Wherever I Wind Up. My Quest for Truth, Authenticity, and the Perfect Knuckleball

R.A. Dickey with Wayne Coffey. Wherever I Wind Up. My Quest for Truth, Authenticity, and the Perfect Knuckleball. New York: Blue Rider Press, 2012, 340 pp. Cloth, $26.95. In The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Ernest Hemingway writes, is a snow-covererd mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called by the Masai, 'Ngaje Ngai,' the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude. Perhaps R.A. Dickey discovered the leopard's secret when he climbed Kilimanjaro in January 2012 in support of the Bombay Teen Challenge, describing his ascent in several real-time blogs to the New York Times. He must have learned something on the mountain because, at least in the first part of the 2012 season, his knuckleball was nearly unhittable as he streaked to an 11-1 record. Whether Dickey's newfound mastery continues, at this writing he is enjoying the greatest success of his career. The pun in the first part of Dickey's title refers to his itinerant baseball career which stretches over fourteen seasons, four major-league teams, and several minor-league teams, including all or parts of seven seasons with the Texas Rangers' triple-A Oklahoma City Red Hawks. The second portion of his title, however, is serious, descriptive, and precise. Dickey's quest for the perfect knuckleball has taught him that what he seeks is not solely a technical matter of grip and spin, but a broader odyssey of personal growth, indeed, a search for truth and authenticity. Dickey's apologia pro vita sua successfully blends confession, biography, baseball play-by-play, technical aspects of the knuckleball, and psychoanalysis--think here of Hesse's Steppenwolf reconfiguring the shards of his life. And, in Dickey's thirty-seven years, there have been many shards to reconfigure: a broken family, genteel poverty, an indifferent father, an alcoholic mother, and repeated sexual abuse by a babysitter at the age of eight. On the positive side, Dickey's talent as a pitcher, and a fierce competitive spirit honed by adversity, earned him All-American status at the University of Tennessee, a starting berth on the 1996 US Olympics baseball team, a first-round draft selection by the Texas Rangers, and a proffered $810,000 signing bonus. But the latter was not to be: presigning physicals revealed that Dickey lacked an ulnar collateral ligament in his pitching elbow; the eighteenth draft pick was suddenly damaged goods. Texas rescinded its initial offer and R.A. ultimately signed for $75,000, beginning a professional career that between 2001 and 2010 took him to Texas, Seattle, Minnesota, and the New York Mets, punctuated by years of toil in the minor leagues. After two mediocre seasons with the Rangers, in 2003 and 2004, and nine years in the Rangers' system, the steam had gone out of Dickey's fastball, and he was advised by manager Buck Showalter and pitching coach Orel Hershiser to reinvent himself at Oklahoma City; to make the knuckleball he had toyed with the focus of his repertoire. …

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