One of the biggest stories of the 2012 baseball season is the rise of 37-year-old knuckleballer R.A. Dickey as an elite pitcher.

Dickey improved to 11-1 with Monday night's 5-0 win against the Baltimore Orioles - his second consecutive one-hitter. As it happens, the Orioles are managed by the guy who was one of Dickey's biggest supporters as a young first-round draft pick: Buck Shpwalter, the former Mississippi State All-American, who was the Texas Rangers manager in those days. ESPN tells that story here.

I remembered Dickey as a great pitcher at Tennessee - 38-10 in three seasons - but his "overnight " success in New York seemed to have come out of left field. Even now, he's made more minor-league starts (169) than he has in the bigs (120) and he's only above .500 for his major league career (52-51) because of this year's crazy start.

On top of that, he's thriving this year after writing a frank autobiography that details his childhood sexual abuse and the importance of his faith in helping him move past that. The whole thing is quite a story.