A Bad Week for Flame-Throwers (One Sixty-Two: Day 127)

Writer’s note: One Sixty-Two is a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.

Day One Hundred Twenty-Seven: R.A. Dickey, New York Mets

So the best pitching prospect since Roger Clemens is likely out of baseball until 2012, and the Rocket himself as been indicted.

Not a great week for flame-throwing right-handers.

As Stephen Strasburg prepares for the likelihood of Tommy John surgery for the torn ligament in his golden right elbow, and as Roger Clemens prepares for the possibility of spending time behind bars with the accusation that he lied to Congress about his use of steroids, it seems like a good day to celebrate someone who never wowed the crowds with blazing fastballs.

It’s a good day to be R.A. Dickey, knuckleball-throwing specialist for the New York Mets. For years, Dickey tried to stick in the major leagues with a fastball and breaking ball. But at the age of 35, he has mastered the knuckler, a floating, fluttering wild card of a pitch that hitters often have no idea what to do with. In 2010, Dickey has been the second-best pitcher on the Mets, winning eight games and maintaining a superb 2.64 earned-run average. Not only that, but Dickey is throwing a pitch that’s much easier on the arm, as it can’t dance properly unless released with far less exertion than a fastball.

Stephen Strasburg quickly became a household name this season thanks to his strikeout prowess with the Washington Nationals. But as Strasburg steps out of the spotlight and into rehabilitation, the former All-Star pitcher for whom his upcoming surgery is named – Tommy John – has heard his name mentioned nearly every day in relation to this increasingly common surgery among pitchers. The procedure, which was first performed on John in the 1970s, involves replacing a ligament from the elbow with a tendon from elsewhere in the body. Today, it is performed all year long on arms throughout the collegiate and professional ranks. The odds of recovering from the surgery keep getting better, but the procedures continue as pitchers pile on innings at all levels of development. The physics of throwing a baseball overhand at great speed does not compute well with the biology of the human arm. Even as teams try desperately to keep pitchers from throwing too many innings, the fact remains that our arms are much better suited to throwing the ball underhand.

Or to throwing a knuckleball. And if you’re tossing the ball 50-something miles an hour, you’re probably not too tempted to try any performance-enhancing drugs, either. So cheers tonight to R.A. Dickey, as he finally finds himself pitching regularly for a big-league team every five days. It’s taken nine years, but some things are worth the wait. That’s some advice Stephen Strasburg could probably use right now, as he looks ahead to 2012. And the same applies to Roger Clemens, as he looks ahead to many days in court.