maybe even whole periods when that was true, like the long

         stretch in which you could have seriously argued that no one

         dominated the game like Sutter or Fingers. This isn't to put

         relievers down. To play first‑rank ball, by my standards, you

         have to figure into the MVP voting from practically your rookie

         year until you get into at least your late thirties. Wonderful

         players like Dizzy Dean and Williams and Koufax and Jackie

         Robinson, who all either started late or finished early or missed

         seasons for good reasons and bad, wind up getting discussed in

         terms of what they would have done in some ideal life. Players

         like Aaron and Cobb and Rose and Berra and Mathewson all get

         talked about in terms of what they did and, by my lights, that

         makes their careers first‑rate.

         That's what made Newton remarkable. He pitched his first World

         Series in his teens, and his last in his forties, and he finished

         second in the MVP voting both times; and in between he had seven

         better World Series. He dominated the game for twenty‑three

         years, and who's done that? No other reliever, I'll tell you.

         Even before he came up, he was known. Like I said, he was

         nineteen when he pitched in a Series, but it seems that he was in

         the minors forever when they called him up. He'd pitched in the

         Olympics the year he graduated high school, and he dominated the

         Double‑A league that the Phillies sent him to at age 18, and the

         next year, when the Phillies insisted on sending him to Triple A,

         there was practically a riot in the City of Brotherly Love lasting from April

         until mid‑June when he got called up.  He was just a kid, but Phillie fans

         carried on so much you would have thought he'd won a hundred

         games in the minors and saved hundreds more. I looked it up. His

         minor league record was 11‑3 with fifteen saves, in parts of two

         seasons.

         He was a funny‑looking kid, and never got much better looking. He

         had this huge adam's apple, which got hairier the older he got, until

         it got so hard to shave he took to letting his chest hair grow

         halfway up his neck. And sloping shoulders, so he looked more

         like an antelope than an athlete. Coupled with long skinny arms,

         those shoulders and his hunched-over posture made him look like

         some weird forest creature grazing on all fours.

         Even though he had a major‑league curve from the moment the Phils

         signed him, and a major‑league fastball in the womb, probably,

         the Phillies wouldn't have brought him up if he didn't also have

         the best control in their whole system,. And even then, they

         wouldn't have called him up if they didn't need a reliever in

         the worst way. They'd been in third place all season, sometimes

         a close third, sometimes a very distant third, and their bullpen was

         destroying them.

         The Philly pen was worse than inept. If it had just been inept, they could

         have traded for somebody. The bullpen was ept, all right, but only for a

         game or two at a time. Their veteran relievers would have one or two bad

         outings, then come in and blow the other side away for a couple of innings,

         and then come right back with a few more awful outings. By mid-May,

         they had an ERA in their bullpen of better than a run an inning, with a few

         hitless appearances mixed in. Management had decided that the terrible

         appearances were just bad luck, a whole season’s worth of bad relief jobs

         squeezed in together at the beginning of the year.

         Then it got to be the middle of the year. The bullpen ERA was still

         in the high sevens, and‑‑worse‑‑the management had lost several

         chances to pick up ace relievers (at suitably ace prices) until

         now there was no one available anymore. So they called Frankie

         Newton up.

         He had a terrific fastball, and a good curve and control, from

         git‑go, and they just needed him to pitch a couple of innings a

         couple of times a week, and they needed it bad. Most of all,

         the kid to his credit was relaxed, especially in the big games. He

         couldn't fail, the way he saw it, because he was only a kid. If

         he screwed up, the Phils would get the blame, for rushing him

         up too fast. And if he pitched well, he'd get all the credit, so

         he pitched wonderfully. It took a lot of maturity to see how he

         could use his youth to his advantage.

