Why so few knuckleballers?

Another article asking why there aren't more knuckleball pitchers in baseball given the recent success of R.A. Dickey who won the National League Cy Young award last season. Watching animated GIFs of Dickey's knuckleball is mesmerizing, the animated GIF being the perfect form with which to fetishize the almost sorcerous movement of the pitch. Perfected, the pitch puts much less strain on your arm, allowing pitchers to go deeper in games and later into their career at near peak effectiveness. Seems like a market inefficiency waiting to be exploited, doesn't it?

I played organized baseball when I was younger, and I suspect the reason it's so rare is that it's really an all or nothing skill in both technique and results. That is, if you decide you're going to become a knuckleball pitcher, the results will be binary. It's putting your entire career in one basket.

The types of players who play organized baseball at the high school and college level are almost always the most promising players, the best athletes, and at that level, none have had to throw a Hail Mary with their career. So for any of them to suddenly try to throw the knuckleball, to take an all or nothing gamble with their baseball life, is unnecessary.

The types of people you see throw the knuckleball typically are much older, already in the minor leagues, or about to be cut from a MLB roster, and so at that point they have nothing to lose. Then the idea of trying a knuckleball doesn't seem so crazy.

The distribution of results if you have a more conventional pitching repertoire, maybe a fastball-slider combo, is less binary. There's a chance you could end up just a mediocre or situational reliever with that, but with a knuckleball, you're probably either a starter or out of baseball.

Mastering the knuckleball tends to be an all or nothing endeavor, too. It's extremely difficult to throw (I tried to learn one) and takes a ton of work to learn, let alone master. It's not thrown like any other pitch in baseball so you have to learn a lot of the technique from scratch. A poorly thrown knuckleball, to a major league player, is like tossing a softball underhand to the plate: the end result is usually the endangerment of your life, that of one of your corner infielders, or that of some spectator in the bleachers. In R.A. Dickey's first career start he gave up 6 home runs and was immediately demoted to Triple A.

That said, I do think more players who can't even make the cut for their high school team, or even fringe pitchers, should try to learn the knuckleball much earlier in life. Their career is essentially already over at that point, the risk reward ratio makes sense then, and they give themselves a headstart on learning the pitch. Even then, they'd likely have to still throw a conventional baseball alongside it for many years just to maintain enough arm strength to throw it at a useable velocity in the major leagues. R.A. Dickey's knuckleball is the fastest I've ever seen in baseball, he throws it harder than probably any of you reading this can throw a regular fastball.

A question more people should ask of professional sports is why more NBA players don't shoot free throws underhand. Given how poorly some of the key stars in the NBA shoot them (among regulars, Dwight Howard is last in the NBA right now shooting .508), the question of swallowing your pride and machismo and shooting a style that would likely improve your team's record in close games by a non-trivial number of games is one that should be asked ever year until someone does it again.

Free throws are one of the most boring parts of basketball anyhow, and I bet the first player to do it would be a huge fan attraction.

Attacking the Miami Heat trap

I finally caught the condensed replay of the Bulls Heat game from Jan 4 on my DVR.

With a lot of fast, active defenders, especially Lebron, the Heat love to attack the primary ballhandler with double teams. Recall the first time they played Jeremy Lin last season and how they unleashed a barrage of double teams high and forced him into a ton of turnovers.

The Bulls, surprisingly, won this game, and I noticed a few things that might point the way for future success against the Heat, whether it's the Bulls or another team. You can follow along with the two examples below in this highlight reel.

At 0:16, you see the Heat trapping on the strongside against the sideline with Lebron and Udonis Haslem. This is an example of a case where the Heat's attack succeeded in forcing the turnover and triggering the Heat's fast break, where they are nearly unstoppable.

One way to succeed against that trap which the Heat often employ is a tactic the Bulls used a few times in this game. First, you have to be able to recognize it as a team. The man whose defender has left can move to an open spot near the top of the circle or the high post to serve as a safety release for the ballhandler. If you get the ball to that player quickly, the defender can't recover in time to mitigate your man advantage, and another defender will have to rotate to try to protect the basket. Then the player that rotating defender was covering can cut to the basket, and if you hit him with a pass it's often an easy dunk or layup. Easier said than done, but the Bulls pulled it off several times in this game with Joakim Noah when he was setting the pick on the pick and roll.

You can see one example in this clip at 2:04. Bosh and Wade show a soft double team on Hinrich, and Noah sneaks away towards the basket to take the release pass, then turns towards the basket, at which point the zone defender on Boozer cuts towards Noah. In that instant, Noah quickly hits Boozer for a layup. It's easier said than done, but Noah, who's having a great year, is an ideal big man to be the hub of such an attack because of his passing ability and increased willingness to attack the basket this season. I saw this happen a few times in this game, but this is the only example I could find in this highlight clip. The Bulls ballhandler would be trapped up high, above the 3-point circle, they'd quickly advance the ball to the next level towards the basket, somewhere along the top of the key or free throw line, then that ballhandler would feign an attack to the basket and then drop the ball down behind the defense near the basket for the easy bucket.

The other option, of course, is to conclude that attack not with a pass to a big man cutting to the hoop but to swing it to a 3-point shooter in the corner when their defender rotates to defend the basket. The Bulls have a shortage of 3-point shooters this season so it's not surprising they usually opted to go to Gibson and Boozer on backdoor cuts instead.

Where the Heat are deadly is when they can attack the ballhandler without a double team, and they almost always do that when times get tough with Lebron, whom they unleashed on Derrick Rose the last time the two teams met in the playoffs. Also, it's worth noting that the Heat don't seem to be exerting themselves as hard as they can on defense right now. They're certain to ratchet it up in the playoffs, and all of the above is standard playbook fare against the overplay. Still, it's odd to see it working so well in the regular season.

Legal monopolies

Matthew Yglesias on the absurdity of professional sports team owners treating profits as a fundamental right:

Owning a pro sports franchise is pretty awesome and it's something that high net worth sports fans ought to be doing as a costly hobby. The relevant financial fact is that it's a costly hobby you can exit from by selling your team to the next guy. But the web of municipal subsidies, labor market cartels, and barriers to market access that have been spun around the conceit that it should be a lucrative hobby flies in the face of all kinds of common sense. After all, you look at the people with great season ticket packages to any of these teams. Who are those guys? Not savvy investors. They're rich fans dropping a lot of money on indulging their hobby. And the owner is the richest and most indulgent fan of all. Except somehow he expects to get paid for it? It's nuts.

If you're a fan of a sports team and the owners turn out their pants pockets and shed a few tears to justify trading away some of your favorite players, don't fall for it. The fact that teams make moves to avoid a tax that is named the "luxury tax" is hilarious.

If I were immensely wealthy I'd buy the Chicago Cubs. Not because I'm a Cubs fan and would love to get them a World Series but because owning a professional sports team is one of the few legal monopolies the U.S. holds sacred. What a great racket.