HOMETOWN

My baseball career ended at 13 after I suddenly became afraid of the ball during my first season in Pony League, the destination in those days after aging out of Little League. At the lower level, I’d been a dependable third baseman with no fear at the hot corner even when the strongest boys with the quickest bats came to the plate 60 feet away. There were plenty of “5-3” notations in the Braves’ clay-dusted scorebook.

In a year I went from All-Star to also-ran and, in short order, out of the sport. No more seasoning my glove with castor oil before the first practice. No more Bazooka bubbles between batters. My knuckleball retired with me.

That’s because in addition to my years as an infielder at the sweet little ballfield across Morganton Road from the National Guard Armory in Southern Pines, a dearth of pitchers my last season meant I was recruited to take the mound when I wasn’t playing third.

Possessing a fast ball which wasn’t very speedy and not being able to throw a curve ball — couldn’t hit one either — I had been messing around with a knuckleball in the neighborhood well before using a rosin bag and stepping on the pitching rubber for the first time.

With the knuckles of my index and middle fingers of my right hand touching the ball instead of a normal grip — some early knuckleballers had thrown the pitch that way, but later skilled practitioners used their fingertips — I discovered the ball did funny things when thrown.

With a knuckler, a pitch could become a magic act. And it helped a kid with an average arm sit down some batters.

Because the unique grip minimizes spin, a ball can’t make up its mind when you throw it. The aerodynamics — most of the time — make its flight unpredictable. A knuckler flutters in flight, mimicking a butterfly, its destination uncertain. The mystery novel of pitches, it has confounded generations of hitters and catchers with devilish dances and darting movements.

“The knuckleball,” wrote the famous sportswriter Jimmy Cannon, “is a curve ball that doesn’t give a damn.”

Joe Torre, sometimes tasked with being on the receiving end of the can’t-make-up-its-mind pitch for part of his long and distinguished career in the major leagues, said, “You don’t catch a knuckleball, you defend against it.”

Toad Ramsey, a 19th century pitcher, is cited by some historians as the originator of the fluttering, frustrating pitch, but the ballplayer who first brought a lot of attention to it was Eddie “Knuckles” Cicotte, of the Chicago White Sox. Cicotte possessed a legendary repertoire of junk pitches, a knuckleball among them, before being caught up in the scandal of 1919, when he admitted being one of eight Chicago players taking cash to throw the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds.

My youth coincided with the final seasons of the 21-year knuckleballing career of Hoyt Wilhelm, the most famous athlete to come out of Huntersville, N.C., north of Charlotte, before Drake Maye, the current New England Patriots quarterback. Like successful knuckleballers who followed, Wilhelm, the first relief pitcher to make it into the Baseball Hall of Fame, lasted a long time, appearing in more than 1,000 games and retiring when he was just shy of 50.

Other top knuckleballers enjoyed similarly lengthy and successful careers because the slower pitch is less stressful on the arm: Wilbur Wood, Charlie Hough, Phil and Joe Niekro, R.A. Dickey and Tim Wakefield among them. In 1973, Wood started both games of a doubleheader; knuckleball pitchers can pitch on little rest and don’t have to ice their arm after games.

Despite the plusses, fewer than a hundred major leaguers have thrown the baffling pitch. Speed has become the realm of modern baseball. A lone knuckleball pitcher, Matt Waldron, of the San Diego Padres, is on a MLB roster at the start of this season. The pitch that the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Willie Stargell referred to as “a butterfly with hiccups” is practically grounded, its vexing vagaries left to history.