Witness Jamie Moyer, for instance.
Greg Maddux is another great example of someone who has made a career out of not necessarily always throwing his best stuff but always mixing things up in such a way that the batter doesn't expect it.

Now, when I looked at Matsuzaka's pitches from the 2007 season, I concluded that if he threw the pitch, it wasn't being thrown very often. Maybe once or twice per game at most. There is a pitch-tracking system called Pitch f/x that is installed in every major league ballpark, and all the data are completely free for the world to look at. Well, you have to know where to find it and how to interpret it. The signature of the gyroball would be a ball that doesn't break, that has neither a horizontal nor a vertical break. So I've looked for such pitches from Matsuzaka, and you sort of see a few every now and then that look like they might qualify. If he does throw it, it's not the sort of pitch you would want to give people a steady diet of, because once they figure it out and catch on to it, it's an easy pitch to hit. So you have to throw it judiciously, and if he does throw it—nobody knows for sure—he is certainly throwing it judiciously.

Moving over to Matsuzaka's teammate Tim Wakefield, could you give us a rundown on his signature pitch, the knuckleball?
Well, I have to admit that I understand one that the least.

I think that's true of everyone.
The key to understanding the knuckleball is that if a ball were perfectly smooth, the air would flow over it in a fairly smooth fashion. But the stitching on the ball disrupts the flow of air, causing the ball to break. It's not at all the same effect as the effect due to the spinning baseball—it's different altogether. So the key to throwing a knuckleball is that if you throw a ball that's spinning, one way to think about it is that the spinning baseball is averaging over different seam orientations, so there's no net effect due to the air interacting with the seams. But if you throw the ball with almost no spin at all—maybe it rotates a half or even a quarter of a revolution on its way to home plate—then as the air moves over the ball, it's the interaction of the air with those seams that changes the character of the airflow, making it go from a nice, smooth flow to sort of a turbulent flow. That causes local pressure variations which make the ball break, and it breaks in a more or less unpredictable way.

If you use this Pitch f/x system to look at any other pitcher and you plot each pitch on sort of an x-y diagram where x is the break in the horizontal direction and y is the break in the vertical direction, then the pitches fall into nice, neat little clusters. You have a nice little cluster showing a four-seam fastball, a curveball, a cutter. But you look at Wakefield and it's all over the place. There is no nice, neat cluster, which means that the ball doesn't have what you might call a characteristic break to it. It really is quite literally unpredictable. Everyone knows it's coming, but all you have to do is look at what the catcher is doing to realize that nobody knows where it's going—I mean, the catcher's having a heck of a time dealing with it also. [Editor's note: In 2006, the Red Sox reacquired catcher Doug Mirabelli specifically for his ability to catch Wakefield's knuckleball.] It's a tough pitch to hit. It's really funny with Wakefield; he is the closest I've seen to a bipolar pitcher. He gets on the mound, and either he has it that day or he doesn't. When he's on, he's just totally unhittable. And when he's not on, they whack him around. Sometimes that ball is really dancing around and sometimes it's not. And then there are times that it's dancing around so much that he can't control it, and then he's walking people and has a bad day. He's almost a .500 career pitcher; he wins half the games he pitches. It just reflects the fact that sometimes it's on and sometimes it's not.

On a personal level, I have to ask, what's your team?
The Red Sox. I'm from Maine originally.

Do you see them going all the way this year?
I think they have the possibility if things fall into place. There is tough competition in their division. Although hitting this year won't be quite as good as it's been in years past, the pitching looks to be very strong if people stay healthy. They'll be in the mix. Check back with me in October.