An erratic knuckleball pitch is crazy. Just what can a toss do to a ball? You can see in the GIF above how it has been colored to highlight its almost total lack of spin.



Ivan R. Dee provides a good explanation of knuckleball dynamics in chapter 1 of The Knucklebook:
In the action of the knuckleball... some stitches are moving toward the flow of air in the front, and others are moving away, at a slow speed. The stitches move around the ball in quire a complex curve on a knuckleball, and the ball may rotate at different rates in different ways. This causes the swirls of air to change size and direction, form and disappear, and move location on the ball, thus producing changing locations of low pressure that really can't be predicted. The wake behind a single knuckleball at various points in flight may look like this:
Reuters made a video dissecting the knuckleball with the University of Illinois physics professor Alan Nathan. We embedded it below. Check it out: