Phil Niekro

The Atlanta Braves let Phil Niekro go after the 1983 season. Twenty years with the organization, four All-Star teams, two NL wins titles, and the response was a release. Niekro was 44 years old, and the assumption around baseball was that the knuckleball had finally run out of dance. "I don't think they'll ever convince me that I'm not as good as some of the best pitchers in their camp," he told the Philadelphia Inquirer that spring, still looking for a team. The Yankees signed him instead. Two years later he'd win his 300th game in pinstripes, and the pitch that supposedly had nothing left in it would still be fluttering.

A Knuckleballer Nobody Wanted to Bet Against

Niekro signed with New York as a free agent on January 5, 1984, a two-year deal worth a reported $1.4 million. On the day he signed, a reporter asked him something about his age. His answer: "I still say the mound is 60 feet, six inches from the plate. You still have a home plate, a backstop, nine men on the field." The math hadn't changed. Neither, it turned out, had he.

He was 45 that first season and led the entire Yankees staff in both wins and innings pitched -- 16-8, a 3.09 ERA, and a first half so good (11-4, 1.84 ERA at the break) that he made his fifth career All-Star team. On July 4 in Arlington, working eight scoreless innings against Texas, he struck out Larry Parrish for career strikeout number 3,000, joining a club that, at the time, had almost nobody in it. He faded some after the break -- knuckleballers have bad stretches like anyone else, usually when the pitch stops dancing and just floats -- but 16-8 for a 45-year-old was already the stuff of record books. Historians would later rank it alongside Satchel Paige's age-45 season in 1952 as one of the best age-45 seasons any pitcher has ever had.

The Brother in the Dugout

The 1985 season was rockier on the surface -- 16-12, a 4.09 ERA, and an American League-leading 120 walks (leading the league in walks isn't typically a stat teams celebrate), because a 46-year-old knuckleball still wanders sometimes even when the man throwing it doesn't. But the record didn't matter as much as the number sitting behind it. Niekro carried a career total of 299 wins into his final turns of the season, and the Yankees, eliminated from the race and playing out the string, started arranging his starts around the milestone.

Then, in mid-September, the Yankees traded for Joe Niekro -- Phil's younger brother, also a knuckleballer, acquired from Houston with the season and the countdown to 300 both running out. The brothers had been teammates once before, briefly, with the Braves in 1974. This time Joe would be watching from the Yankees dugout instead of pitching against him.

Niekro got his 300th win on October 6, 1985, the final day of the regular season -- a four-hit shutout of the division-champion Blue Jays, thrown almost entirely without a knuckleball, saved for one final strikeout in the ninth. He became the 18th pitcher in history to reach 300, and the second that year alone: Tom Seaver had already gotten there in August, pitching for the White Sox, at Yankee Stadium, against the Yankees. Baseball has a way of rhyming with itself. At 46 years and 188 days old, Niekro was also, for a while, the oldest pitcher ever to throw a major-league shutout -- a mark that held for 25 years until Jamie Moyer broke it in 2010, which is its own kind of tribute to how strange and durable knuckleball careers can be.

What Twenty Wins in Pinstripes Buys You

Niekro didn't retire after leaving New York. He pitched into 1987, moving from Cleveland to Toronto before a one-day, one-dollar homecoming start with Atlanta that September (an actual dollar -- the Braves weren't paying market rate for a farewell lap), the club un-retiring his number for an afternoon so he could leave the way he'd spent most of his career -- as one of them. He finished with 318 wins, 3,342 strikeouts, and 5,404.1 innings pitched, the fourth-most in baseball history. Some 121 of those wins came after he turned 40, still the major-league record. The Baseball Hall of Fame elected him in January 1997, his fifth time on the ballot, with 80.3 percent of the vote.

None of that career total belongs to the Yankees, and nobody's pretending otherwise -- two seasons out of twenty-four is two seasons. But those two seasons weren't a farewell tour or a paycheck. Niekro won 32 games in pinstripes, made an All-Star team, struck out his 3,000th hitter, and closed out his 300th win with his brother watching and a crowd at the Stadium on its feet for a game that meant nothing in the standings and everything else. Don Mattingly and that '85 lineup gave him the runs. Niekro gave the Bronx one more knuckleball, right when everyone figured there weren't any left.

The Braves thought he was finished at 44. It took him four more seasons and four more uniforms to actually get there -- and the moment that mattered most, the 300th win nobody handed him, happened in pinstripes.