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Mickey Jannis' baseball journey captures the fleeting beauty of the knuckleball
By Jake Mintz
FOX Sports MLB Writer
A good knuckleball is beauty in the absence of motion.
So much of baseball, of sports, of life is an exhibition of constant movement, perpetual motion. Things happen, and when they do, they are notable. A knuckleball is the opposite. At its best, it is nothingness, a moment in time paused, an object frozen in space yet hurtling toward home.
A good knuckleball is almost impossible to throw and even tougher to master. It’s all about letting go, tossing caution to the wind and trusting it. When done correctly, it is fine art, baseball ballet. A rare sight to behold and cherish, like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon in the wild or a red autumn leaf slowly drifting its way to the ground.
Every other pitch in baseball is about maximizing either speed or spin to deceive the hitter. The goal of a knuckleball, on the other hand, is to pitch with as little spin as possible. That way the hitter has no idea which direction the ball will go as it’s moving toward home. Technically thrown with one’s nails and not one’s knuckles, the pitch requires outrageous finger strength, supernatural feel and a good manicurist.
Learning how to properly control this delicacy takes years and years of thankless practice, hundreds of thousands of repetitions. It is not a party trick learned by watching a few YouTube videos. So for 33-year-old Orioles rookie knuckleballer and recent MLB call-up Mickey Jannis, attempting to perfect the sport’s most fickle pitch has been an inspiring, decade-long journey of failure, perseverance and commitment to one’s craft.
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Since 1990, a grand total of 11 knuckleballers have debuted in the major leagues. A handful of them, such as longtime Red Sox hurler Tim Wakefield and 2012 Cy Young winner R.A. Dickey, had sustained success in the bigs and are memorable characters in the extended MLB universe. Other guys, such as Charlie Zink and Eddie Gamboa, are probably names you’ve never heard of who threw in fewer than 10 MLB games.
When Jannis got the call-up Tuesday to join the Orioles in Baltimore, becoming the league’s 11th knuckler since 1990 and only active knuck proprietor, it was cause for celebration. Unfortunately, Jannis struggled, allowing seven runs in 3 ⅓ innings against Houston’s potent offense, and was designated for assignment off the MLB roster just a day later.
That's disheartening to say the least, but at 33 years old, Jannis was never your typical rookie. He has been in professional baseball since 2010, when the Rays drafted him in the 44th round, a round that has not existed since the 2011 draft. When Tampa took him with the 1,331st pick after his senior year, Jannis was an undersized, run-of-the-mill sinker/slider-type pitcher coming off an underwhelming two-year career at Cal State Bakersfield.
His college teammate Michael McCarthy, who is currently a pitching coach with the St. Paul Saints, didn’t remember anything particularly notable about Jannis’ raw stuff. "His FB was high 80s/low 90s, and his slider was his best pitch. Nothing too overpowering, but he understood how to mix speeds and locate."
Despite Jannis’ underwhelming stuff, McCarthy remembers him as a dude with a unique passion for and unwavering commitment to the game.
"Mickey truly loves baseball and always wanted to be on the field or watching games at home. There was nothing he enjoyed more than being on the field with a baseball in his hand. In catch play, he would regularly tinker around with a knuckleball, and it was always a bit of good fun but never anything any of us took too seriously at the time."
Anyone who has played competitive baseball can speak to this. There’s always someone on your team screwing around with the knuck who can throw it pretty well, but usually those guys don’t turn into big leaguers. Jannis threw the pitch from time to time in college and the minors but used it only sparingly until he was forced to adjust to survive.
That moment came after the Rays cut him loose following the 2011 season. Even though Jannis had an impressive ERA around 3.00 in almost 100 innings, Tampa’s front office decided that the 5-foot-9 guy with the 89 mph heater whom they took in the 44th round wasn’t worth a roster spot.
No one dreams of being a knuckleballer. It is a profession born out of failure. One is pushed to the lifestyle only after not making it as a position player or regular pitcher. It’s like that line from "School Of Rock": Those who can’t hit pitch, and those who can’t pitch pitch knuckleballs. It is a lifeline, a last resort to keep a baseball career alive.
That’s exactly what Mickey Jannis needed in the spring of 2012.
