For almost 20 years, R.A. Dickey slaved away trying to perfect his pitch.
The baseball player went in and out of the major leagues, playing for the Texas Rangers, the Milwaukee Brewers, the Minnesota Twins, the Seattle Mariners, the New York Mets, and now the Toronto Blue Jays.
But this year, everything finally fell into place for the 38-year-old pitcher. Dickey finally got so good at mastering the knuckleball that he basically became unhittable.
Today, Dickey is the only major league player who uses the knuckleball as his primary pitch and he's become so good at it that he won the National League Cy Young Award.
Dickey is now at the top of his game, but what he went through to get to there is the definition of an ultimate underdog story.
Dickey was sexually abused as a child.
Dickey recently opened up about his childhood abuse in a memoir called "Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball."
He wrote that he was abused on several occasions by different individuals when he was eight years old in Tennessee. The memories of those incidents have plagued him his entire life.
He sought refuge in sports, playing quarterback and pitching for his high school teams. He earned a scholarship to play baseball at the University of Tennessee.
He was drafted to the major leagues—only to have his signing bonus slashed after doctors discovered a flaw.
In 1996, Dickey graduated from Tennessee as an All-American and was drafted by the Texas Rangers in the first round.
But when a physician from the Texas Rangers discovered that Dickey does not have an ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow—his pitching arm—the Rangers dropped his signing bonus from $810,000 to $75,000.
Dickey started for the Rangers for the first time in 2001.
He pitched just 266 innings for the Rangers between 2001 and 2006.
However, he pitched in the minor leagues every year from 1997 to 2010, with five stints in AAA Oklahoma City and AA Frisco in between.
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