I am an unabashed fan of Charlie Haeger. Unlike many on this board I believe Ozzie is a solid manager (though he gives up too many intentional walks) and I believe Don Cooper is one of the best 4 or 5 Pitching Coaches in the majors. I truly "trust Kenny" - but I was deeply disappointed when they decided to send Charlie Haeger back to AAA to start this season. So I was delighted to read an in-depth article in BP which points to a promising future for Haeger. The author, while stating several times that nothing is guaranteed, places an emphasis on the age at which Haeger learned his knuckler (and then reached the majors using it) and how Haeger's extremely low home run rate bode well for him.
[After returning from "retirement" as a traditional pitcher] ... He made fewer than 15 appearances at each level before promoted to the next, and worked his way from rookie ball to Triple-A in two years. A year ago at this time, he was already widely considered to be the best knuckleball prospect since Tim Wakefield. A 3.07 ERA in Triple-A did nothing to change that perception, nor did a September callup (11 innings, four hits, 15 strikeouts) that washed away the bad taste of his six-walk, six-run major league debut on May 10th.
About that debut…Haeger was 22 years, seven months, and 21 days old when he made his first appearances in the major leagues as a knuckleball pitcher. At the same age, the majority of the most successful knuckleball pitchers in baseball history had not even learned to throw the pitchyet ; most of them did not throw it in the majors until their late 20s. Hoyt Wilhelm, pitch-for-pitch the greatest knuckler of them all, was three months shy of his thirtieth birthday before he threw his first major league pitch. Tom Candiotti was 25 when he debuted, but didn’t start throwing the knuckleball until after a minor league sabbatical two years later; by the time he returned in 1986, he was nearly 29 years old.
... To put it bluntly: what Charlie Haeger has already done—reached the major leagues before his 23rd birthday while throwing knuckleballs almost exclusively—is almost unprecedented. It also strongly suggests he has a bright future, at least if the company he keeps is any indication. Hough pitched 25 years in the majors, and won 216 games despite working in relief the first half of his career (he made just 23 starts in his first 12 seasons).
... When he was this age, Tim Wakefield’s first minor league pitch was still a few months away.
... Let's take a look at Haeger’s stat line since he returned from his brief retirement:
Year Level W L ERA G GS IP H R ER BB K HR
2004 R 1 6 5.18 10 10 57.1 70 41 33 22 23 6
2004 A- 1 3 2.01 5 5 31.1 31 17 7 12 21 0
2005 A+ 8 2 3.20 14 13 81.2 82 33 29 40 64 3
2005 AA 6 3 3.78 13 13 85.2 84 43 36 45 48 1
2006 AAA 14 6 3.07 26 25 170.0 143 71 58 78 130 9
2006 Maj 1 1 3.44 7 1 18.1 12 10 7 13 19 0
If you were to conjure up numbers for a promising young knuckleball pitcher out of thin air, they would like a lot like the numbers above. Good ERAs despite iffy control and a mediocre strikeout rate? Looks about right, as do the high unearned run totals. (Historically, knuckleball pitchers give up more than their share of unearned runs, thanks to the tendency of their catchers to surrender passed balls. So does the fact that his 2006 hit total reads like a misprint because it’s so low in comparison to his strikeout rate; perhaps more than any other group, knuckleball pitchers seem to have the ability to keep their BABIP lower than average.
But one column in Haeger's stat line looks out of place. Specifically, his homers allowed column, which looks like it was borrowed from another player. Specifically, Greg Maddux. Haeger has allowed just 19 home runs in 444 innings since he started throwing the knuckler. Over the last two years, he has allowed just 13 in 356 innings. That’s phenomenal for any pitching prospect, even the best pitching prospects in the minor leagues. While it’s a small sample size, the fact that Haeger faced 79 major league hitters last year and didn’t surrender a single homer—and just one double and one triple—is a good sign that his ability to keep the ball in the park may not be solely a single-deck phenomenon.
By comparison, Felix Hernandez, one of the most impressive pitching prospects of our time, and an extreme groundball pitcher at that, surrendered 14 homers in 306 minor league innings. Haeger’s home run rate is on a par with that of King Felix; it’s better than Homer Bailey's (12 HR in 255 IP), or Matt Garza's (14 HR in 211 IP), or Francisco Liriano;s (32 HR in 484 IP). It’s not as good as Phil Hughes, who has given up a mere six bombs in 237 innings.