The Lake Erie Crushers belong to the independent Frontier League, one of independent baseball’s more established circuits. That’s where Jannis latched on ahead of the 2012 season and where he reinvented himself into a knuckleballer.
"When he showed up, we didn’t even know he threw a knuckleball," Chris Steinborn, the Crushers' pitching coach that year, explained. "We had his scouting report or whatever from when he was in the minors with Tampa, but we had no idea."
Lake Erie’s catcher that season, the aptly named Brian Erie, vividly remembers the day he met Jannis. "I’ll never forget it," the six-year indie ball vet recalled. "It was the first day of spring training, and he just walks up to me and hands me this enormous, 35-inch catcher’s glove and says, ‘We gotta break this in because I’m only throwing knuckleballs this year.’ He threw me the first couple, and I’d never seen anything like that before. It took a little getting used to."
Jannis’ biggest obstacle that first season in Lake Erie was that he’d never thrown the pitch regularly. The Rays knew he had it in his arsenal but restricted him from throwing it as his main offering. So even though he could make the ball dance a bit, his command and consistency of the knuckleball needed some development, according to Steinborn.
Jannis spent the next three seasons with Lake Erie, gradually improving his feel for the pitch each season but failing to catch the attention of any affiliated teams, despite an ERA that was pretty consistently under 3.00. That’s three full years in indie ball — riding busses, sleeping on pull-out couches, eating bad fast food, absolutely grinding it out, drifting through small towns like a knuckleball in a hurricane.
In 2015, his fourth season in indie, Jannis joined the Long Island Ducks of the Atlantic League, which is generally thought to be a more competitive environment than the Frontier League. It was in Long Island that Jannis turned a corner, tossing 83 2/3 innings with a 1.18 ERA.
Finally, that August, the Mets called and added Jannis to their High-A roster.
Jannis spent the next four seasons, from 2016 to ‘19, pitching in Double-A Binghamton. Each year, he threw well enough to be brought back the following season — but never so well that he forced his way to Triple-A or the big leagues. Imagine spending a presidency’s worth of time in Binghamton, just trucking away, dreaming that one day you’ll get the call.
After the 2019 season, Jannis was picked up by the rebuilding Orioles and was expected to spend 2020 in Triple-A Norfolk. But then the COVID-19 pandemic happened, and like many of us, Jannis spent the 2020 season on his couch after the Orioles chose not to invite him to the alternate site.
Fortunately, they brought Jannis back this season. And when you’re organizational depth in an organization that severely lacks impact pitching in the majors, there’s a good chance that you’ll eventually find yourself in the bigs, which is exactly what happened to Jannis last week.
He wasn’t pitching any better than normal when he got the call. His arrival was the result of general attrition at the major-league level. At no point did it seem like the Orioles truly believed Jannis could have success in the bigs, as evidenced by his brief, four-day stint in Baltimore.
Eleven years in the minors for four days in the majors — what a world we live in.
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When the Montreal Expos franchise came to French Canada in 1969, a panel of locals were tasked with creating previously nonexistent French words for various baseball phrases. For knuckleball, they chose "balle papillon," or butterfly ball.
The life of a knuckleball pitcher is like that of a butterfly. It is a fickle and delicate existence, reliant on the whims of the wind and the conditions of any given day. For the brave few like Mickey Jannis, survival is as paper thin as the wings of a butterfly. But there is something beautiful and defiant about that constant state of fragility.
Facing the Astros’ thunderous offense armed with nothing but a butterfly is akin to running through a rainstorm and having the audacity to think you’ll emerge dry. In his first career outing Wednesday, Jannis got soaked — to the tune of seven earned runs. Two days later, the Orioles sent him back to the minor leagues.
It wasn’t Mickey’s first bout with failure, and it won’t be his last. To spend three years as a Lake Erie Crusher and believe that one day you’ll pitch under the sport’s brightest lights, you have to be wired differently.
But whether he gets outs or gets crushed, Jannis will do what he has always done: try to move forward, all the while hoping the ball doesn’t move at all.
Jake Mintz is the louder half of @CespedesBBQ and a baseball analyst for FOX Sports. He’s an Orioles fan living in New York City, and thus, he leads a lonely existence most Octobers. If he’s not watching baseball, he’s almost certainly riding his bike. You can follow him on Twitter @Jake_Mintz.
