Toronto Students Create Knuckleball Pitching Machine Inspired by R.A. Dickey

The knuckleball is a strange bird.

It wobbles and dives—or sails straight. Or rises. Or morphs into a leprechaun and laughs as it dances over the plate.

It's an imprecise pitch needing very specific requirements in order to occur, and anyone who masters it is basically a witch doctor.

With this in mind, a group of engineering students at the University of Toronto appear to have delved deeply into the blood magic of the knuckleball. After much tinkering, the quartet has manufactured the first machine capable of conjuring the voodoo necessary to reliably sling baseball's most intriguing craft brew pitch.

The Toronto Star's Brendan Kennedy brings news of the invention. 

Toronto University student Alex Gordon told Kennedy the project began with the intent of creating something that could throw the first predictable knuckleball—one that knuckled the same way every time.

"The idea was if we could control everything maybe we could get a knuckleball to be the exact same every time," Gordon said.

Alas, not even the gasping edge of modern technology could tame the knuckler.

"The amount of control you need to throw the same knuckleball every time is unbelievable," said Martin Cote, another student involved in the project.

"They mystery of the knuckleball prevailed over our efforts," said professor David Sinton, who cribbed the idea.

So there you have it. Knuckleballs. The Bermuda Triangle. Where your girlfriend actually wants to go for dinner. These are mysteries modern science can't solve and may never.

I, for one, find comfort in that. A world with predictable knuckleballs is a world without magic and randomness and $10 bills in the dryer. And I don't want to live in that world.

Dan is on Twitter. He treats the knuckleball like any other arcane art and leaves it to its devices.