Word: phil
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...family tells the story, Phil Niekro Sr. was the first one to throw the knuckleball. He used the pitch to confound batters on the amateur baseball teams around the coal mines of Ohio and West Virginia where he worked. Later, he taught it to his elder son Phil, who by the age of eight could dig his fingertips into the ball and send it floating without spin toward the strike zone, dipping and zigzagging in the air currents. Younger Son Joe tried the pitch, but his hands were too small, so he concentrated on the conventional pitcher's repertory...
...lead the National League in wins last week (18-9), but he had helped mightily to keep the surprising Houston Astros neck and neck with the powerful Cincinnati Reds in the National League West. Fittingly, Joe Niekro's closest competitor for victories in the league is Big Brother Phil, 40, who has won 17 and lost 18 for the last-place Atlanta Braves. (He has accounted for 30% of all the games the Braves have managed to win this year...
...Phil has been throwing the knuckler ever since he came up with the Braves in 1964, a rarity since the pitch is usually mastered in desperation by aging veterans. Joe started as a fireballer who played with the Chicago Cubs in 1967, then bounced around from club to club as his fastball faded. In 1972, when he was sent to the minors, those backyard sessions finally asserted their hold: Joe perfected the knuckleball. In 1975 he joined the Astros, who now have a flutter at the pennant...
...Phil is as astonished as his kid brother: "I've seen it start in toward the plate, a batter would swing at it, and the ball ended up going behind him." Umpire Doug Harvey recalls: "Once Phil's catcher dived full length to his right to catch a ball that looked like it was going into the dirt, and the thing came back up across the strike zone for a called third strike, then hit me in the left shoulder...
...survey was through, the border was set more than a quarter of a mile too far north. But for that British rum, Derby Line would have been firmly in Canada for the past 205 years, and the border in an unsettled, and much less complicated, stretch of open countryside. - Phil Blampied...