This week the Tampa Bay Rays buried the Yankees’ season.

Along the way they may have resurrected the bunt.

The bunt is classic inside baseball: The batter lightly taps the ball instead of trying to whack it out of the park.

Its several varieties — drag, sacrifice, suicide squeeze — once took up a chapter in every team’s playbook.

Then came sabermetrics, and math whizzes crunched the numbers.

They declared the bunt a waste of a perfectly good plate appearance.

Maybe the math guys overcorrected.

This year the Rays, a small-market franchise that can’t spend lavishly on power hitters, bunted 134 times — more than any team in a decade — en route to the best record in the American League.

“It’s about continuing to understand what influences winning,” Rays front-office man Erik Neander explained: Bunts have become so rare in the “Moneyball” age that opposing fielders don’t know how to handle them.

Given the Rays’ success with an old-school tactic, what’s on deck as baseball’s next big comeback?

My money’s on the knuckleball — the sport’s most storied pitch.

In an era where conventional pitchers chase more and more velocity and higher spin rates, the knuckleball travels slowly and — this is the key — hardly rotates.

That makes it dart around chaotically for reasons baseball’s best scientists can’t quite explain.

“There’s just too much going on with that pitch. Any attempt to understand it is almost pointless,” said Barton Smith, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Utah State University — the guy who may know more about why pitches move than anyone on Earth.

Yet the knuckleball has all but disappeared from MLB. Why?

Don’t blame sabermetrics, said Christopher Long, a Rutgers-trained mathematician who worked for a number of MLB teams after “Moneyball,” Michael Lewis’ 2003 book on statistics-driven management, upended the game.

“My job was all about getting an edge. Identifying better players, cheaper players or younger players,” he told me.

“I was dead certain that one way to get an advantage was to build a pipeline of knuckleball pitchers.”

Long knew that slow-throwing knuckleballers can pitch as much as they want, and that great ones like Phil Niekro and Hoyt Wilhelm won hundreds of games while competing into their late 40s.

He assumed it would be easy to develop new knuckleballers.

“A conventional major league pitcher needs a really hard fastball, plus multiple other pitches with different kinds of spin. He must be able to hit different spots around the strike zone. That’s a tall order,” he said.

“A knuckleballer throws the same pitch the same way to the same spot every time. It seems a much smaller ask.”

It wasn’t: Turns out the knuckleball is just too hard to control, and if you throw one that spins, the batter sends it into orbit.

And retraining a conventional pro pitcher to throw strikes without spin is a large ask indeed.

High-tech pitch-design labs — which teach pitchers nasty new innovations like the sweeper and the kick-change — haven’t been able to create a knuckleballer, either.

Wilhelm may have known the secret.

The Hall of Famer once advised his White Sox teammate Wilbur Wood, who was struggling as fastball-curveball pitcher, “Don’t try throwing the knuckleball now unless you threw it as a kid.”

Wood’s father had indeed taught him the pitch when he was 12 — and Wood went on to become a knuckleball great.

Unlike the bunt, the knuckleball takes years to truly master.

“There are so many throws and so many tweaks you have to make,” said Tom Candiotti, who won 151 MLB games with the knuckleball he learned at the age of 10.

“And even if you find someone with a real good one, when he gets on a mound, with a batter and an umpire and 50,000 fans, that knuckleball can turn into a spinner real quick.”

As Eddie Gamboa, whose MLB knuckleball career lasted 13 innings for the Rays in 2016, put it, “The knuckleball is the crazy ex-girlfriend who makes you pull your hair out.”

But teams are taking chances on knuckleballers they find in the wild.

In 2023, the Twins gave UConn pitcher Devin Kirby-Williams a shot — though he’d thrown only three knucks in college.

He’s bouncing around the minors hoping for his big break.

In 2025 the Detroit Tigers signed Kenny Serwa after his knuckleball video went viral.

This summer, when the Padres cut Matt Waldron, MLB’s only knuckleballer, he caught on with the Blue Jays and then the Nationals.

So the knuck’s not dead yet.

And odds are the moneyballers who brought back the bunt will go to bat for it.

Brian Gaffney is the author of “School of Hard Knucks: My Three Sons and Baseball’s Wildest Pitch.”