         After the Phils won that year’s Series, with Newton pitching seven

         scoreless innings against the Tigers, Newton improved a little

         every year, although if you'd have asked Jack Pokey, the team's

         owner, if Newton could bear improvement, he'd have thought even

         the question reeked of ingratitude. But the next spring, he

         sharpened his curve, and the spring after, he put on a little

         weight, which went straight to his fastball, and the next year,

         he got to fielding fairly spectacularly, which up to then he'd

         never really noticed as a part of his game, and then the next

         year, he got his pickoff motion down almost perfect, and then the

         next year, he started monkeying with a better grip on his change‑up,

         and the year after that, he learned how to hit a little bit‑‑not

         much, maybe .190 or .210, like that, but a big improvement on his

         previous contribution, which stood at .165. I'm skipping over a

         lot of crises here‑‑like the time Haunches Frye, his manager,

         tried making a starter out of him, or the time he was suspended

         for his pickoff throw of Tim Whitted, which broke Whitted's

         ankle, and ruined his career. Never understood how the

         Commissioner could have felt, let alone ruled, Newton was

         aiming for a fast man's moving ankle. Somewhere in here, though,

         Newton must have developed his mythical knuckleball.

         No one knows where it started, this knuckleball of his. Ed Worth,

         his catcher starting for three years when he was twenty five,

         swears he couldn't have even thrown one before Johnny Yyke, the

         knuckleballer, came to the Phillies. But Yyke's widow makes the

         point that her husband hated young pitchers, and would have died

         in boiled oil before he ever taught a young pitcher his money

         pitch. Other players point out, besides, Newton was throwing it

         in the bullpen years before Yyke came to the team. And some

         players claim there was never any knuckler at all‑‑the whole

         story of his knuckleball was an elaborate hoax, maybe the biggest

         hoax in all of baseball history.

         The story was spread by the biggest flakes in the game: bullpen

         catchers. Players to this day sometimes say bullpen catchers,

         though they're on the official rosters, aren't even major‑

         leaguers. The first-string catcher's in the game, the second

         stringer's on the bench, and the third stringer's in the

         bullpen,  risking his fingers two or three times a game, warming

         up relievers on a second's notice, usually without warming up or

         putting on a mask or shinguards or a chest protector. Three years

         in the majors is about the longest they last. After that, they

         either get out of the bullpen, which most of them can't play well

         enough to do, or they're too crippled to play any more. Starting

         catchers in the minors outlast major‑league third‑stringers, and

         when the big‑league third‑string job opens up, most minor‑league

         catchers would rather wait in some triple‑A or Double‑A league

         for a better opening to come along. Most teams go through a

         different third stringer every year, and some more often

         than that.

         These guys, pathetic as it may seem, train real hard over

         the winters; the lucky ones, the ones whose open sores heal,

         whose busted hands function after a long winter of rehabilitation

         fool their bodies and fool some new team into believing that they

         can catch in the bullpen another year. Most of these cases look like

         some poor kid who's gotten whacked out night and day by his parents

         and his new teammates believe his crazy stories about as often as

         people believe some whacked‑out kid. One of these abused

         catchers, his chest solid welts after the winter, made a new team,

         and warned his new teammates about Newton's knuckler. "His

         knuckler?" they'd laugh, "he ain't got one." And the new kid

         would say  he caught it all last summer, don't tell him! That's

         how Newton warmed up. After a half‑dozen knuckleballs, Newton

         would be loose, and with no strain on his arm.

         The first few times recycled catchers spread such stories, most

         players figured they'd caught a few too many fastballs with their

         foreheads. They'd think the new kid couldn't tell a knuckler from

         Newton's fastball‑‑which for a short while became the expression

         players used for "he can't tell his ass from a dry well." But

         then the Phillies got rid of a couple more bullpen catchers, and

         then some veterans who'd been on the Reds, where one ex‑Phillie

         bullpen catcher spread knuckler stories, got traded to the White

         Sox, where another ex‑Phillies catcher was now the bullpen coach,

         and their stories matched. One Red, the old batting champion Leo

         Chin, spread the story, and from Chin's lips, it was believed. By

         the next summer, Newton's knuckler was the Unicorn of baseball,

         and everyone wanted to see the strange and terrible creature.

         Newton himself had put in ten years in the big leagues around

         this time, and he'd just answer knuckler questions with an inane

         laugh and a "Nah." When reporters persisted, listing ex‑catchers

         who claimed to have caught Newton's knucklers, he'd just spit.

         Now people would try to see Newton throwing knucklers, in his

         natural habitat, so to speak. In likely Newton situations, the

         fans would all gather around the bullpen, making the old ball

         park look like it was going to get tipped over at one end, maybe

         fifteen thousand of them, jostling for position in the seats near

         the Philles pen, waiting to see him soft‑toss. "There it is,"

         one would scream, "that was it! There, that one knuckled! And

         that one."

