It has been a long, wild ride, but it has culminated in this: As of Tuesday morning, R.A. Dickey is the No. 1 pitcher on our Player Rater.

Dickey is in the midst of a truly historic hot spell. He has won each of his past six starts, every one of them a quality start. His ERA during that span is 0.18, his WHIP 0.53. He has 63 strikeouts and only five walks in 48 2/3 innings. And he is the No. 1 player overall -- hitters included -- during that 30-day stretch.

Elias gives us some impressive historical notes about Dickey:

- He is the first pitcher in modern baseball history (since 1900) to pitch back-to-back complete-game one-hitters with at least 10 strikeouts in each.

- He has five straight starts with zero earned runs and at least eight strikeouts, the longest streak in history.

- He is only the fifth pitcher in history to post at least 11 wins, an ERA of 2.50 or better, and at least a 9.00 strikeouts-per-nine innings ratio in his first 14 starts of a season, joining Sandy Koufax (1966), Pedro Martinez (1999), Randy Johnson (2000) and Francisco Liriano (2006).

- He also is one of only four pitchers in modern baseball history to have a streak of seven consecutive starts of at least eight strikeouts and no more than two walks; Koufax (1965), Curt Schilling (1997) and Johnson (2001) are the others.

And here is perhaps the most perplexing fact: R.A. Dickey is a knuckleballer.

Whaaaaaaaaaaaa?!

What Dickey has done is unprecedented. We've seen many dominating pitching stretches in history -- teammate Johan Santana's 13-0, 1.21 ERA and 11.13 K's-per-nine ratio during the second half of 2004 immediately comes to mind -- but historically, no knuckleballer has come quite close to this. When analyzing Dickey this season, one thing has become clear: There isn't a "book" on this guy, and if you think you have one, throw it out. It's a fake.

Dickey currently sports a 9.36 K's-per-nine ratio. That's 11th-best among qualified starters. He has a 4.90 K-to-walk ratio. That's sixth-best. And he has thrown a knuckleball, a pitch renowned for its difficulty to command and control, 86 percent of the time so far this season.

Let's talk knuckleballer history for a moment. While there is no official, 100 percent-complete list of historical knuckleballers -- partly due to the debate as to what percentage of knuckleball use a pitcher needs to qualify as one -- this list, partly cobbled from some of former ESPN colleague Rob Neyer's research, is a pretty comprehensive list of 86 such pitchers. If you've been playing this game for any length of time, you can probably name a good half dozen, maybe more, but among those 86, these are the all-time, single-season, ERA-qualifying (162-plus innings) leaders in those two "command categories":

K's per nine innings ratio

8.13 -- Ken Johnson, 1962
7.90 -- Tim Wakefield, 2001
7.52 -- Wakefield, 2003
7.38 -- Wakefield, 2002
7.14 -- Phil Niekro, 1977
7.03 -- Charlie Hough, 1987

Strikeout to walk ratio
3.87 -- Johnson, 1962
3.39 -- Wilbur Wood, 1971
3.39 -- Niekro, 1969
3.11 -- Niekro, 1968
3.09 -- Niekro, 1972

Those are the only historical instances of a knuckleballer having managed at least seven K's per nine or three K's per walk in a single year, and in Johnson's case, understand that he wasn't nearly as reliant upon the pitch as Dickey is. Johnson threw the knuckler roughly a third of the time. And to put these numbers into perspective, assuming Dickey throws, say, 220 innings, he would need to average 7.14 K's per nine and 3.20 K's per walk from today forward to secure his place as the all-time leader on both of those charts.

History -- or at least statistics printed on a piece of paper or displayed on a screen -- might say that's about right for a Dickey expectation from today forward. Heck, even I have said it, even recently. And I've said it despite having warmed to the right-hander at blazing speed the past several weeks; apparently, I've always been lagging a few steps behind this bandwagon. Thanks to the many New York Mets/Dickey fans, such as reader @zackdanielssr, to prompt me to dig out the microscope for a more meticulous examination of Dickey's prospects moving forward.

Again, throw out that "book" on knuckleballers. Dickey's performance is not only unprecedented, his knuckling style is very likely unprecedented.

As knuckleballers' fortunes hinge primarily upon command and velocity, Dickey's mastery of each makes him special. In the past week, I've watched portions of several of his past six starts and have determined that his strengths are location, ability to throw his knuckler at a high speed, and ability to change speeds.

The stats back this up. It appears that 78 mph is the "breaking point" on Dickey's knuckler, both performance-wise and the fact that he throws almost exactly half of his knuckleballs as fast or faster (51%) than that speed. Here are his knuckleball numbers compared to that velocity in 2012:

78 mph or higher: 194 PA-enders, .111 BAA, 40.7 K%, 1.0 BB%, 32 Miss%
77 mph or lower: 137 PA-enders, .283 BAA, 12.4 K%, 10.9 BB%, 23 Miss%

Here are Dickey's splits during his Mets career (2010-12):

78 mph or higher: 778 PA-enders, .175 BAA, 29.7 K%, 1.4 BB%, 24 Miss%
77 mph or lower: 766 PA-enders, .285 BAA, 9.8 K%, 7.2 BB%, 21 Miss%

Those numbers illustrate Dickey's superb control, as well as the unhittable nature of his knuckleball at a high speed. Consider that in 2012, he has thrown his knuckler at 80 mph or faster 17 percent of the time, and it's his strikeout pitch, thrown 40 percent of the time at 80 mph or higher with two strikes. Hitting Dickey's "fast knuckler" is the effective equivalent of trying to hit a peach slathered with butter.

Unfortunately -- and this addresses the absence of a "book" on knuckleballers -- there aren't any velocity-based comparison points we can make with Dickey. Tim Wakefield is the most notable full-time knuckleballer during years for which there are velocity readings, but he averaged 65.5 mph with the pitch and never topped 74.7 mph since 2009, the first year for which we have pitch data, and per FanGraphs, he averaged 66.5 mph with the pitch since 2002, the first season for which they have velocity readings. We can assume that no knuckleballer threw the pitch harder than Dickey does, because it seems unlikely that anyone could have as frequently as him, but there are no data points to confirm that.

Addressing Dickey's ability to change speeds, consider this: Though he has thrown only four percent of his knucklers during his Mets career at 70 mph or slower, he has limited opponents to a .159 batting average, has a 27.7 percent K rate, 2.1 percent walk rate and 21 percent miss rate on those pitches. Dickey is...