No Knuckles About It

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Winter 1985 (Vol. 4, No. 2).

 

There was a man on our block named Rooney Sullavan who would often come walking down the street while the kids would be playing ball in front of my house or Johnny McLaughlin’s house. He would always stop and ask if he’d ever shown us how he used to throw the knuckleball back when he pitched for Kankakee in 1930.

“Plenty of times, Rooney,” Billy Cunningham would say. “No knuckles about it, right?” Tommy Ryan would say. “No knuckles about it, right!” Rooney Sullavan would say. “Give it here and I’ll show you.” One of us would reluctantly toss Rooney the ball and we’d step up so he could demonstrate for the fortieth or fiftieth time how he held the ball by his fingertips only, no knuckles about it.

“Don’t know how it ever got the name knuckler,” Rooney’d say. “I call mine The Rooneyball.” Then he’d tell one of us—usually Billy because he had the catcher’s glove, the old fat-heeled kind that didn’t bend unless somebody stepped on it, a big black mitt that Billy’s dad had handed down to him from his days at Kankakee or Rock Island or some place—to get sixty feet away so Rooney could see if he could “still make it wrinkle.”

Billy would pace off twelve squares of sidewalk, each square being approximately five feet long, the length of one nine-year-old boy stretched head to toe, squat down and stick his big black glove out in front of his face. With his right hand he’d cover his crotch in case the pitch got away and short-hopped off the cement where he couldn’t block it with the mitt. The knuckleball was unpredictable; not even Rooney could tell what would happen to it once he let it go.

“It’s the air makes it hop,” Rooney claimed. His leather jacket creaked as he bent, wound up, rotated his right arm like nobody’d done since Chief Bender, crossed his runny grey eyes and released the ball from the tips of his fingers. We watched as it sailed straight up at first then sort of floated on an invisible wave before plunging the last ten feet like a balloon that had been pierced by a dart.

Billy always went down on his knees, the back of his right hand stiffened over his crotch, and stuck out his gloved hand at the slowly whirling Rooneyball. Just before it got to Billy’s mitt the ball would give out entirely and sink rapidly, inducing Billy to lean forward in order to catch it—only he couldn’t because at the last instant it would make a final, sneaky hop before bouncing surprisingly hard off Billy’s unprotected chest.

“Just like I told you,” Rooney Sullavan would exclaim. “All it takes is plain old air.”

Billy would come up with the ball in his upturned glove, his right hand rubbing the spot on his chest where the pitch had hit. “You all right, son?” Rooney would ask, and Billy would nod. “Tough kid,” Rooney’d say: “I’d like to stay out with you fellas all day, but I got responsibilities.” Rooney would muss up Billy’s hair with the hand that held the secret to The Rooneyball and walk away whistling “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” or “My Wild Irish Rose.” Rooney was about forty-five or fifty years old and lived with his mother in a bungalow at the corner. He worked nights for Wanzer Dairy, washing out returned milk bottles.

Tommy Ryan would grab the ball out of Billy’s mitt and hold it by the tips of his fingers like Rooney Sullavan did, and Billy would go sit on the stoop in front of the closest house and rub his chest. “No way,” Tommy would say, considering the prospect of his ever duplicating Rooney’s feat. “There must be something he’s not telling us.”

BARRY GIFFORD of Berkeley, Ca., wrote The Neighborhood of Baseball.