Knuckler

by Tim Wakefield

  In the end, after all, what real difference did two starts make? In a career marked by 380 starts, two games signified a difference of roughly 0.5 percent. Whether Wakefield finished at 380 or 382 games started, the conclusion was the same. His legacy had been forged. He had become, against all odds, part of the background, one of the most reliable and dependable pitchers in baseball history, particularly given that he pitched in a city and for a franchise that frequently devoured its own.

  The Red Sox have been part of the culture in Boston for well over a century, their history defined by everything from pure heartbreak (most frequently) to unfiltered glory (more recently). Consequently, loyal followers of the team have prided themselves a great deal on perseverance, grit, determination. Red Sox fans have long since learned to show up for work the next day, no matter what, and they have memorized all of the clichés that celebrate the most noteworthy achievements. Slow and steady wins the race. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Focus on the journey, not on the destination. In retrospect, no one more perfectly reflected those qualities than Wakefield, who had resurrected his career on more than one occasion and who continued to push forward—methodically, deliberately, undeterred.

  And yet, when it came to instances like this and many others, Wakefield's achievements seemed to materialize out of thin air. Red Sox fans, too, sometimes could be distracted by the flash and glitz of the stars who came and went—men like Clemens, Mo Vaughn, Nomar Garciaparra, Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz. The list went on and on. Even Boston seemed to take Wakefield for granted sometimes, to overlook him entirely, to forget that the most commendable achievements can take place over years and years and years, like a steady, continuous construction project.

  And then, one day, there it was.

  Baseball was something of a religion in Boston, where the Red Sox, especially, were a passion, obsession, addiction, and psychosis all wrapped into one. ("Sometimes I almost wonder if it's a sickness," Wakefield chuckled.) The game was seen as a true test of endurance, where consistency and longevity reflected an ability both to perform and to survive. The Red Sox were dissected and analyzed over and over again, especially by those who deemed themselves to be card-car rying members of Red Sox Nation, a fan base that sometimes seemed as widespread as Islam. All of that should have made Wakefield an obvious focus as he moved toward the end of an accomplished, hardworking career defined by resourcefulness and resiliency, if for no other reason than the fact that Boston was the kind of place where even the smallest sacrifices were recognized by a Red Sox following that typically paid great care to detail.

  With Wakefield, however, his career was greater than any individual year. By the end, a man who rarely received top billing had compiled a résumé that was, in many ways, like no other in team history.

  "I think I've stayed under the radar my whole career. I've never gotten too high or too low—that has helped me [survive]," Wakefield said. "I think there are a couple of reasons I have a connection with people here. I think I bust my butt and never make excuses, and I think they appreciate that. I think I care about the team more than I care about myself. I think I put the team first, and I think that's very much appreciated by the fans because they get that side of it. And I just think, from a philosophy standpoint, outside of baseball, I think they get that side of me, too. I care about the community, like everybody else. I care about the neighborhood. I give my time. I care about the community that I live in and the community that supports us on a daily basis.

  "I've tried to stay humble for as long as I can," he said.

  Indeed, while maintaining a healthy dose of humility—the knuckler, too, will do that to a man—Wakefield had long since decided that he wanted to pitch in no other place than Boston, where he felt the aforementioned connection from the moment he arrived. He saw Boston as far more intimate than many of the bigger America cities—"It's more of a blue-collar, deep-rooted neighborhood that cares about its own," he said—and that was, of course, how he saw himself. The glitz of New York or Los Angeles never really lured him. The idea of a nomadic existence never really appealed. In an age when professional athletes frequently were urged to market their services, to take the best deal available, Wakefield was an absolute anachronism, a man whose values left him terribly out of place. In those instances when free agency beckoned, Wakefield flirted with homier, more comfortable places like Minneapolis—the Minnesota Twins, too, had a family-type environment—than he did with bigger, louder metropolitan areas. He grew up in Melbourne, Florida. He began his career in Pittsburgh. For Wakefield, Boston was the perfect landing spot, a place where the fans took their baseball seriously, but where citizenship mattered. More than anything else in his career, Wakefield had always wanted to belong. As such, he had never really tried to leave Boston, and the Red Sox had never really looked to dispose of him. They had built the kind of gold-watch relationship that had generally ceased to exist elsewhere in baseball.

  "I just don't understand how some people can separate the personal side of it," he said.

  As much as anyone else, Tim Wakefield saw himself as the last of a dying breed.

  By the time Wakefield concluded 2009 and signed what looked to be a final, two-year contract that would keep him with the Red Sox through the 2011 baseball season, he was one of a unique group of major league players—and not solely because he was one of the few in history to have mastered the knuckleball. Wakefield was one of only 19 pitchers in baseball history to have spent at least 15 seasons with a single franchise; along with the incomparable New York Yankees closer Mariano Rivera, he was one of only two active pitchers in the game (and the only starter) to have remained with the same team since the start of the 1995 season. And somewhat incredibly, Wakefield had spent more time with the Red Sox than any pitcher in the history of the organization, an accomplishment that only grew in magnitude when one considered that Wakefield did so while making the journey with his impulsive knuckler, a pitch that frequently operates as if it has a mind of its own and one that had caused him as much angst and anxiety as it gave him dignity and delight.

