Tim Tebow should become a knuckleballer

Tim Tebow is an outfielder for the Mets’ Low-A team, the Columbia Fireflies. He’s 29 years old in a league where the average player is seven-and-a-half years younger than that, and he’s batting .226/.324/.349. That on-base percentage is actually pretty all right, since the Sally League average is .318. But Tebow strikes out constantly at a level where opposing pitchers are spending more time trying to refine a given pitch on a given night than they are trying to get hitters out.

It’s not that Tebow has zero chance of getting better, it’s just that, athletically, he’s on the wrong end of his peak years and he hasn’t even been able to play well at the lowest full-season level in Major League Baseball. It happens, though, and the fact he’s even doing this well is impressive given high school baseball was a lifetime ago.

If he wants to keep playing baseball and have a chance at moving up, we have one suggestion. Quit this whole outfielder thing. It’s time to devote yourself to pitching, but not just any pitching: It’s time for Tim Tebow to become a knuckleballer.

You might ask: What evidence is there that Tebow can throw a knuckler, the most unpredictable pitch there is? And I would counter: Have you ever seen Tim Tebow throw a football?

Tebow is already throwing knucklers.

It’s not like that is just one photo captured at the exact wrong time to make Tebow look bad at the whole quarterbacking thing. Jon Bois wrote probably the lengthiest story ever published at SB Nation on the premise that Tebow threw a football really, really weird by America’s standards.

Everything about his time as a quarterback was unorthodox, but maybe, just like when Bois suggested the NFL was the wrong football league for him, Tebow just hasn’t been put in the right situation in baseball to succeed with the gifts he does have.

He’s in the right place for this career move, too. You think Tim Wakefield converted to the knuckler and the mound after years of success as a position player? Wakefield spent his early 20s hitting as poorly in the low minors as Tebow has, and he switched to pitching full time at 23. Then he had a 19-year major league career that included two World Series rings, a third-place finish for the 1995 Cy Young award, an all-star appearance, and a spot in the Red Sox Hall of Fame.

Steven Wright, another Red Sox knuckler, was a regular old pitcher in the Indians organization until a switch in his mid-20s brought him to the knuckleball. After a few years of tinkering with it, sage advice from Wakefield himself, and some opportunities in the majors, Wright has put together a productive five-year stretch for Boston, culminating in an all-star berth last summer.

The knuckler isn’t something players start out with: It’s a last refuge for those failing to find success elsewhere. That’s why Brian Wilson, who used to be one of the game’s best closers but pitched his way out of MLB, is trying to make it back as one. Tebow didn’t stick in the NFL. He’s got a job talking about college football, sure, but he clearly wants to keep playing professional sports, and he got a shot to make his way to MLB courtesy of the Mets.

However, unless the Mets promote him to New York for the sole purpose of the media and merchandising firestorm it’ll create — make fun of Tebow all you want, but he’s the most popular player in the game right now thanks to his pre-baseball career — he’s not making it to the bigs at this rate. He’s still got a couple of months left in his 20s, though, which is more than enough time to start tinkering with a knuckleball.

Hand Tebow a baseball. Tell him about how the thing to do is grip the pitch with your fingernails and push it toward home plate while keeping your wrist stable to minimize or completely remove any spin on the ball. Science takes care of the rest: “Without the gyroscopic effect of spinning, the ball’s movement is unstable. Its seams create an uneven flow of air over the surface of the ball, pushing it in random directions.”

Nearly perfect. A few sessions with Wakefield, and he’d get that wrist straightened out exactly as it needs to be and that pitch contorting like it should. Tebow would get those sessions, too: Knuckleballers are a tight knit bunch, and each new generation of knucklers learns from the previous one to keep the dying art alive.

Why the knuckleball, though? Tebow wouldn’t make it with any regular old conversion to pitching. He doesn’t have the arm strength for that — it’s why scouts said he should play left field instead of right field, given left relies less on hard, accurate throws. Knucklers, though, don’t need to throw 100. They don’t need to throw 90. Hell, they don’t even need to throw 80. So long as his fastball is harder than his knuckleball and he can consistently throw it accurately, this would work.

Well at least it was thrown hard...

Maybe that was a knuckler, too.

OK maybe this was a bad idea after all.