Uncovering the Mysteries of the Knuckleball by

T he knuckleball is perhaps the most mysterious of baseball pitches. It is thrown slower than normal pitches, it is barely spinning, and it appears to float to home plate. Its motion seems to be very unpredictable by anyone: the batter, the catcher, and even the pitcher himself. Moreover, there is a common perception that a knuck-leball does not follow a smooth path to home plate, but instead " dances, " " flutters " or " zigs and zags, " with seemingly abrupt changes of direction. It's no wonder that it is so difficult both for the batter to hit and for the pitcher to command. Indeed, very few pitchers in the history of Major League Baseball have had much success mastering the knuckleball. That makes the recent success of R.A. Dickey, winner of the 2012 National League Cy Young Award, all the more impressive. As a result of Dickey's success in the past few years, there has been renewed interest in knuckleballs in the baseball world. Indeed, many recent articles have been written in both the mainstream media and the blogosphere attempting to answer the question: What makes an effective knuckleball? Moreover, Dickey's success has also driven new efforts to train knuckleball pitchers early in their careers. One such effort is the International Knuckleball Academy, a training ground based in Vero Beach, Fla., where young pitchers can learn to master the craft of knuckleball pitching. The ultimate goal is to bring knuckleball pitching into the mainstream of baseball. It is perhaps a very fortunate accident of nature that Dickey's success with the knuckleball has occurred during an era in which pitch-tracking technologies have revolutionized our ability to analyze pitching. These technologies, PITCHf/x and TrackMan, allow an analysis of the trajectories of all pitches, whether knuckleball or otherwise, with unprecedented precision. As a result, we are now able to quantify both the magnitude and the direction of knuckleball movement, to compare it to that of ordinary pitches, and to investigate its erratic behavior. These technologies also allow us to investigate more detailed aspects of the trajectory, allowing us to quantify the extent to which the common " zigzag " perception is supported by the data. A parallel development has been wind-tunnel experiments to investigate the aerodynamic forces on a knuckleball and how they depend on the seam orientation. Taken together, the trajectories and the forces are leading to a better …