When I was a kid growing up in the baseball purgatory that was Cleveland, I tinkered with a knuckleball.

I didn’t throw hard and my curveball was more likely to hit the batter in the small of the back than break over the inside corner of the plate.

I desperately wanted to be a pitcher in Little League and I thought, “Why not the ol’ knuckler?”

Soon I found out throwing a knuckleball is hard. Very hard. I checked out books from the library to learn how to throw the thing and practiced by toss a baseball off the door of our shed.

Nothing.

Every now and then I’d float up a good one. But more often than not, it was like I was placing the baseball on a tee for the opponent to whack into the next county.

I admired knuckleball artists. Still do.

The Indians had two of them in their starting rotation when I was growing up: Phil Niekro and Tom Candiotti. There were others dotting major league rosters at the time, most notably Charlie Hough and Joe Niekro.

Before that, knuckleball pitchers were popular. The Washington Senators had four of them on their staff in the mid-40s. Hoyt Wilhelm used the pitch to flutter his way into the Hall of Fame.

The 1990s were a different story. Tim Wakefield pulled his fledgling baseball career as a first baseman out of the gutter by learning the pitch and ended up winning 200 games. Steve Sparks was another guy who had some success with the flutter ball in the 90s, but he tailed away, much like the knuckler itself.

The knuckleball has slowly been going the way of complete games and 200-inning pitchers.

Just when you think all hope is lost for the knuckleball, along comes R.A. Dickey.

It’s not as if Dickey has just arrived. For the better part of seven seasons, he struggled to find a spot on pitching staffs from Texas to Seattle to Minnesota.

Then something clicked with the New York Mets.

Dickey has used the pitch to notch back-to-back 1-hit shutouts. He’s 11-1 with a 2.00 ERA. He has made 103 hitters look like fools flailing away at his knuckler and he has walked only 21 in 99 innings.

He hasn’t given up a run since mid-May.

He’s reinventing the knuckler.

Dickey doesn’t just soft toss the pitch to the plate. He chucks it up there at 80 mph.

It acts more like a hummingbird than a butterfly.

Sports fans love the unique. Dickey certainly qualifies.

Hopefully that will open things up for aspiring knuckleball artists.

Perhaps others who dabble with the pitch will be able to take it to the majors and make an impact like Dickey is in 2012.

They say sports is cyclical. Maybe — just maybe — we are witnessing the beginning of the knuckleball rebirth.

Mike Kilroy is a staff writer for the Butler Eagle.