The Elusive Butterfly

The Elusive Butterfly .

When I was a young girl, maybe about four years old, I tried to catch a butterfly. Actually, my mother helped me because I was always a little wary around insects, even pretty, colorful ones . We got a net and went out to the backyard to try to catch a monarch dining in Moms flower bed. We never actually caught it- it would flutter out of the way as soon as the net came near it. It kept us busy for a while, until we finally gave it up. did everyone have this much trouble catching a simple, defenseless butterfly? Later in life, I found out that some of the toughest men in America - major- league baseball batters occasionally have the same problem. The only difference is they are equipped with a large wooden bat instead of a net and fluttering object of their frustration is not a motley winged insect but the knuckleball. The knuckle is a near-impossible pitch to hit: former New York Yankee Bobby Murcer once said that trying to get a hit off knuckleball Phil Niekro was " like eating a Jell-O with chopsticks". ( qtd. In Cohen). Big-leaguers approach it the way I approached butterflies as a child with the utmost wariness. Unlike " normal" pitches, where the spin determines how the ball moves, a knuckleball is thrown with very little spin. The pitcher grips the ball with the fingertips or fingernails ( not with the knuckles as the name would indicate), keeps the wrist stiff, and " pushes" it forward with almost no spin. Dennis Springer, a major-league knuckleball pitcher for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, offers this advice relative to gripping and throwing a knuckle " I grab the baseball like I am throwing a palm ball, then I raise my first two fingers ( forefinger and