Knuckleballer R. A. Dickey Wins National League Cy Young Award The 101 previous winners of baseball's Cy Young Award make for a fascinating pitching tableau. There are starters and relievers. There are masters of the curveball, the sinker, the slider and the splitter. There are fierce intimidators, steroid cheats, convicted felons, a rock star, an underwear model, a rookie and a spitballer. Now the team picture includes a knuckleballer, R. A. Dickey of the Mets, who won the National League award on Wednesday. Dickey went 20-6 with a 2.73 earned run average, leading the league in innings (2332/3), strikeouts (230), complete games (5) and shutouts (3). The numbers were so convincing that Dickey was the runaway winner, despite a pitch often dismissed as a last-chance trick for has-beens who failed the conventional way. Unlike a fastball, which conjures images of fire and smoke, the dipping, floating knuckleball compares to the flitting of a butterfly. No pitch produces quite as much embarrassment - for the hitter who flails in vain, or the pitcher who leaves it flat in the strike zone, with the speed of a high school pitch, and watches it soar off the bat. Dickey, 38, adds a twist to his knuckleball, throwing it about 77 miles per hour, or 10 m.p.h. harder than the retired Tim Wakefield, the last pitcher before Dickey to rely on it. But it is still slow, even at that speed, and he turned to the pitch as most practitioners do, to save a fading career. By mastering it so completely, Dickey collected 27 of 32 first-place votes from baseball writers, easily beating the Los Angeles Dodgers" Clayton Kershaw, who won it last season. Dickey and his knuckler now join the ranks of Sandy Koufax, Steve Carlton, Randy Johnson and other pitching stars, like Tom Seaver and Dwight Gooden, the only two Mets to win before him. On a conference call with reporters, Dickey credited voters for respecting the manner in which he dominated. "They didn't see the knuckleball as a trick pitch; they didn't see it as some kind of illegitimate weapon that isn't worthy," Dickey said. They saw it as a legitimate weapon that has one purpose, and that's to get big-league hitters out consistently. And they respected that. They had the imagination to see beyond some of, maybe, the old-school mentalities of what the knuckleball used to look like. A flop as a first-round pick with the Texas Rangers, Dickey started his experiment with the no-spin flutterball in 2006. He allowed six home runs in his first game as a knuckleballer, and never pitched for Texas again. But Dickey persisted, passing through three more organizations before the Mets gave him a sustained opportunity in 2010. His success has coincided with a personal metamorphosis. He wrote a revealing and confessional autobiography. He climbed Mount Kilimanjaro last winter and blogged about it for The New York Times. His locker at Citi Field is a repository for "Star Wars" memorabilia sent to him by fans, who may not have the chance to salute him next season. Dickey's breakout performance comes at a sensitive time for the Mets. Even as they celebrate the franchise's first Cy Young Award since Gooden's in 1985, they are grappling with Dickey's future. Should they extend his contract or trade him - while his value is high - to save money and rebuild a team that has staggered through four consecutive losing seasons? "I feel good about being a Met, I do," Dickey said. That might be my youthful optimism, because I also understand as a veteran that it's part of the business of baseball. But I'm fairly confident. I can't put a percentage on it, like one out of 100, but I can certainly say that I believe the Mets are going to be a lot better and I want to be part of the solution. Hopefully, we'll be able to work something out where I can stay here, and I wouldn't mind finishing my career here. Dickey is signed for 2013 for $5 million, a bargain for a Cy Young Award winner, and said he feels fine after surgery to repair an abdominal muscle tear. Other Cy Young winners have used the knuckleball occasionally, like Early Wynn, who threw up to 20 per game on his way to the 1959 Cy Young Award. But Dickey belongs to the small fraternity of pure knuckleballers, throwing the pitch more than 85 percent of the time. Even the knuckleballers in the Hall of Fame, Phil Niekro and Hoyt Wilhelm, never captured the award. "It is most, most well-deserved," said Niekro, a mentor for Dickey, in a statement released by the Hall of Fame, "and I'm super proud of him." Niekro, of the Atlanta Braves, was the N.L. runner-up to Seaver in 1969. Three years later, Wilbur Wood of the Chicago White Sox finished second in the American League to Gaylord Perry. But knuckleballers are so rare that no pitcher before Dickey had shown up in the Cy Young voting since 1995, when Wakefield placed third in the A.L. for Boston. Within an hour of winning the award, Dickey said, he had spoken to or gotten text messages from Niekro, Wakefield and another former All-Star knuckleballer, Charlie Hough. "This is a victory for all of us," Dickey said. This year's A.L. winner, David Price of the Tampa Bay Rays, is a Tennessee native, like Dickey, and the pitchers share an agent. But Price, according to Fangraphs, throws the hardest average fastball of any major league starter, at 95.5 m.p.h. The pitchers faced each other once this season, on June 13 at Tampa Bay. Price allowed seven runs in five innings. Dickey went the distance, striking out 12, walking none and allowing one infield single. He did allow an unearned run, mostly because a runner advanced twice on passed balls. That is a natural hazard of the game's most unpredictable pitch, one that Dickey tamed with historic precision.