Knuckler: My Life With Baseball’s Most Confounding Pitch
By Tim Wakefield with Tony Massarotti. Foreword by Phil Niekro (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011)

Funny to pick up what you think is an autobiography or memoir and find that it’s written in the third-person. That’s what throwing knuckleballs will do to your brain, I guess. This is really a straight-out biography by ace old-school Boston sportswriter Phil Niekro about Red Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield, in which Wakefield apparently got involved enough to rate the main cover credit.
All is explained in the Acknowledgements section, where Wakefield and Niekro are referred to respectively as “the author and writer.” They jointly thank the usual range of colleagues, family members and those with special knowledge of the subject at hand. (“Because the knuckleball is the ultimate specialty, true experts were required”). First, however, they spend a full page acknowledging editors and agents who “demonstrated an especially high level of tolerance during the negotiations, a process that most everyone generally finds stressful.”

Well, what would a baseball book be without complex contract negotiations?

The subtitle leads you to believe that there might be some instructional, or at least philosophical element about Wakefield’s signature pitch. There isn’t. Flat-out linear chronological bio of a ballplayer.