“It doesn’t have as much time to flutter out of the zone,” Dickey says of his knuckleball. Its speed makes it more controllable. Photograph by Dylan Coulter

R. A. Dickey, the reigning National League Cy Young Award winner, sometimes seems like a sports hero dreamed up by a bookworm. He is a knuckleball pitcher, already the most ungainly of athletic specialists, relying on physics to make jocks look foolish. He wears his brown hair shaggy in the back, and has a beard that would please a thru-hiker. In 2011, inspired by Hemingway, he climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro—Kili, he calls it—and blogged about it for the New York Times. (“I take solace at least in the awareness of my own bravado.”) Every celebrity has a charitable cause, but, this past winter, Dickey actually travelled to the red-light district of Mumbai in support of his: curbing sex trafficking in India. He wrote about that for the Daily News: “It made me want to grab every downtrodden person I could find and walk them through the door, into the light and possibility, beyond the vile and violent world they’ve grown so accustomed to.” In spite of his millions, Dickey also professes to love public transportation, which he uses to visit museums in cities like Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., on the days he’s not pitching. “I mean, I figure, why not, you know?” he told me, in a Tennessee drawl. “I love art.” Dickey is impossible not to admire, yet one can’t help but wonder about those who embrace him too readily, now that they’ve seen him self-deprecating with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show.” Are they even baseball fans, or do they just find it comforting to know that not all exceptional athletes are as boring as Derek Jeter or as vain as Alex Rodriguez?

Conspicuous cosmopolitanism can be its own form of vanity, especially in a sport with a culture as lethargic as baseball’s. “Hurry up and wait,” baseball people sometimes joke, about the preponderance of downtime that overwhelms their daily professional lives. Instead of embracing multitasking, the game’s unwritten code seems to frown on it, and makes a virtue of enduring long afternoons between stretching and shagging fly balls with little more than sunflower seeds and headphones as distractions. In a losing clubhouse, at least, extracurricular activity is cause for suspicion, and, shortly before the Mets traded Dickey, last December, a column appeared in the Post accusing him of being a glory hound. Dickey was engaged in negotiations about his contract with the club. He was due to be paid five million dollars in 2013—good money, to be sure, but a pittance for a twenty-game winner—and his agent was seeking an extension, and a raise, to capitalize on his client’s newfound status, at age thirty-eight, as one of the game’s élite players. The column’s author, Ken Davidoff, mocked Dickey’s infatuation with his own “narrative,” and accused him of being needy—“a handful”—and unloved by his less worldly teammates.

The precipitating event for this zinger was a holiday party that the team had organized, at Citi Field, to benefit victims of Hurricane Sandy. Whether or not Dickey was admired by his peers, he was, after three seasons on the roster, undeniably popular among Mets fans, a lone bright spot in the grim years that followed the near-bankrupting of the franchise owing to the owner’s investments with Bernie Madoff. Dickey was asked to fly up from his home, in Nashville, to attend the party, playing the part of an elf. (Inevitably, a knuckleballer, even one who stands six feet two and weighs two hundred and fifteen pounds, would be cast as an elf.) There, also inevitably, reporters asked him about the status of his contract talks, and he took the opportunity to plead his case: he was old, yes, but well within a knuckleballer’s prime, and a bargain at a wage that was only slightly greater than the league average. “I feel like we’re asking for even less than what is fair,” Dickey said. “When people say, ‘It’s business, it’s not personal,’ that just means it’s not personal for them.” To Davidoff, at the Post, this was Dickey showing his “true character,” putting his own feelings above the mission of the team. The headline—“AMAZIN’S WON’T KNUCKLE UNDER DICKEY’S LAUGHABLE THREATS TO LEAVE”—gave the impression that the column’s author was serving as a mouthpiece for management, which appeared to be more interested in rebuilding for the future. Sure enough, in a matter of days, the Mets had found Dickey a new home, in Toronto.

“My first thought in my heart was: You need to apologize, R.A., for the place that you did that,” Dickey told me, the day after he’d passed his Blue Jays physical—“the day after all this crap,” as he put it, referring to the fallout from the Post column, and what he perceived as a hurtful smear campaign by the Mets, to placate a frustrated fan base. “Because I did it at a holiday party that was there to celebrate kids who had been displaced from Hurricane Sandy.”

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Dickey was back in Nashville, where strangers stopped him occasionally to offer congratulations: the Blue Jays had agreed not only to take on his contract but to extend it by two years and twenty-five million dollars—considerably more money than he had made in his entire career thus far. Yet as he drove around town, fielding calls from his agent (“Hey, did we put the shoe contract to bed?”) and ESPN (“It feels good to be wanted—my narrative is such that that hasn’t always been the case”), I got the sense that Dickey felt he’d earned a Pyrrhic victory. He’d loved his time in New York, a city that had bigger ambitions than baseball. “Seemingly, there was this culture where you could celebrate who you were authentically made to be,” he told me, and referred to the connections and friends he’d been able to make in the publishing and film industries while writing a best-selling book, “Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity, and the Perfect Knuckleball,” and participating in a documentary, “Knuckleball!,” that premièred at Tribeca last spring. “You get to celebrate that part of you that gets overshadowed, because ‘the game should just be the game,’ and you can’t operate outside that—you’re not a human.” He went on, “Now, it may have been more than what some people wanted. As far as the Mets were concerned, I don’t know.”

In “Wherever I Wind Up,” Dickey recounts an anecdote from his first day in the majors, when a veteran pitcher, instead of saying hello, kicked Dickey’s brown leather shoes into the middle of the clubhouse floor: “I guess my shoes were trespassing on his territory by a few inches.” What stuck with him was not just the hostile act but its routine nature—the fact that nobody else seemed to mind, or even notice. “Why do you need to have a certain amount of big-league time or a particular set of credentials to be treated like a human being?” he writes. “Some baseball customs are just plain absurd. And downright dumb.” He had resolved then to treat everyone with dignity, regardless of accomplishments on the field, and the notion that this might have been perceived as arrogance, that he wasn’t a good teammate, now stung. He noted that Ken Davidoff had felt compelled to write a follow-up column, defending his assertion but citing only anonymous sources, and Dickey couldn’t help wondering whose agenda was being served. “Wouldn’t it be great if people said what they really meant?” he asked.