R.A. Dickey: When I started the knuckleball in 2005, I would grab whoever I could and have them catch with me underneath the stadium, in the cages, [wherever].
I would throw balls off of the outfield wall during batting practice. I would always have a ball in my hand. As I drove around the city, I would put it in my cup holder and I would play with it—that’s one of the things Charlie Hough first taught me. He said, “always have a ball in your car and always have it in your hand when you’re driving so you can just get the sensation of what it feels like for your grip to be in the right place.”
It wasn’t like I was a robot and I went into the gym after 500 balls a day for six months and all of a sudden I came out the other side and was this great knuckleballer.
In 2006, I remember I was with the Texas Rangers trying to make the club and I would come into the cages before anybody even got to the stadium and take a bucket of balls and just throw them into the net. I would go pick that bucket of balls up and go back to the mound and throw it into the net.
That was early on in my transformation, so I would get so angry because I could see that it wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do and I didn’t know how to fix it.
Out of sheer stubbornness, I just would keep going—just hoping that at some point something would click. I certainly held onto the hope that it might.
I had no guarantees, but I trusted that if I worked hard and put in the time, it would eventually reap a fruit.
I just didn’t know what that fruit was going to be or how big it was going to be.
As far as being able to pinpoint how many hours or how many times?
I would go ahead and say that 30,000 is a conservative estimate.
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