As the only knuckleballer in the major leagues, the Padres’ right-hander is the ultimate changeup
Ruben Niebla was a pitching coach at Double-A Akron a dozen years ago when a young Steven Wright arrived in the Eastern League looking to see if the knuckleball he threw could unlock a path to the majors.
Niebla had already begun to establish himself as an up-and-coming mind on pitching, so what he told Wright was sure to carry weight as his great experiment began:
“You know how I coach knuckleballers?” Niebla told him. “I don’t.”
Niebla smiled wide and laughed in the Padres’ clubhouse this week as he recounted that first interaction with Wright. The Guardians connected Wright with Tom Candiotti, one of the few men alive who have thrown the pitch in the big leagues, and Wright went on to start 81 games over seven major league seasons.
Matt Waldron is the second knuckleballer that Niebla, now the Padres’ pitching coach, has worked with. Niebla’s own know-how has developed exponentially over the years, growth supplemented and boosted by baseball’s ever-expanding Information Era.
Niebla has got numbers — via Trackman and all the high-speed cameras and sensors at the biomechanics lab at Point Loma Nazarene University — that provide the perfect marriage with his background as a kinesiology major.
More times than not, Niebla’s trained eye can spot the root of the inefficiency of a delivery before inning reports land in his hand.
And even then …
“We’re both at the mercy of the movement of the knuckleball,” Niebla said.
Which is the story of Waldron’s season so far in the back of the Padres’ rotation.
Superpower, kryptonite
Waldron has made eight starts this season. Four have been good (1.66 ERA); four have not (10.19 ERA).
The right-hander is on an upswing heading into Friday’s start in Atlanta after baffling the dangerous Dodgers for a second time in what’s been an up-and-down start to a career built on the unpredictability of a pitch that no one else in the majors throws.
On any given day, it could be Waldron’s superpower or kryptonite. It’s why Waldron’s first instinct is to describe the pitch as “uncompetitive,” as he did in spring training and again this week.
But that’s not quite the word Waldron is looking for. The knuckleball is a pitch — it’s not gripped and ripped; it dances left and right and darts downward — that leaves you … vulnerable.
“I can’t apply more force into the ball like a guy like (closer) Robert Suarez, who is like, ‘(Expletive) you, hit this,’” Waldron said. “I’m the exact opposite. Sure, I’m being competitive with it, but I think it’s very much a finesse pitch.”
While velocity was never Waldron’s strong suit as an 18th-round pick out of the University of Nebraska, he could always command a baseball to both sides of the plate. Waldron showed Niebla when the Guardians’ minor league coordinator stopped by the short-season Mahoning Valley Scrappers in 2019.
“I doubt he remembers this,” Waldron said, almost beaming as he dressed Wednesday, “but I threw the best bullpen of my life. I had two trash cans up (on either side of the plate) and didn’t touch either one.”
Two years, a pandemic and a canceled minor league season later, Waldron was traded to San Diego as the player to be named later in the Mike Clevinger deal.
The following spring, Padres minor league instructor Jimmy Jones noticed Waldron fooling around with a knuckleball.
Curiosity ensued: What kind of reading would that pitch get on Trackman?
The game is chasing spin and the knuckleball doesn’t, making Waldron an outlier in a sport in constant search of the next edge.
A Padres official later that year suggested to the Union-Tribune that it could become an 80-grade knuckleball.
Really?
Well, who else is throwing it?
‘My hands were tied behind my back’
Waldron’s path to the big leagues has been fraught with days he would like to forget.
Like the grand slam he gave up early in his days as a full-fledged knuckleballer at high Single-A Fort Wayne. Waldron walked seven batters and allowed nine runs — three of them earned — on five hits in 2 2/3 innings. The feeling he had as Yonathan Perlaza circled the bases remains seared in the back of Waldron’s mind.
“I felt like my hands were tied behind my back,” Waldron recalled “I was so upset.”
It was around that time that Waldron connected with the late Tim Wakefield for a crash course on the outiler pitch. During a two-hour video call, the two talked fingernails, finger pressure and mechanics. Wakefield, a knuckleballer who won 200 games in 19 big-league seasons, reminded his new protégé to have fun with the pitch.
Sure enough, the pitch opened up Waldron’s path to Double-A San Antonio and eventually Triple-A El Paso.
Altitude, small ballparks and the new automated ball-strike system conspired against Waldron in the Pacific Coast League. He was carrying an ERA of 7.02 when injuries forced the Padres to call him up for his MLB debut last June.
Waldron arrived with a drastically different repertoire.
“When he got here, he was like, ‘I’m not throwing the knuckleball anymore,” Niebla said. “We were like, ‘No, no, let’s throw it still. Let’s bring it back.’”
Said Waldron: “I had put a couple starts together where I went away from it. It was almost like I needed to see if I could. Do I belong here without it? I performed well without it. It gave me that extra confidence with it.”
Waldron threw just two knuckleballs in his first inning in the major leagues, went away from the pitch until the fourth, and threw just 13 of them over 4 2/3 innings. He now throws the pitch between 30 and 35 percent of the time, along with a four-seam fastball, sweeper, sinker and cutter.
Wakefield and Candiotti threw their floaters in the 70-80 percent range.
“The thing about (knuckleballs) is that you don’t know where it’s going to break,” the Rockies’ Brenton Doyle told The Denver Post after Waldron threw six innings of one-run ball in a win at Coors Field last month. “It makes his fastball even a little sneakier because he throws a lot of knuckleballs and you want to stay back, but at the same time he has that fastball in his back pocket that he can throw 90-92.”
The ultimate changeup
Two weeks later, Waldron allowed seven runs on eight hits over three innings, and the Diamondbacks beat the Padres 11-4 in Phoenix.
The root of the problem, Niebla discovered, was Waldron’s knuckleball on that day only had arm-side break.
Waldron fixed his release point to get his hand directly behind the ball. The correction occurred over two bullpen sessions while the team was in Chicago. Noticing the early damage on his bad days and the stamina that Waldron carries late into games, Niebla had previously increased his pre-game bullpen session from 20 to 40 pitches to properly find the feel of the knuckler.
The swings that the Dodgers have taken so far — Waldron has struck out 10 over 10 ⅓ IP against them this year — provide a clear picture of what the Padres are chasing.
And then there’s potential domino effect of Waldron as the embodiment of a changeup.
Nobody throws like him.
“When he falls in the middle of a series or in the front of a series, I always say, ‘Where’s Matt pitching?” Niebla said. “He’s leading off this series. Atlanta won’t know our attack plan until Day 2. Day 3, they start making adjustments. Day 4, we have to figure it out, and then we’re out of there.”
That’s not to say the Padres are dismissing the fact that Waldron’s 5.49 ERA ranks 111th among 122 starting pitchers with at least 30 innings this season. It’s very much a part of a conversation that includes multiple considerations: How Randy Vásquez has done in spot starts, which minor league arms are pushing for major league roles — Adam Mazur is likely next in line — and the simple fact that Waldron’s good days are awfully intriguing.
Besides, he’s is the fifth starter.
“What’s a fifth starter in the big leagues? If he gives you innings, his value is a (expletive) load,” Niebla said. “I think if we’re making decisions off eight outings, eight starts, we’d be making a mistake.
“He is a little bit of a different breed.”
Go deeper inside the Padres
Get our free Padres Daily newsletter, free to your inbox every day of the season.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the San Diego Union-Tribune.
