There’s a big difference between throwing a fastball and throwing a knuckleball.

With the fastball, you don’t want to throw the ball to the catcher's mitt. You want to throw the ball through the catcher's mitt.

So when you're throwing a fastball, it's a maximum-effort pitch. You give it all you've got to not only hit the glove, but go through the glove.

The feel of throwing a fastball is much different than throwing a knuckleball. It’s a feeling of power, of a weight lifter exhaling when he's in the toughest part of his motion. That's the feel of a fastball, you know, just exploding off of the rubber, doing everything as hard as you can.

Now when you're throwing a knuckleball, you're basically throwing to the glove. You're not trying to overthrow the ball, you're not trying to throw it as hard as you can. Throwing a knuckleball is like an overexaggerated game of catch. It's like playing catch-plus.

With a knuckleball, you can almost talk to yourself when you're going through your delivery, through your windup. You're saying to yourself, "Okay, the leg’s coming up, the arm’s coming back, the fingers are on the ball, take it to the zone." You can do this because everything is done without much effort. You’re not forcing it. It’s so natural. It’s almost like playing catch.

The first thing that’s unique about throwing a knuckleball is the signal from the catcher. For the usual pitches—fastball, slider, curve, change—the catcher puts down one, two, three, or four fingers. For the knuckleball, when I look in to get the signal, he just wiggles his hand.

Every knuckleball pitcher grips the ball in a different way. For me, once I’ve gotten the signal for a knuckleball, I grip the ball in my glove by digging the fingernails of my index finger, middle finger, and a little bit of my ring finger into the cowhide of the ball, not into the seams. Also, the ball is far back in the palm of my hand so I can put a lot of pressure on it.

As I start my windup, I’m visualizing a triangle peaking at the catcher's mask, down to both of his knees. And when I throw a knuckleball at the catcher's mask, it's usually going to go down-left or it's going to go down-right or it's going to go straight down. So that's the triangle that I'm visualizing when I'm throwing a knuckleball.

So when I’m in my windup, I'm concentrating on the catcher's mask. That's my focal point when I'm throwing.

As I go throw my motion and deliver the pitch, I'm not exploding off of my back leg like a fastball, like a maximum-effort guy. I'm concentrating on the feel of the fingernails on the ball.

When it's time for the release, my wrist tightens but I don't throw the ball. It's more like a motion where I kind of thrust the ball, push it out. My wrist is taut and I’m trying to take the spin off of the ball. That's your goal as a knuckleball pitcher—to get the ball with little or no rotation heading to that triangle.

Tom Candiotti is a knuckleball pitcher for the Oakland Athletics.