Knuckleball!

Maybe that's romanticizing things, but baseball wouldn't be half as beautiful without its mythology.

The movie's a must for baseball fans in general and Red Sox fans in particular - if nothing else, it will help remove the battery-acid taste of the season now stumbling to a close.

Immediately leaps near the top of the list of greatest baseball documentaries.

Some of Knuckleball!'s best scenes show Dickey and Wakefield hanging out with Hough and Phil Niekro (the latter the rare knuckleballer who threw the pitch his whole career rather than turning to it out of desperation), talking about the mechanics and the mojo of the knuckler.

Knuckleball! looks and feels like a standard ESPN documentary, slickly packaged and a little bloodless, and Stern and Sundberg lean a little heavily on music to goose up the excitement.

Though not novel enough to attract non-devotees of America's Pastime, the film should please fans on the small screen.

Viewers who can't get enough of ESPN's "30 for 30" docs will lap up this dual portrait.