Movie About Sports Looks More Interesting Than Most Movies About Sports

I sat behind the plate at Fenway Park in Boston a few years back and watched Tim Wakefield pitch a game with his knuckleball, and man, the way the ball dove and rose and fluttered and swerved — sometimes, clearly to a distance of feet — it was about the closest thing to magic I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. The science is hard to understand. (For me at least.) It has to do with air currents and friction created by the seams of the ball and turbulence and vortices. Anyway, Awl pal Christine Schomer helped make what looks to be an excellent documentary about the subject. And here’s hoping that knuckleballer R.A. Dickey (who another Awl pal, David Roth, describes as speaking like “a character in a Charles Portis novel”) wins the National League Cy Young award this year.