Sport: Knuckles Up

I realized when I was pitching high school ball, says James Hoyt Wilhelm, "that I wasn't fast enough to get by. I had read about Dutch Leonard and the kind of junk he was throwing for the Senators, and I set out to see if I couldn't throw some too." Hoyt Wilhelm's "junk" is the craziest knuckle ball in baseball today. It floats up to the plate, dances tantalizingly before batters' eyes like a butterfly, then breaks sharply and unpredictably. One night last week his knuckler broke all over the place, kept the bug-eyed...

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