SPECIAL DELIVERY

How remarkable it would be if Tom Candiotti and Dennis Springer matched knuckleballs in a Freeway World Series.

How remarkable it is already, said Charlie Hough, who threw his last competitive knuckler at 46 and is now a minor league pitching instructor with the Dodgers.

What Hough meant is, here are Candiotti and Springer, knuckleball dinosaurs, perhaps the last of that breed, having emerged from the fringe of the Dodger and Angel staffs to provide rotation stability down the stretch--to provide predictability with baseball’s most unpredictable pitch.

“It’s kind of ironic to have two knuckleball pitchers playing key roles in a pennant race,” Hough said. “They aren’t out there scouting for knuckleball pitchers, and most managers aren’t crazy about them.

“They want Chan Ho Park blowing guys away with a 95-mph fastball.”

Park has been doing some of that for the Dodgers. But then there’s also the image of Springer delivering a 45-mph knuckleball in Baltimore’s Camden Yards. Scouts recharged the batteries on their speed guns as they waited for it to reach the plate.

Springer threw 135 pitches in that recent game and came back two nights later to throw 92 more against the New York Yankees. He has averaged eight innings in his last six starts and will be out there again tonight against the Cleveland Indians at Anaheim Stadium.

With Chuck Finley, Mark Langston and Mark Gubicza injured, Springer’s resilient and effective knuckler hasn’t driven Manager Terry Collins crazy as much as to church to offer thanks.

“All he’s done is keep us in games and eat up innings,” Collins said.

With Pedro Astacio erratic--and eventually traded--and Ramon Martinez injured, Candiotti, who turns 40 Sunday, has come out of the bullpen and off the trading block to help save the Dodger season.

But he knows where Hough is coming from. He knows there are many managers who don’t want to fool with the idiosyncrasies of the knuckleball, particularly when one wild pitch or passed ball or hanging floater or stolen base could mean the division title.

“It scares a lot of people,” Candiotti said. “Some managers just like a pitcher who has stuff that is easy to measure on a speed gun.

“When the knuckler is working, it can be the easiest game to watch. But when it’s off, it drives managers crazy.

“With a knuckleball, there can be more wild pitches, more passed balls, more running by the other side. If it’s working, the pitcher can give you a lot of innings and you can save your bullpen. There are a lot of advantages, but you also have to put up with a lot of headaches.

“I heard Charlie once say that the best way for a manager to watch a knuckleballer is to put on a blindfold for the first five innings, then take it off and see where he’s at.”

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The Washington Senators once had an entire rotation of knuckleball pitchers. Phil Niekro and Hoyt Wilhelm reached the Hall of Fame throwing it. Hough pitched 25 years in the majors after Goldie Holt taught it to him when his arm went bad as a Dodger minor leaguer.

Now only Candiotti, Springer and Tim Wakefield of the Boston Red Sox throw it with regularity in the majors--no disrespect to Wade Boggs, who pitched an inning of relief with it last week.

“It’s very difficult to learn and tough to coach,” Hough said. “The guy throwing it is the only one who knows how it feels.”

Hough has been trying to teach it to Class-A prospect Kevin Pincavitch, but it has been a struggle. Former major leaguer Jim Bouton, who toyed with the pitch, would tell him you need to approach it with the stoicism of an Eastern philosophy.

“It requires an incredible amount of persistence and patience, and most young people don’t have it,” Bouton said.

“A lot of coaches and managers also don’t understand the knuckler. Managers like to manipulate and control, but nobody controls the knuckler. It controls you.”

“You definitely have to have an Eastern temperament. The East is much more mysterious, subtle and magical--just like the knuckler.”

Candiotti, Springer and Wakefield learned the pitch out of necessity. Their careers would have been over without it.

Niekro’s father came home from the coal mines each day and instructed his son in the art of it.

Eventually, Phil Niekro said, the knuckler became like “a member of the family” for him and his brother, Joe, as they combined to win 539 games.

Wilhelm, who appeared in a record 1,070 major league games, picked it up after seeing a newspaper picture when he was a high school sophomore.

However, much like Springer, he had to spend 10 years perfecting it in the minors.

“It’s definitely a goofy pitch,” said Springer, 32, who made his major league debut in 1995 after nine years in the minors and didn’t get his first major league victory until last year.

