More Than Just A Knuckleball

Sports Illustrated:

It tacks in inexplicable and unpredictable ways. It sometimes resists the desired path, no matter how much control you try to exert. When you think you've solved the mystery and discerned the secrets, it confounds you anew. When hope diminishes, it has a way of cooperating and breaking right.
Yes, life mirrors the knuckleball, just as the knuckleball mirrors life. R.A. Dickey is singularly well-suited to appreciate this. The Mets righthander is the lone knuckleballer in a major league rotation. He is the keeper of the flame carried by the Niekro brothers, Charlie Hough and Tim Wakefield -- inasmuch as there's anything flaming about a pitch that dips and dives and dances and usually travels slower than the speed of interstate traffic. Plus, at age 37, Dickey has done his share of living, his tortuous -- and sometimes torturous -- path to the majors marked by gratifying highs, and lows that had him pondering suicide.
Beyond that, Dickey is literate and literary in the extreme. His clubhouse locker doubles as a library, filled at any given moment with anything from C.S. Lewis to Tolkien to, as was the case last week at the Mets' camp in Port St. Lucie, Fla., F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned. He is the rare ballplayer whose interviews are parsed on the vocabulary.com blog, whose voice gets thick with emotion when he discusses his love of words. With a full beard and an unruly head of hair, Dickey even looks like an English professor. "Writing has enriched me in so many ways," Dickey says, "and one of those is that I really tend to think in metaphor."

Dickey's memoir comes out this week.  He's getting headlines because he confesses that he was sexually abused by his babysitter as a child.  He's also a pretty damn good pitcher.  This marks two years in a row a knuckleballer releases a book, and hopefully Dickey won't follow Tim Wakefield in retiring the season his book comes out.