Early on a bright Friday morning, just after the New York Mets lost to the Philadelphia Phillies, 16-1, their ace pitcher R. A. Dickey ambled from the Grand Hyatt hotel on Forty-second Street towards Grand Central Terminal, unnoticed and uninterrupted. “To be honest with you,” he said, “I’m a bit tired. Last night was rough. The team’s gone into some kind of dark tailspin.”
The Mets had, maybe, but not Dickey. He would take the mound three more times in September in pursuit of a twentieth win and a probable Cy Young award. (Currently 19-6, he makes his next start on Thursday.) Dickey, the only knuckleballer in the major leagues, has become dominant courtesy of a strange, near spin-free pitch that hovers en route to home plate, then takes a trap-door drop that batters often can’t see or predict. But the pitch he was more concerned with on this morning was the plot of a children’s picture book he’d written. He was headed by subway to the offices of Penguin publishers in SoHo to present it to his editor there.
The thirty-seven-year-old Dickey, who has the gentle comportment of a humanities professor, has no personal representative or manager—“because I don’t consider myself marquee,” he said, “and I like to be in control of things.” He spoke in a soulful Nashville drawl peppered with words and phrases that would include, over the course of a morning, “edifying,” “antithetical,” “deus ex machina,” and “voluminous.” He is exceedingly polite. It is not difficult to imagine a character with his traits in a Wes Anderson film, though he would surely rather appear in a sci-fi or fantasy flick. (He warms up on the mound to “The Imperial March,” from “Star Wars,” and when he comes to bat, has the Citi Field public-address system play the theme from “Game of Thrones.”) An avid reader, Dickey keeps books in his locker at the stadium, where he often finds time to read. (Pitchers, he noted, tend to have a lot of free time.) As he navigated a transfer underneath Times Square, Dickey rattled off a few of this year’s summer reading titles, and when asked, followed up with reviews in miniature. A sampling: a rereading of John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”: “Still potent”; Chaim Potok’s “The Chosen”: “A rich education in Jewish culture;” Bill O’Reilly’s “Killing Lincoln”: “Entertaining, but he’s no Hemingway;” and William Saroyan’s “The Human Comedy”: “Actually, let’s skip that one.”
“I think you’ll like my editor,” he said with a smile as he approached the Penguin offices. “I’m pretty sure she might have been part of the hippie movement. You’ll see what I mean.” He took the elevator, checked in at the front desk and sat down on a couch. It was nearly silent, and the lobby’s lower walls were painted with characters from children’s books. After a few minutes, a ruddy-cheeked young man wearing a tie and carrying a backpack introduced himself to the receptionist and informed her that it was his first day on the job. Dickey looked over and said softly, “Now isn’t that an exciting moment?”
Just then Lucia Monfried, Dickey’s editor, appeared, a petite, fair-skinned woman with light blue eyes and long gray hair. On her wrist was a pinstriped New York Yankees watch and a blue silicone wristband that commemorated Derek Jeter’s three-thousandth hit. She didn’t look like a hippie. In a singsong voice that stopped and started, she welcomed Dickey and led him to a sunlit conference room with a view of lower Manhattan. She told Dickey that she was one of the “minute fraction of baseball-crazed people in children’s publishing,” and Dickey complimented her for her work on “Skippyjon Jones,” a book series popular with Dickey’s four kids, who live at his permanent residence in Nashville with his wife.
The two sat down and Monfried introduced the first order of business: having Dickey approve the general outline of a young-adult adaptation of “Wherever I Wind Up,” his autobiography, released earlier this year, which tracks his life from a troubled youth—Dickey moved around a lot and was sexually abused—to his career in professional baseball, which stalled until he learned the mechanics of the knuckleball.
The conversation eventually turned to “Knuckleball Ned,” a thirty-two-page picture book that is the second of three books in the deal that Dickey signed with the publisher. Dickey pulled a twenty-page manuscript, dense with type, from his bag. On one of the pages was a cut-and-pasted image of Mr. Met.
“Now, I know I might have to simplify what I have here,” said Dickey. He began to explain the plot of “Knuckleball Ned,” in which Ned, whose body has the shape of a baseball, negotiates a scene of being bullied.
“Ned’s set apart because he wobbles. No one else wobbles, and he’s teased mercilessly. He’s the only one of his kind,” said Dickey.
“Does Ned have any friends?” asked Monfried, drinking from a black coffee mug that said “So Many Books, So Little Time.”
“Curve Ball,” said Dickey.
“O.K. … maybe there should be a Soft Ball, too. Soft Ball’s gotta be fat,” said Monfried.
“There’s Foul Ball, he’s kind of a gangster. And Slider.” It was unclear whether these would be friends or foes.
“Maybe Slider smells,” said Monfried.
It became obvious that Monfried thought Dickey had written too long.
“You’ve got to think about who your audience is. I’m not sure, for example, that four-year-olds get what ‘bullying’ is. I think you need to simplify,” she said as she read further. Later, she added, “It doesn’t sound like a light story. Are you funny?”
“I would say I’m more witty than funny,” said Dickey.
“Maybe this book is older. There’s some meat here, and that’s good. Ned is you, really. It’s not like the story of Derek Jeter—magic just happened to Jeter, found him. Jeter never had any problems, aside from when he was eighteen and went to A-ball and called his parents, homesick, crying.”
Monfried didn’t look at the other pages of Dickey’s manuscript, but gave him encouragement, set some deadlines for another draft, and offered up some of “Lucia’s Laws,” which include “Talking is killing,” “Think visually,” “You can do anything you want in a picture book, but you can’t just do it once,” “Children don’t like description,” “Keep it moving,” and “The kid always solves the problem.”
Dickey asked Monfried if readers will need to know why it is that Ned wobbles.
“No,” she said.
“So it’s not important that my character has a genesis—he can just be?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
The meeting wrapped, and Dickey returned to the train going back towards Grand Central. During a transfer underneath Times Square, he was spotted, finally: a young man approached with a Sharpie and a New York Post, with the page folded to an article about him. Dickey signed it and continued down the platform. The episode afforded the opportunity to change the topic of conversation to baseball. As the 7 train clattered towards Grand Central, Dickey likened throwing his pitch to “having a relationship with an organic, living thing—something that’s sometimes there and sometimes not.” So would he feel additional pressure, essentially pitching for the Cy Young during his last starts of the season? “No, extra pressure would only still the joy of the experience,” he said. And what made him risk everything on an odd pitch that baseball teams seldom seek? “It was only until I came to the end of myself that I was able to embrace it,” he offered. The train stopped, and we said goodbye, and Dickey took the sunlit stairwell towards Lexington Avenue, alone.
Photograph by Patrick McDermott/Getty.
