Knuckleballs Come To The Big Screen

Tim Wakefield and R.A. Dickey are featured in an upcoming documentary:

Tribeca: Tell us a little about Knuckleball! How do you describe the movie in your own words?

Ricki Stern: Our society today is obsessed with youth, speed, and power, and the knuckleball is a pitch that doesn’t require strength or power. It requires craftsmanship and patience, and it gets better over time, and it gets better with age, so it allows players to age into baseball.
Knuckleball! looks at how this pitch is a symbol for where we are today in our lives. By focusing on Tim Wakefield and R.A. Dickey—the only knuckleballers playing in Major League Baseball—through the 2011 season, and the small fraternity of men who have thrown the pitch over the years, we appreciate how the knuckleball embodies this somewhat nostalgic sense of hard work and patience and perseverance. And these guys’ personal stories are really about doing what it takes to stay in the major leagues. They are survivor stories.
Annie Sundberg: Knuckleball! is a love letter to baseball, seen through this particularly quirky, magical pitch that doesn’t do what anyone ever expects it to do. It’s also a film that really looks at this fraternity of men, some of whom have embraced this pitch because it was their only chance, or their second chance, or their last hope to stay in the game, because they weren’t quite good enough as a position player or a power hitter or a fastball pitcher. They had one last chance to pick something up that would keep them viable. Each pitcher talks in certain ways about coming to peace with the pitch—making a full commitment to something that is incredibly fickle and very difficult to master.
As we cut the film, we realized there are so many themes that are relevant to today’s economy, and what people are feeling as they are reinventing their own lives, trying to take a sense of pride in doing things a little bit differently, not necessarily always getting the expected outcomes, and finding some peace with that.

Dickey was also interviewed on Fresh Air:

"A knuckleball is like trying to hit a butterfly in a typhoon," he explains to Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "It shakes side to side; it may go straight left on one pitch. It might go straight down to a right-hander on another pitch. It may stay on the very same plane on one pitch. The thing that makes a knuckleball effective is that you cannot predict which way the ball is going to move, which makes it an extremely hard pitch to hit."
Dickey starts by positioning his knuckleball slightly above the catcher's helmet, gripping the ball with his pointer and middle fingers. He digs his nails into the horseshoe and his fingers into the leather underneath. After stabilizing the ball with his thumb, he releases the pitch and hopes for the best.
"If you throw a good one, you make them look foolish," he says. "It certainly didn't start that way. I was all over the place early on in my career as a knuckleballer, and would have games where I'd walk five or six guys and have four or five wild pitches. ... It's a very unique, interesting pitch. It can be really ugly when it's ugly, but when it's on, it's fantastic."

 I used a similar grip, but my ring finger was closer to the other two.  I also aimed for the batter's rib cage and let it fly.

Anybody who can't appreciate the knuckleball has no soul.  I'm looking at you CubsDad.