The Jedi Council

RA Dickey talks about the knuckleball pitchers' fraternity:

A knuckleball is confounding, both going and coming, because it's thrown with almost no rotation. The baseball's laces interact with the air, turning it into a Godard jump-cut of pitches.
Currently, Dickey is the only regular knuckleballer in the major leagues. It's a hard pitch to learn, but there is a fraternity of knuckleballers who can offer advice.
"The people that poured into me and lent me their wisdom and acumen were Tim Wakefield, Charlie Hough and Phil Niekro," Dickey says. "And so speaking from that experience I can tell you that there's nobody on this Earth that knows more about it than they do."
Dickey calls those former major leaguers "The Jedi Council." In addition to throwing a quirky pitch, he loves Star Wars and The Lord Of The Rings. He names his bats after swords in Beowulf, and the music he has cued up over the stadium PA when he walks up to bat is the theme to Game Of Thrones.
There's also Dickey's literary side. His revelatory memoir, Wherever I Wind Up, is clearly written by a lover of language who entertained thoughts of becoming an English professor.
And then there's the side of Dickey that wants to teach others his recondite skill. Though Cy Young award winner Frank Viola is the pitching coach of the Savannah Sand Gnats, the knuckleball is as baffling to him as string theory. But Dickey eagerly passed along what he knew to minor leaguer Frank Viola III." He's amazing," the elder Viola says. "R.A. invited him to the games he pitched, invited him to his side sessions to watch; they planned on having Frankie tape a couple workouts and then sending it to New York and having R.A. look at it to critique it and get back to him. I mean he just shared his wealth with Frankie."

It is nice that knuckleballers stick together.  Maybe they can console him on getting screwed out of starting the All-Star Game.