You expect a pitcher with a great sinking fastball to be difficult to drive. Not so with the a pitcher who relies on the knuckleball, because even the best knuckleball pitchers can’t avoid throwing the occasional knuckler that hangs for hitters to feast on. For example, Tim Wakefield led the AL with 35 homers allowed in 2005, the fourth time in his career he has given up 30 or more homers; on his career, Wakefield has allowed 315 homers in 2432 innings. Wakefield’s problems with the gopherball didn’t start in the major leagues—in his first full pro season as a knuckleball pitcher, he surrendered 24 homers in 183 innings. Prior to his major league debut, he'd given up 51 homers in 553 innings—a ratio more than twice as high as Haeger’s.
When asked about Haeger, Hough replied, “oh, he’s got the best knuckleball since I saw a young Wakefield in the minors.” When I mentioned that Haeger has been able to keep the ball in the park much more effectively than Wakefield, Hough pondered that for a moment. “Haeger might have a slight advantage over Wakefield, in that he was a pitcher before he started throwing the knuckleball,” whereas Wakefield was a converted first baseman. Hough’s point was that when Haeger has to throw a strike, he has a few other pitches he can turn to without necessarily throwing a cookie over the plate.
... How about a scouting report on Haeger? In the words of Kevin Goldstein, “scouts have a remarkably difficult time” with knuckleball pitchers, which is only fair; scouts aren’t selected on their ability to evaluate the knuckleball any more than major leaguers are selected on their ability to hit it. But Goldstein reports that Haeger’s knuckleball “is generally seen as the best since Wakefield.” When asked how you scout a knuckler from afar, Hough’s advice was that the only proven method is to “watch how many times the catcher drops the ball.”
None of this is to say that Charlie Haeger is destined, or even likely, to be remembered someday as one of history’s finest practitioners of the knuckleball. The pitch is simply far too unpredictable to make such a statement. Haeger has thrown the pitch competitively for less than three years, not much longer than Zink had before everything went south for him.
Hough himself was not at all concerned that Haeger failed to make the White Sox Opening Day roster as a long reliever (Haeger will instead head back to Charlotte to start the year). “It’s a lot easier to throw the knuckler as a starter,” Hough said, “and another 100 or 200 innings in the minors wouldn’t hurt him compared to throwing 30 innings in the bullpen this year.” He quotes an old coach who used to tell him of the knuckler, “when you’ve pitched a thousand innings you’ll know what you’re doing.” There’s no substitute for the experience that comes from pure repetition, Hough says, because when a knuckleball pitcher struggles “there aren’t a whole lot of guys around who can help you.”
For evidence we need to look no further than Wakefield’s career. Wakefield was an absolute phenom in his major league debut—he went 8-1 with a 2.15 ERA in 1992 while not debuting until July 31st, then won Games 3 and 6 in the NLCS as the Pirates came within one pitch of the World Series. The following year, he was 6-11 and his ERA rocketed up to 5.61, and he pitched even worse (6.99 ERA) after a demotion to Triple-A. In 1994, he spent the whole year in Triple-A and lost 15 games, put up a 5.84 ERA, and walked more batters (98) than he struck out (83). The Pirates released him at the end of that year; at that point, Wakefield had thrown 1006 innings in his pro career. You know the rest—he latched on with the Red Sox, and after four starts in Pawtucket in 1995 he made his triumphant return to the majors, going 16-8, 2.95 ERA and finishing third in Cy Young voting. He’s been at least an average major league pitcher ever since.
Whether Haeger returns to the White Sox later this month or later this year, whether in long relief or as a starter, he figures to stick in the majors this time. With youth on his side, there’s no compelling reason why he won’t still be in the majors twenty years from now. Hough himself was still in the majors until he was 46, and he was the Marlins’ Opening Day starter in the franchise’s first-ever game when he was 45. Phil Niekro made the All-Star team at 45.
There’s no guarantee that Haeger will have a longer and more successful career than the far more notable pitchers who debuted last season, but he has a shot. Those of us who love to watch the knuckleball for what it does, and for what it does to the poor men who have to swing at it, have had fewer and fewer pitchers to root for in recent years. The 1945 Washington Senators alone had more quality knuckleballers than we’ve seen in the majors over the past generation. And with Wakefield entering his 40s, you have to figure he doesn’t have more than, oh, seven or eight years left. Finally, we may have found a worthy successor to his mantle, a pitcher who insures that a trick pitch first thrown 100 years ago continues to baffle the finest hitters in the world for decades to come.
Many thanks to Kevin Goldstein for his considerable assistance with this column.
Rany Jazayerli is an author of Baseball Prospectus. You can contact Rany by clicking here or click here to see Rany's other articles.
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/artic ... cleid=6068
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