An alert reader points me to this charming New Yorker article on the knuckleball, focusing on Tim Wakefield and Red Sox prospect Charlie Zink (given the Bill James influence on the organization, it's unsurprising that there's a pro-knuckleball and pro-sidearm bias at work in Boston; I'm a big fan myself). I hadn't known that Toad Ramsey was considered the primeval knuckleballer.

This anecdote about Zink was amusing:

“My first double-A game, I was pitching in Binghamton against the Mets,” he said. “And the second hitter I faced pulled a rib-cage muscle from swinging so hard. He had to get taken out of the game. I mean, that was one of the funniest things I’ve seen.”