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always tell how you were doing by the way The Colonel said good morning. If he said, “Well now, good morning, Jimsie boy,” that meant you’d won your last two or three games and were in the starting rotation. If he nodded his head to you and said, “Jimbo, how you doin’, how you doin’?” you were still in the starting rotation, but your record probably wasn’t much over .500. If he just said, “Mornin’,” that meant you were on the way down, that you’d probably lost four out of five and it was doubtful if you would be getting any more starts. If he simply looked at you and gave a solemn nod, that meant you might get some mop-up relief work, or you might not, but you definitely weren’t starting anymore and would never get into a close game again. And if he looked past you, over your shoulder, as if you didn’t exist, it was all over and you might as well pack your bag because you could be traded or sent down at any moment.

MARCH
1
    Joe Schultz stopped by again to say a kind word. I noticed he was making it his business to say something each day to most of the guys. He may look like Nikita Khrushchev, but it means a lot anyway. I’m sure most of us here feel like leftovers and outcasts and marginal players and it doesn’t hurt when the manager massages your ego a bit.
    I was moved up from last to next-to-last, and then to second, for my five minutes of batting practice, and I’ve decided there’s no significance to the position. My arm feels good; no pain, no problems. Every once in a while I let a fastball fly and it comes out of my hand real easy and seems like it took no effort. I can almost hear a voice in the back of my mind whispering, “You can go back to it, you can find it, you can find your old fastball and you’ll be great again.” Of course, I’ve heard that siren song in my head before and I’ve won a total of fourteen games in the last four years. So I’m going to stick with my knuckleball. I’ll probably throw it 90 percent of the time, and if my other stuff comes around for me, I’ll probably cut it down to about 40 or 50 percent. But I’ve got to remember that if it wasn’t for my knuckleball I’d probably be back in New Jersey, raising chickens or something. Remember, stupid, remember!
    One of the problems is that the hitters hate to hit against my knuckleball in batting practice. They don’t like pitchers to work on anything out there. They want you to lay it in there and let them smash it over the fence. So I compromise. For each seven swings they get, I give them two or three knuckleballs.
    Gerry McNertney (now there’s one of the great names in baseball) was catching me today, and when I threw a knuckler that didn’t do much I hollered in to him, “Is it better than Wilhelm’s? Is it? Huh?”
    Nert caught Hoyt Wilhelm when they were with the White Sox and he tried to be kind. He laughed and said, “Not bad, not bad.” I asked Nert about Wilhelm’s knuckleball and he said one of his problems was that he was throwing it about three-quarters because he didn’t have the strength to come with it straight overhand anymore. He is, after all, at least forty-six by his own admission. Nert said it was only effective when he came straight over. “You seem to be throwing straight overhand all the time,” he said, “and you should have success with it.”
    Things are looking up. Right now I’m thinking that I can do anything—start, relieve, be a long man or a short man. Or all of them together, every day, because the knuckleball doesn’t take anything out of your arm. It’s like having a catch with your sister. I’m starting to get that old fire in my stomach again.
    There are some things I ought to explain about the knuckleball. I was about thirteen years old the first time I threw it. I was very little at the time, the littlest and skinniest kid in the neighborhood, but I could play ball. At least I could hit and run. Although I had a good arm, I couldn’t throw