“I mean, as much confidence as I have in it, you never know how it’s going to react, and you always have to be prepared to try something different to make it work.

“We’re kind of a clan, a small fraternity, and whenever I see Tim or Tom or play golf with Charlie, there’s three automatic questions: ‘How are you? What have you been doing? How’s your knuckler?’

“It’s nice to be able to send out an SOS.”

Springer’s recent rotation-saving effectiveness emerged after he and Wakefield met recently with Niekro in Boston. Niekro told Springer he had seen him on television and thought there was a need for him to try taking something off the knuckler, slowing it down, letting it work.

“I’ve had a real good one ever since,” Springer said.

Coaching, however, is a problem. Little League and high school coaches don’t have the background or willingness to explore the pitch, young pitchers don’t have the patience to stay with it and scouts aren’t attracted to it.

At the professional level, organizations aren’t willing to invest the time and money in a fringe veteran or prospect’s attempt to master the pitch.

Then, too, there’s the challenge of finding a catcher who can handle it. As Bob Uecker once said, “The best way to catch a knuckler is, wait for it to stop rolling and then pick it up.”

Said Yankee Mike Stanley, a catcher and designated hitter, “I don’t like to catch it and I don’t like to hit it.”

Acknowledged Marcel Lachemann, the Angel pitching coach:

“I honestly didn’t have a lot of respect for [the knuckler] until I worked with Charlie Hough [as coach and pitcher, respectively, with the Florida Marlins].

“I thought you could just pick it up and throw it, but I changed my opinion when I saw the commitment and work Charlie put into it.”

Lachemann said he realized mechanics are as critical to the knuckleball pitcher as to any other pitcher--an area in which the coach can help--and that the key to a knuckler’s success is control of his other pitches, Candiotti’s curve, for instance, or Springer’s 75-mph fastball.

“At some point, he’s going to be behind [in the count] and have to spot his secondary pitch,” Lachemann said.

But the commitment, Hough said, has to be to the knuckler, and that takes courage.

“Try standing out there and throwing 60 mph to Frank Thomas or Albert Belle,” he said. “You’re kind of naked out there.

“Phil and Hoyt were the best at it. The rest of us were guessing.”

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If you viewed this in a movie, you would snicker at the idea that a screenwriter would try to pass it off as realism:

Here is a teenage Candiotti, a Northern California resident, going out to Candlestick Park to root for his beloved Giants against the hated Dodgers.

Candiotti arrives early and takes his seat down the left-field line, about 10 rows back.

Hough, the Dodger knuckleball specialist, spots Candiotti among the few early arrivals and tosses him a ball, throwing a knuckler.

Candiotti, who has experimented with the pitch in youth leagues, throws a knuckler back to Hough.

The pitcher is surprised, but approves.

He tosses another knuckler to Candiotti and, for a few minutes, Candiotti is in a dream world, matching knucklers with Charlie Hough.

“I thought it was the coolest thing,” Candiotti said. “Other than a few autographs, it was the first contact I had ever had with anyone in the major leagues.

“It was so ironic, because I would wind up throwing the knuckleball, I would wind up working with Hough, I would wind up pitching on that same field at Candlestick, and I would wind up pitching for the same team Hough did.”

Candiotti remembers first throwing the knuckleball in games of catch with his father, Caesar.

“Here’s my knuckler,” Caesar would say.

Tom would respond with one of his own, although, he said, neither really knew what he was doing.

Candiotti got to the major leagues on his curveball and good control.

By 1985, his career, which had been spent mostly in the minors, seemed to be over. The Milwaukee Brewers, for whom Candiotti was pitching, wanted to make him a coach.

“I still thought I had some bullets left,” he said.

Left with extra time to throw one day in the spring of ‘85, Candiotti started fooling around again with the knuckler.

Suddenly, he looked over his shoulder, and there were Sal Bando, then the assistant general manager, and Manager George Bamberger.

“We had no idea you throw the knuckleball,” Bando said.

“I kind of mess around with it a little,” Candiotti said.

The Brewers sent him to the minors to work on the pitch and he became a knuckleball specialist. He signed that fall as a free agent with the Cleveland Indians, who soon brought in the master, 47-year-old Phil Niekro.

“ ‘Having you here to talk to is like having Thomas Edison to talk to about electricity,’ ” Candiotti said he told Niekro.

