A trip inside baseball's knuckleball factory 7 minutes ago Matt Monagan https://www.mlb.com/news/history-of-the-knuckleball-academy-in-torrance-california Quite a long article about the knuckleball but I knew Wakefield would get a mention. I dreaded everytime he pitched against the Yankees. The Beginnings of Knuckleball Nation Nowlin grew up outside of Boston and went to about a dozen Red Sox games per year as a kid. During one of those nights at Fenway Park, running around with his friends, he was witness to a performance by one of the game’s great knuckleballers: the late Tim Wakefield. The way he describes the moment feels like a scene from a movie. "I ended up right behind the backstop and Wakefield was taking a no-hitter into the seventh," Nowlin said. "And it was like quintessential Fenway Park. It was hazy, Green Monster in the background, Citgo sign. And he was just throwing these balls that didn’t rotate at all. I was looking around like, ‘Is this real? Are we all watching the same thing?’ I was looking at the adults for reassurance: ‘Is this … can he do that?’ I’ve been obsessed with it ever since.”