls escape the sex trade. He’d raised $100,000 for the project by climbing Mount Kilimanjaro last year. He’d also be making edits on the young-adult version of his bestselling autobiography and, of course, preparing for the upcoming season. So, yeah, don’t worry about the book. Take your time. “I’ll read it between now and then, and give it back to you,” he insisted. “You need to hang on to this.”
In the four years since I found the Hemingway collection at a used book store, I’ve read maybe 30 pages. I brushed away dust when I grabbed it off the shelf that morning.
To understand Dickey, you have to know that he doesn’t move on to a new book until he’s finished the one he’s reading. Each story is its own authentic journey, and he intends to see it through. “I like to try to get everything out of it, so I’m engaged with it until I finish,” he says. He views pitching the same way—every unpredictable knuckleball tells a story of glory or tragedy (hopefully more often the former). In the end, each of those swooping, breaking knucklers is part of a larger plan, a means to an end bigger than baseball, a way for him to impact the world on a more meaningful scale. You can trace the philosophy back to his Christian faith and, more directly, to Trevecca Nazarene University in Nashville, in January 2010, in a class of 10 undergrads, when Dickey sat down to… no reaction at all. Only one student—a member of the women’s varsity softball team—even recognized Dickey as a major league pitcher who had just pitched 35 games for the Minnesota Twins with a 4.62 ERA. Dickey was four years into his knuckleball experiment, and he still hadn’t found success. His only claims to baseball history were tying Tim Wakefield’s record for most home runs given up in a game (six, in Dickey’s first start as a knuckleballer), and for throwing four wild pitches in a single inning (a record he shares with four other pitchers, including Hall of Fame knuckleballer Phil Niekro). At 34, Dickey was aware that he might have to find a new job soon—perhaps, he thought, as a professor, or a middle school teacher—and was interested in completing the English Lit degree he left unfinished at the University of Tennessee when he was drafted by the Rangers in 1996. The professor at the head of the class that day was Michael Karounos, whom Dickey had met through a mutual friend at their church. Dickey quietly joined the professor’s class on existentialism and the search for meaning in modern American literature, convening Tuesdays and Thursdays at noon. They discussed works like The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. Karounos often met with the pitcher in his office before class, and they’d chat about Nietzsche or John Gardner’s Grendel, a satire of existentialism, over sandwiches from Panera. Dickey would show the prof some of the poetry he was working on and Karounos would try to get some inside gossip about the majors. (Dickey never gave it up.)
That spring, Dickey decided to give the knuckleball one more shot and signed a minor-league contract with the Mets. The rest is one of the best-known stories in recent baseball history. He was quickly brought up to the big club in 2010 after starting strong in the minors, and delivered two quality seasons before finally breaking out in 2012—16 years after he’d been drafted. Dickey won 20 games and led the National League in starts, innings pitched and strikeouts, finishing second in ERA among pitchers with at least 150 innings pitched. But the pitcher and the prof remain close friends. Dickey calls Karounos every few days to chat about literature, family, faith and a series of children’s books they are working on together.
While sabermetric geeks might dismiss this dreamy digression into Dickey’s academic career, that side of him is as critical to his success as the knuckleball itself. Everything is connected—Dickey is an existential pitcher. “He has the gift of equanimity. He doesn’t get nervous,” says Karounos. “He’s just looking pitch to pitch. I think that’s why existentialism resonated so much with him—it’s a moment-to-moment creation of authenticity.” The act of performing on a stage in front of 50,000 people is, naturally, a nerve-racking thing. “I get nervous just thinking about it,” says Karounos.
Add to that the expectation that follows a Cy Young season and the hype surrounding the 2013 Blue Jays and it seems like a recipe for regression. Dickey freely admits that he gets anxious, but says he’s never been one to run away from the what-ifs. He often talks about his pitch as a metaphor for life—he never knows exactly where it will end up, but he has faith it will get where it needs to go. “If I’m engrossed in the moment, everything will happen the way it should.”
Karounos is an essential part of Dickey’s philosophical approach to baseball, but a fraternity of retired knuckleball pitchers he calls his Jedi Council are equally important to what he does on the mound. Not necessarily in the mechanical sense, though that’s important, but because they can relate. Wakefield, Niekro and Charlie Hough are among the select few who can understand Dickey, the pitcher. “It’s a lonely place sometimes, because you’re the only person who does it,” Dickey said, as we walked down a hall of memorabilia in the team’s clubhouse—past Dave Stieb’s cleats, a mural of Roy Halladay and a photo of Pat Hentgen, the Jays’ current pitching coach. None of those guys would be able to fully grasp the mix of uncertainty and hope Dickey faces in each pitch. “There are probably only eight knuckleballers still alive, so you don’t have a lot of people to turn to,” he says. “So it’s just nice to talk to somebody who has walked a mile in your shoes. Forget baseball for a minute—just the other stuff.”
When he won his Cy Young Award last year, he received close to 200 text messages. One of the few he replied to was from Hough, who had simply written: “Yahoo!” He was the first guy who worked with Dickey back in 2005, after the Texas Rangers told the fading pitcher he needed to reinvent himself. Dickey credits Hough and the others for guiding his success. Hough credits him for keeping their art alive. “Thanks to R.A., people are starting to recognize the value of a knuckleball pitcher again,” he says, sounding like an excited grandfather. “It’s just good to see good people do well. Things weren’t going too good, but he stuck with it to make it right—yahoo!”
Dickey is known for having two speeds on his knuckleball, which isn’t really unique, Hough says—except for the speed at which he can throw them, which can reach into the 80s. The goal for the Jays this season, Hough says, should be to have Dickey pitch as many innings as possible. “The rest,” he says, “will take care of itself.” Any reason to worry that, at 38, his time is running short? “Well, it took me 25 years to master it,” says Hough, who pitched his last game at 46. “I’d say he has a lot of good years left.”
So there’s something of a preview there, right? Something that helps cut through the hype around Toronto’s new pitching wizard? Well, might as well let the man himself finish it off. Walking up to the case that holds the two world championship trophies from 1992 and 1993 in the Jays clubhouse, we stop for a moment so I can set up the obvious conclusion. So, what’s the next chapter, I ask. “Well, I think you’re looking at it,” Dickey says, on cue. “I remember watching Joe Carter hit that home run off Mitch Williams like it was yesterday. The energy that it brought to this city and this country was something incredibly special.” Nailed it. Bring back the nostalgia and create hope for what’s to come. Very effective, Dickey. Now stick to baseball, and leave my job alone.