         A knuckler, as most of you know, rides the air currents, moving

         slowly but at random, buffeted an inch up, now a half inch down

         on the diagonal. No one, least of all the pitcher, knows where

         it's going, and no one, least of all the batter, can pick up a

         pattern in the motion of a good knuckler from fifty-five feet away.

         Now these fans, or these fools, were a good two hundred feet

         away, and practically straight up above Newton as he warmed up,

         so how they could see a pitch moving centimeters at a time, is

         beyond me.

         But at least the fools had ignorance to claim as a defense.

         Broadcasters, who should have known better, were

         claiming, "You can see old Newton warming up with that knuckler

         in the bullpen," from maybe four hundred feet away. "Looks like

         it's really moving today, Vin." "Oh, yeah, Joe, that knuckler's

         just dancing the night away."

         Well, maybe Vin and Joe would claim senility as their defense, I

         sure don't know. I'm an old man, I get called to talk at these

         things about players from my time, and them two geezers are still

         doing the game of the week. Last time they made any sense at all

         must have been 1995. Joe's been wandering around No‑man's land

         for decades, and Vin's been at least a buck short for that long.

         Hell, everybody in those days was gabbing about Newton’s

         knuckler. And when he'd come into a game, the first few years,

         people wondered when he would throw it in a game for the first

         time.

         Batters, especially. The first year word got out about the

         knuckler, they'd be looking it for it in a tight spot. Newton'd

         come with men on, tie game, he'd throw two fast strikes over the

         plate, and the batter would start wondering if this was the time

         he'd choose to throw the pitch. Only it never was.

         Even in World Series games, batters would concentrate extra on

         the ball's spin, hoping to pick up the first Newton knuckler, and

         Vin and Joe would be yakking away, speculating on what he was

         saving it for. But it was always boom‑boom‑boom, fastballs on the

         corners, with an occasional curve or change to keep the batters

         straight, even in the seventh game of the series.

         Most people figured that Newton was perfecting the pitch until

         his fastball left him, but as the years went on, and he lost a few

         miles‑per‑ on the fast one, he just threw his curve a little

         more, and got by on smarts. I figured that by this time, it had

         become a psychological weapon more than anything else. If a

         batter was thinking "Where is that knuckleball?" with only 1% of

         his brain, and if he'd never seen the pitch just knew it was the

         best one ever, that was maybe more valuable than the pitch

         itself.

         Young writers would ask him about the pitch from time to time,

         and Newton wouldn't even acknowledge the question, except to say

         "I don't throw one, man. What the hell are you talking about?"

         The last few years, when he'd lost his fastball except as a

         surprise, and pretty much lost his stamina, pitching maybe

         thirty, forty times year, the word was that he was a valuable

         pitcher for his sixty‑odd innings. I think his knuckleball might

         have helped him hang on an extra year or three. He always

         stayed a great pitcher, like I said, but some managers can't

         afford to keep a reliever who can only work twice a week, no

         matter how good he is. But with Newton, those managers had to

         think that once Newton felt sufficiently humbled by the

         experience of not pitching three or four times a week, he'd

         finally cough up his knuckleball. He never did, of course, but I

         wonder. Maybe Newton will listen to all these speeches tonight,

         go home, and five years later when he's elected to the Hall of

         Fame, I think he'll make a return as a knuckleballer. Maybe he'll

         be the first man to get elected to the Hall of Fame twice.

         And you know, there's one other thing I'd like to say, kind of an

         afterthought., If he doesn't do something like that, he'll still

         be the greatest reliever of all time, to my mind, but I'm not

         sure any more that he's really first rank. I was just thinking

         what I said before that the truly great ballplayers are truly

         great because there's no shoulda‑woulda‑coulda about them. Well,

         I'm just thinking, if he'd a mixed a few knucklers in there,

         maybe he would have gotten a few more key outs, maybe he would

         have picked up some key saves he didn't get, maybe he would even

         have appeared in and won a couple of more series. Thinking now,

         Newton does cause me to wonder what he would have done and I

         suppose I'm always going to keep an open mind about Newton until

         I see that knuckleball someday. Thank you. And Newton, thank

         you, too. This's been an interesting evening.