The retirement of Tim Wakefield gives us a chance to revisit the New Yorker's 2004 take on the fluttery magic of the knuckleball.

The knuckleball—also known as the knuckler, the fingernail ball, the fingertip ball, the flutterball, the floater, the dancer, the bug, the butterfly ball, the moth, the bubble, the ghostball, the horseshoe, the dry spitter, and, curiously, the spinner—has been around, in one form or another, for nearly as long as professional baseball itself ...