Why MLBs moneyballers aim to resurrect the games trickiest pitch

This week the Tampa Bay Rays buried the Yankees’ season.Along the way they may have resurrected the bunt.The bunt is classic inside baseball: The batter lightly taps the ball instead of trying to whack it out of the park.Its several varieties — drag, sacrifice, suicide squeeze — once took up a chapter in every team’s playbook.Then came sabermetrics, and math whizzes crunched the numbers.They declared the bunt a waste of a perfectly good plate appearance.Maybe the math guys overcorrected.This year the Rays, a small-market franchise that can’t spend lavishly on power hitters, bunted 134 times — more than any team in a decade — en route to the best record in the American League.“It’s about continuing to understand what influences winning,” Rays front-office man Erik Neander explained: Bunts have become so rare in the “Moneyball” age that opposing fielders don’t know how to handle them.Given the Rays’ success with an old-school tactic, what’s on deck as baseball’s next big comeback?My money’s on the knuckleball — the sport’s most storied pitch.In an era where conventional pitchers chase more and more velocity and higher spin rates, the knuckleball travels slowly and — this is the key — hardly rotates.That makes it dart around chaotically for reasons baseball’s best scientists can’t quite explain.“There’s just too much going on with that pitch.Any attempt to understand it is almost pointless,” said Barton Smith, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Utah State University — the guy who may know more about why pitches move than anyone on Earth.Yet the knuckleball has all but disappeared from MLB.

Why?Don’t blame sabermetrics, said Christopher Long, a Rutgers-trained mathematician who worked for a number of MLB teams after “Moneyball,” Michael Lewis’ 2003 book on statistics-driven management, upended the game.“My job was all about getting an edge.Identifying better players, cheaper players or...