Who Is Charlie Zink?

Charlie Zink is a lot more than just the “Hey! How hilarious! Another knuckleballer to replace knuckleballer Tim Wakefield while he’s on the DL!” headlines he’s getting lately. The 28 year-old (almost 29- his birthday is in a couple of weeks) will be making his first major league start against the Rangers, and seems just about as excited as you think he’d be:

This is everything I have ever dreamed of. It has come true now and I’m going to the major leagues. It’s ridiculous. I’m at a loss for words. I really don’t know what to say about it. I’ll be smiling forever now. This is just awesome. Awesome.

So who is Charlie Zink? I’ve got 10 random bits of trivia about the newest member of the Red Sox 25-man roster:

1. Charlie’s the son of two Folsom State Prison employees. Cue the Johnny Cash theme music. Actually if Charlie used Folsom Prison Blues as his warm-up music at Fenway, his cool factor would automatically go up by a factor of 100.

2. He only ended up playing baseball because his tae kwon do progress was stymied by his young age. Charlie was a second-degree black belt in tae kwon do (and teaching classes) by the age of 12– but when he learned he couldn’t progress to a third-degree until the age of 16, he started playing baseball instead.

3. Charlie thinks baseball is “a little boring” to watch and he doesn’t “really keep up with all the baseball numbers”. He prefers to watch football, his favorite sport. His team? The 49ers, of course… like every good kid from Northern California.

4. Pirates-era Tim Wakefield was his inspiration to become a knuckleballer. He was fascinated when he saw Wake throwing in the playoffs for the Pirates, and started playing around throwing the pitch when he was 11. He didn’t actually throw the knuckleball in a game setting until 6 years ago – because (according to Charlie), “All of my coaches growing up said it was stupid and I shouldn’t mess around with it.”

5. You can thank Luis Tiant for Charlie’s baseball career. Tiant spotted Zink playing junior college-level ball for Sacramento City, and brought him to Savannah College of Art and Design (the Division III school where Tiant was head coach). A few clubs took a glance at Charlie and weren’t interested, but Tiant got Charlie a tryout in Fort Myers for the Red Sox. As Charlie tells the story:

[Tiant] asked me if I’d come try out. I decided to give it a shot; I hadn’t picked up a ball in eight months, but I said, “Yeah, I’ll come try out, whatever.”

I went down there and threw. I couldn’t have been throwing more than 85; my arm was weak, but one guy gave me a call two weeks later and asked me to come back down. I told them I had to wait for finals, and once finals ended I came back down. There was a week and a half left of spring training, and they threw me right in the mix. I did really well, and they signed me when camp ended, on April 1st.

They told me they signed me just because Luis had been my reference. He told them I was a good pitcher, and they trusted Luis’s opinion, so they gave me a shot, and that’s how I got my start there. I would have never gotten picked up if I hadn’t known Luis. I tried out for a few other teams–Blue Jays, Braves, Rangers–and they didn’t like me. The Red Sox only gave me a shot because Tiant told them to.

6. What would Charlie be doing if he wasn’t a ballplayer? Chances are, he’d be a golf pro. Charlie was shooting under par from the age of 12. In fact, he was on the verge of applying for his pro card onto the tour when Tiant called him and got him in with the Sox in Fort Myers. Charlie said, “I’d rather play baseball than golf any day, but if baseball ended, that’s what I’d probably do: I’d try and go play golf.”

7. Charlie added a changeup to his pitching portfolio this season on the suggestion of PawSox pitching coach Rich Sauveur.

8. The amount of care that Charlie puts into his nails and hands would make Jonathan Papelbon proud. He uses a protective gel on the nail of his index finger, because that one rubs against the ball. He grows the nail on his middle finger long so he can dig it into the ball. He calls it a “one nail and one knuckle” grip, which is what he thought he had seen Wakefield do on television all those years earlier. Wakefield actually uses two fingertips. “It’s really weird,” Zink said. “I haven’t seen anybody else with this grip.”

9. He has Raynaud’s Disease, a vascular condition that causes him to go numb in cold temperatures.

It started my junior year in college. My pinky, my ring finger and my middle finger went numb one day. It moved from there up to my ring finger, middle finger and index finger, and now it’s just my middle and index finger. When it’s below 60, they just go completely numb because my blood vessels shrink up. I’ve been to a bunch of specialists and they don’t know what to do with it. Usually older people get it and it’s in all their fingers and all their toes, but they don’t know why mine is just in two fingers. They think I might have pinched a nerve because the way I used to pitch, I turned my neck. But they said there’s nothing they can do about it. I’m trying to learn to deal with it now, since I’ve never played in cold weather.

10. Manny Delcarmen was Charlie’s former roommate when both guys played for low-A Augusta in 2002. Manny also believes he deserves some credit for Charlie’s skills, mostly because Manny was always begging Charlie to throw more knuckleball pitches.

While Zink’s fastball only touches the low-80s now, he said Zink was a hard-throwing reliever at who reminded him of former Sox farmhand Cla Meredith.

“He was throwing 92 with a nasty changeup,” Delcarmen said. “Luis Tiant was his (college) pitching coach, so he had a real funky delivery and he threw hard.”

He also threw a knuckleball on the side that he occasionally unleashed during games. Whenever Delcarmen charted Zink’s pitches, he’d wiggle his hand toward the mound in a fluttering motion, begging Zink to throw it.

“Once he became a full-time knuckleballer, I couldn’t even play catch with him anymore,” Delcarmen said. “He just kept hitting me so much. I had bruises everywhere.”

Resources: New York Times, Baseball Prospectus, Red Sox Prospects, Providence Journal, Boston Herald, Portland Press-Herald.