For anyone interested:
The famous Knuckleball pitcher Tim Wakefield of the Sox recently passed from cancer last year, his wife Stacy also passed from cancer only 5 months after.
The Impossible Career Of Tim Wakefield - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpZfKftTEIQ
Tim was part of the 2004 Red Sox that broke the 86 year long curse. The entire series is on Youtube and possibly one of the greatest baseball series of all time. Here's game one, enjoy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rLWrD1ipi0
https://www.mlb.com/video/red-sox-pay-tribute-to-tim-wakefie...
Something I liked - "If you laugh, you think, and you cry that's a full day."
A guy threw a knuckle in tribute to Wakefield as an opening pitch this season, sorry I can't find it tonight but if someone could find it that'd be nice. Good on 'em.
Takeaway is roughly: those observing the pitch expect it to be moving in one direction, and it often is moving in a different direction, giving the illusion of a sudden change of direction. So the knuckleball is unpredictable, just not in the way that it appears to be.
The cloud of "where it ends up" is not important for establishing the difficulty of hitting a pitch. What matters is the correlation between the initial trajectory and its final location. This is the information that the batter has.
I'd expect the change-up to be an equally-as-interesting subject for a physics analysis.
I don’t know how to reconcile that with the video evidence:
https://images.app.goo.gl/CtJmayDTwVrz9xwi6