Old men and the seams: Two moguls take their cuts at the knuckleball

In the summer of 2012 — when knuckleballer R. A. Dickey came out of nowhere to win the Cy Young award — I discovered my sons in our backyard teaching themselves the pitch. The knuck, a slow trick pitch that doesn’t spin, has a storied history of elevating longshots, retreads and dreamers to the major leagues — even the Hall of Fame.

I resolved to see how far my kids could go. On the decade-long odyssey that followed, I learned that not only baseball-crazy boys harbored knuckleball dreams. Two wealthy business moguls did too. Their intersecting lives are one of the strange but true stories in my new book, "School of Hard Knucks: My Three Sons and Baseball’s Wildest Pitch."

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Brooklyn real estate investor Howard Rich, a free-market guy who founded Americans for Limited Government, had Mets season tickets six rows behind home plate — the ideal place to watch Dickey’s knuckleball baffle hitters in 2012.

"If the knuckleball’s so hard to hit," Rich ’ s wife Andrea asked one game, "why does only one pitcher throw it in the major leagues?"

Great question, Rich thought. This was a market failure. He’d fix it by opening a school — the International Knuckleball Academy (IKA). He hired two minor league knucklers, Chris Nowlin and Zach Staniewicz to run it.

On the other side of the globe, a 36-year-old South Korean who made a fortune in video games had never given up on his boyhood dream of playing pro baseball.

"I thought if I could master the knuckleball," Min Hur told me, "I might still have a chance."

Hur converted the roof of his Seoul office building into a personal training facility, with a retractable dome and cutting-edge pitch tracking technology. He’d also reached out to the greatest knuckleballer of all, Phil Niekro.

"Phil invited me to his home in Atlanta and over a month taught me everything from the grip to the philosophy behind the pitch. He became my great mentor."

Hur worked with another knuckleball legend, Charlie Hough, too.

"He could take the spin off the ball pretty darn well," Hough recalled.

In 2013, Hur hired a well-connected agent who got him tryouts with the Rangers, Mariners, and Diamondbacks. They all passed on Hur. Then the Rockland Boulders, an independent minor league team in upstate New York, agreed to give him a look.

Min’s chauffeur drove him and his translator up from Manhattan every day of tryouts. He made the team and stepped away from his businesses to focus on his knuckleball career.

The Boulders promoted Hur’s pro debut as" Min-Sanity," playing off the NBA’s "Lin-Sanity" craze when point guard Jeremy Lin caught fire with the Knicks.

Min bussed up spectators from New York’s Korean neighborhoods and flew his family in from Seoul. They watched him pitch three innings and surrender five runs on five hits and four walks. He also hit three batters.

Howard Rich read all about it, and wondered if Hur would want to partner with the IKA. He called Nowlin.

" There’s a Korean billionaire in New York right now, and he loves knuckleballs," said Rich. "Set up a meting for us."

Rich, Hur, Nowlin, and Staniewicz had dinner in Koreatown, but much was lost in translation. Hur remembers talking about knuckleballs, but nothing about an academy.

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Rich forged ahead with the IKA, renting Dodgertown, the one-time spring training complex of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Staniewicz worried.

"It’s hard enough to find people who want to throw the knuckleball, much less pay thousands of dollars a week to try to learn it," he told me. "That cut the pool of possible clients from, like, ten to two."

Rich offered a financing plan. He told me about it last year when he took me to a Mets game.

"I hired a hot-shot attorney to draft a contract so players could come for free, but if any went on to throw, say, ten pitches in the majors, we'd get a small percentage of their pay."

Even still, the International Knuckleball Academy shut its doors before a single aspiring knuckler walked through them.

Min Hur is still at it. I recently met him at a batting cage in Lower Manhattan. He’d flown in from Australia after a stint with the Melbourne Aces and was rendezvousing with a knuckleball coach from Buffalo named Joe Gannon.

Hur’s now 50 years old. That’s ancient for most baseball players, but not too old for a knuckleballer. So the dream lives on.

"I’m better than ever," he told me.