Full Count

“When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.”

—Werner Heisenberg

The pitch crossed the plate wide. The catcher stretched to his right and snagged it. From the mound, Hyeon-Jeong stared without emotion, and waited for his teammate to throw back the ball. He saw the umpire raise his hands to signal a time out. Rodriguez stood from his crouch behind the plate, pushed up his mask, brushed passed the batter, and walked out to the mound.

“You all right Rick?” Rodriguez said. Hyeon-Jeong took the ball, and it felt strange in his hand, as did the sound of his name. Rick was his American name. Many Koreans working abroad shortened their names to the initials of their formal names, a way to ease complicated pronunciations Westerners could never master. Hyeon-Jeong thought of going by HJ, but decided to go all the way – he picked Rick.

“I’m fine,” Rick said. “Just mixing it up.”

“You’re one strike from winning the World Series,” Rodriguez said. “Don’t start messing around. We’d all like to get the hell out of here.” Rick looked over his shoulder at the empty stands of the Citizen’s Bank Park in Philadelphia, the Phillies home field. He was alone, and knew it was his doing. He turned back to the plate; Rick neglected to give Rodriguez a signal. Rodriguez gave Rick a signal that Rick ignored, and threw another ball.

Players from both teams stood up in their dugouts, leaned over the railings, thankful for a respite from their boredom. Rick adjusted his cap and again looked at the empty seats. He thought about what the game had become, what he’d singlehandedly created since he perfected his pitch.

Rick had never encountered the knuckleball until he came to America. He first watched Steven Wright of the Red Sox, and then R.A. Dickey of the Blue Jays, throw this strange pitch. The way the ball moved, with a mind of its own, unpredictable, as were the women he had met in the States. Rick thought it was witchcraft. His pitching coach showed him the basics. Thrown with precise control from a left-hander, at top speed, it would be unhittable. At first, Rick only occasionally took it from his toolkit to mix things up; as he got better, he used it more frequently. Rodriguez struggled to catch them. When asked about receiving these pitches, Rodriguez would quote the famed catcher, Bob Uecker, who said, “The way to catch a knuckleball is to wait until it stops rolling and then pick it up.”

That was five years ago, before Rick met the students.

________

Brad Gardner and Syd Jensen sat in their apartment, a stark basement level, two bedroom in West Philadelphia. They tried to keep plants, but with minimal sunlight coming through the basement window, the plants never survived.

The two Ph.D. candidates in physics, had covered the walls with white boards. They filled study breaks with discussions about baseball. Equations and diagrams, meticulously detailed in multiple colors of erasable markers, covered the space. They described pitches with the language of mathematics. They numerically characterized fastballs, sliders, curves, and breaking balls, by velocities, air resistance, and spin. Scribbled equations showing flight paths affected by the Magnus effect, the Karmen vortex street, fluid flow described by Bernoulli and Euler equations, scalar and vector fields, convective acceleration and pressure gradients. They’d characterized every pitch but the knuckleball. They understood the basics, characterized the turbulent flow, but could not understand why the pitch was so hard for a pitcher to perfect, or, at least, to achieve a high consistency in its delivery.

Brad and Syd worked the stands during the Phillies’ home games as food and beer vendors. They attended every home game. They were also determined to visit every major stadium in the US, and flew around the country by means of what they thought was one of the best kept secrets on the planet: by getting part time jobs at the...