Matt Waldron, MLB’s Knuckleballing Sensation, Gets Shoutout From Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes

The knuckleball is perhaps the trickiest pitch to throw in Major League Baseball. So few pitchers throw it, whenever one pitcher throws it well, it’s big news.

The knuckleball’s only full-time practitioner: Matt Waldron, a 27-year-old right-hander for the San Diego Padres who didn’t crack a major league rotation until 2024 — his fifth year in professional baseball.

Waldron wasn’t necessarily expected to hold down a spot in the Padres’ starting rotation this season, but so far it’s gone well. Overall he is 4-5 with a 3.76 ERA in 13 starts, but has gone 3-1 with an outstanding 1.78 ERA in his last six.

The knuckleball grip is often emulated but difficult to perfect. It requires holding the ball lightly but firmly in the fingertips, then releasing it in such a way that the ball does not spin en route to home plate. Because it isn’t spinning — or thrown quickly, relatively speaking — it’s more subject to air currents than any other pitch. That makes the knuckleball more difficult to hit than perhaps any other pitch. It also makes it more difficult to throw for strikes.

It’s not as if pitchers aren’t trying. Even one famous football player is trying to give it a shot.

Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes played college football and baseball at Texas Tech University. He wasn’t known for throwing a knuckleball during his pitching days. Neither was his father, Patrick Mahomes Sr., who pitched for six different teams during an 11-year (1992-03) MLB career.

Clearly the younger Mahomes knows enough about pitching to appreciate the skill of throwing baseball’s trickiest pitch. He recently posted his appreciation for Waldron, a relative unknown outside of San Diego, on his official Twitter/X account:

“I’m trying to learn the knuckleball the Waldron dude from the Padres throws,” Mahomes wrote.

Mahomes can get in line.

There is literally an exclusive baseball academy devoted specifically to teaching the knuckleball. A handful of major leaguers whose careers as position players flamed out — notably the Cincinnati Reds’ Alex Blandino and the Atlanta Braves’ David Fletcher — have even tried making mid-career switches to knuckleball pitchers, with little success.

For now, Waldron stands alone as baseball’s best knuckleballer, an honorific that has had few contenders since former Cy Young Award winner R.A. Dickey threw his last pitch in 2017. He’s 1 of 1.

Waldron told MLB.com that the shoutout left his phone buzzing Wednesday: “It’s kind of crazy. Like I’m living in a different universe.”