“I mean, to have someone like Niekro to watch, like I did at Cleveland, was incredible.

“I saw someone who was 47 at the time making hitters look crazy, and I said, ‘I can do this.’ ”

And alongside Niekro, Candiotti mastered the pitch.

He now regards himself as a pitcher who throws the knuckler among his other pitches, rather than strictly a knuckleball pitcher.

“Even on an off night, when it’s not working, I feel I can give my team a chance to win,” Candiotti said.

Did it save his career?

“There’s no doubt,” Candiotti said. “I went from being the ninth, 10th, 11th or 12th guy, someone who had below-average stuff but enough smarts to get by, to a guy who has had a 14-year career. Throwing the knuckler got me off the bubble, made me a starting pitcher and made my career take off.”

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There is nothing particularly athletic looking about Candiotti or Springer. The flame-throwing Troy Percival likes to needle Springer about being unable to break 80 with his fastball, and teammate Finley says of the knuckleballer, “He looks like a guy who ought to be waiting for a bus.”

Springer says, “My fastball may be like my changeup, but I don’t feel that I’m any less of a pitcher because I’m a knuckler. I’m not going to go out and compete in any triathlon, but I still consider myself a hard worker. I’ve had to be to stay in the game.”

He was drafted and signed by the Dodgers in 1987 and released seven years later, after having advanced no higher than triple A.

“I started to goof around with the knuckler in college, and the Dodgers actually drafted me on the potential of it,” Springer said. “They gave me a chance to learn it and throw it, but they just had too many good pitchers, and in the long run, there’s always something of a bias against knuckleballers.”

He signed with Cleveland in 1993, ran into another fleet of strong arms, was released before the end of spring training, signed with Philadelphia, and finally reached the majors in ‘95, making four relief appearances.

He was released again after that season and signed with the Angels on the recommendation of scout Preston Gomez, who had seen him pitch in Venezuela.

Springer was 5-6 with a 5.51 earned-run average in an irregular role last year but is 8-6 with a 4.83 ERA this year.

“I had a long wait but it was worth it,” he said.

The long wait has left Springer a pragmatist. He knows he is never far from the bubble, that Langston or some other hard thrower could return and bump him from the rotation. But he said he feels capable of pitching another 10 years, at which point he’ll consider another 10.

“A knuckleballer has to prove himself every year, but Terry has been very fair,” Springer said of his manager. “He’s given me a lot of chances and shown a lot of confidence in me.

“I’ve just always enjoyed baseball and being a part of it. . . . I mean, why give up until I have to give up and they take the uniform away.

“I have the rest of my life to find a real job.”

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Besides, the dinosaurs don’t want to become extinct.

“If the knuckleball dies out without me doing anything about it, I’ll feel pretty bad, like I let the art of it down,” said Phil Niekro, in the aftermath of his Hall of Fame induction. “Me, my brother, Hough, Candiotti, among us we’ve got to come up with something, some way to teach it and somehow keep it around the game after we’ve gone.

“There’s a baseball video out on everything else.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

A Dying Breed

Active knuckleball pitchers

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Player, Team Years W-L ERA Tom Candiotti, Dodgers 1983- 135-140 3.53 Dennis Springer, Angels 1995- 13-15 5.07 Steve Sparks, Brewers 1995- 13-18 5.23 Tim Wakefield, Red Sox 1992- 53-47 4.17

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* PROMINENT KNUCKLEBALL PITCHERS: C7

Masters of the Craft

Other prominent pitchers who threw the knuckleball:

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Player Years W-L ERA Charlie Hough 1970-94 216-216 3.75 Wilbur Wood 1961-78 164-156 3.24 *Hoyt Wilhelm 1952-72 143-122 2.52 *Phil Niekro 1964-87 318-274 3.35 Joe Niekro 1967-88 221-204 3.59 Jim Bouton 1962-78 62-63 3.57 Eddie Cicotte 1905-20 208-149 2.38 Dutch Leonard 1933-53 191-181 3.25 Eddie Fisher 1959-73 85-70 3.41 *Juan Marichal 1960-75 243-142 2.89 *Early Wynn 1939-63 300-244 3.54 *Jesse Haines 1918-37 210-158 3.64 *Ted Lyons 1923-46 260-230 3.67

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*-Member of Hall of Fame