Nine years ago, baseball’s best pitcher was a 37-year-old throwing 75-mile per hour knuckleballs. Today, as he watches Jacob deGrom rain fire over the league with a totally different pitching style, R.A. Dickey can still relate to that feeling of Citi Field’s mound transforming into a throne.
“I can certainly understand the space he might be in where he feels like he can do anything on the mound,” Dickey says of deGrom, who he occasionally exchanges texts with. “You don’t get that very often, if ever. Standing on the mound knowing the ball will do what you want it to do, that is such a rare thing. He’s in a different league than me, man.”
Calling from his forty acre farm in Franklin, Tenn., the 2012 Cy Young winner says he keeps a close eye on his former team. When he’s not coaching his teenage son’s travel ball team — a culture that by his own words can be “very toxic from a lot of different standpoints” — or tending to his pig Meatball, Dickey tunes in like the rest of us to marvel at the pitcher who he says might be the best he’s ever seen.
“I keep telling my son that he’s watching a once-in-a-generation player,” Dickey tells the New York Daily News. “It almost becomes more flavorful when he struggles, right? If he were to give up six runs in two innings that would be on the front page. But if he’s shutting people out it’s ho-hum.”
Along with farm and father duties, Dickey keeps busy by playing pickup basketball three times a week at a nearby high school and serving as a board member for a Nashville-based anti-human trafficking organization. Now nine years removed from his magic carpet ride season and the attention that came with it, baseball’s last great knuckleballer lives a life full of whimsy.
“The thing that’s neat about a knuckleball guy is you’re kind of this wizard or this weird thing that blew through the major leagues,” Dickey laughs. “Most people that throw the knuckleball have a humble spirit because you have to deal with failure so much when you’re trying to learn it. You also have to deal with how ugly it looks when it’s not going well. I mean, you’re up there floating 70 miles per hour to major league hitters. That carries over real well; I don’t want people to ever be intimidated by me.”
Fame can be fleeting, or at least for Dickey, it can morph from 40,000 screaming fans at Citi Field to umpires at local parks asking to pose for a photo. One thing that fascinates him is the level of hyper fame that deGrom has evaded.
“You look at what this cat’s done, people ask me all the time why he’s not more well-known,” Dickey says of the relatively anonymous megastar heading the Mets’ rotation. “One reason is that he hasn’t had a chance to pitch in the postseason for a while. The other one is that he’s coming up in an era where there’s still enough people who appreciated guys that threw 240 innings. When you’re asking a guy as good as he is to only go through the lineup twice, sometimes three times, there’s something more there. That’s really the only knock.”
Dickey understands that any criticism of deGrom involves splitting the thinnest of hairs. While he acknowledges that having a manager that allows him to go deeper would add to deGrom’s Q score, Dickey is also awestruck by the best pitcher in the world having such an unassuming demeanor.
“He’s got a perfect temperament for New York. He suits that place well because he’s the same as he’d be in Milwaukee. In that place, man, you need a short-term memory and a bulletproof confidence. That’s what it takes to be good there.”
In the summer of 2012, Dickey was as good as any pitcher had ever been in the Big Apple. He led the National League in strikeouts, complete games and shutouts that year, earning the Cy Young trophy that’s tucked away in the corner of his office. He’s the only knuckleball artist to win pitching’s top honor, doing so by throwing back-to-back complete game one-hitters, logging double-digit strikeouts in seven starts, and setting a Mets record with 32 2/3 consecutive scoreless innings.
Dickey admits that he was rooting for deGrom to break that record this year. When asked about the darker, behind the scenes moments that grounded him from the euphoria of a Cy Young season, though, he pulls a sympathetic card.
“The hardest part is always watching friends not have the seasons they hoped for, and collectively, the team not doing well,” Dickey says somberly of a Mets team that won just 74 games and finished 24 games behind the NL East champion Nationals. “Those are tough times.”
Of course, there was also the trade that immediately followed the supernatural season. The Mets traded Dickey to Toronto just over a month after his name was engraved on the Cy Young trophy. In return, the Blue Jays sent a combination of players headlined by Noah Syndergaard and Travis d’Arnaud, who became integral parts of the 2015 team that won the NL pennant. It was a World Series Dickey thought he was destined to play in.
“I didn’t want to leave New York, that was kind of a dark moment. I felt like I really belonged to a place for a portion of my career,” Dickey reflects. “I was able to build something with the fanbase, then all of a sudden I had to go somewhere else. That was a tough moment.”
Life on the hobby farm is satisfying a different part of his spirit now, and Dickey says it’s brought a sense of fulfillment. Being away from the cameras and microphones has opened a new side to the Mets’ cult hero’s life. As far as his niche, celebrity status in Queens? Dickey still enjoys tapping into that when he can.
“I can still go back to New York and maybe get a free sub if the guy recognizes me. It’s fun to be on that side.”
