GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. — The old knuckleballer grips his favorite pitch with three fingernails. Most pitchers use two, but for him that makes the pitch wobbly, impossible to control. Jim Bouton, 78, uses his ring finger, too. This is the grip he showed Johnny Carson four decades ago on the set of “The Tonight Show,” and the grip he displayed for a recent visitor in his backyard, high up in the Berkshires.
Bouton still throws a couple of times a week. He built a concrete-block backstop in a sunlit corner of the yard, and he hits the strike zone most of the time.