  By that point, Wakefield had long since accepted the fact that the knuckleball was as much a part of him as the wins and the innings, the number 49 he wore on his back, and the mustache and goatee he had sported throughout his stint with the Red Sox. The knuckler could inspire both wonder and fear. The knuckleball had produced some of Wakefield's most glorious successes and some of his most gut-wrenching failures, and he had long since learned to make peace with the pitch and accept its flaws.

  Along the way, the Red Sox and their fans learned to do the same with the knuckleball as well as with the man who had brought it to them.

  "I think a lot of it is the pitch. I really do. It is me," Wakefield said when asked about the identity and legacy he built in Boston. "It's what's gotten me to where I am. It's hard to separate that. My biggest thing is—and you hear me say this every spring training when people say, 'What are your goals?'—I want to give the team innings. I mean, results—yeah, I'd love to win 20 games. I'd love to do that. But my job is to go out there and keep us in the game as long as possible. And I think I've proven that over time, if you go back historically and look at my career."

  To do that, with Tim Wakefield as with anyone else, we have to go back to the beginning, to things that happened long before he came along, things he had absolutely nothing to do with.

  That Wakefield would succeed in Boston, of all places, was as unforeseeable as the knuckleball is unpredictable. For the large majority of their history, the Red Sox were an organization defined by power hitters and heartbreaking failure, not necessarily in that order. By the time Wakefield arrived in Boston in late May 1995, Clemens had only just begun to alter the organization's lineage of royalty—a pitcher, of all beings, now ruled the Red Sox—and Boston was a championship-starved baseball town so desperate for a winner that the slightest bit of failure prompted irrational, illogical thinking and responses.

  The Re
d Sox and their followers were willing to try anything by then, but they were just as quick to dismiss it.

  The sale of Babe Ruth to the rival New York Yankees in 1920 served as the proverbial fork in the road at which the Red Sox had clearly made the wrong turn, but the history of the organization after 1920 was marked not by failure so much as by torture. In the 86 years from 1919 to 2003, a period during which the Red Sox failed to win even a single championship, the team had qualified for the postseason ten times and made four trips to the World Series, losing all four chances at a title in the maximum seven games. The Red Sox were always good enough to contend and flawed enough to fail—qualities that made them the perfect landing place for someone like Wakefield, whose career had followed a similar track thanks to the unreliable nature of his favorite pitch. When he was good, Wakefield could be very, very good. But when he was bad, he could be very, very bad.

  And sometimes he could be both within a matter of seconds.

  The Red Sox had taken on their identity long before Wakefield's arrival, however, thanks largely to Ted Williams, the Hall of Fame left fielder who debuted in 1939 and remained with the club through 1960. Beginning with "The Kid"—and Williams was, in some ways, a boy king—the Red Sox had assembled a line of royalty like few organizations in professional sports. Williams batted .327 with 31 home runs and 145 RBI as a 20-year-old rookie in 1939, launching a truly legendary career that produced a .344 career average and 521 home runs despite time lost to serve his country during World War II and the Korean War. He became a truly iconic figure in American history and was widely regarded in the baseball world as the greatest hitter who ever lived. Williams's Red Sox played in just one World Series, losing to the St. Louis Cardinals in 1946, and it was during his career that the Red Sox began to take on the identity of their star player. That problem would plague them for decades.

  As much as baseball is a team sport, after all, the nature and pace of the game spotlight individual responsibilities and talents. The spectator's eye needs only to follow the ball. As analysts scrutinize individual performances after the game, they often lose track of the larger objectives. In baseball, sacrifices are easily overshadowed, particularly in the absence of group success.

  "I went through the bad years there. I remember when, on a Friday night, you were lucky to have 10,000 people in the stands," said Hall of Famer and Red Sox great Carl Yastrzemski, who succeeded Williams in left field. "If you didn't go three-for-four or something like that, you could throw meat up into the stands and they would have devoured it. I mean, God, it was tough to play."

  Once Williams retired, the Red Sox became Yastrzemski's team, and then the property of Jim Rice when Yaz left. Like Williams, both Yastrzemski and Rice were left fielders and accomplished hitters whose individual performances would land them in the Hall of Fame; like Williams, each played an entire career without winning a World Series championship. All three players spent their entire careers playing for a Red Sox organization owned by Thomas A. Yawkey, his wife, Jean, or the Yawkey Trust, which endured well beyond the deaths of the Yawkeys. Tom Yawkey drew much criticism for how the Red Sox seemed to coddle their star players. Aside from being the last organization in baseball to integrate, the Red Sox often were accused of operating with a country club mentality, a suggestion that the inmates ran the asylum. The perception that the elite players often had more power than the manager for whom they played created both great instability in the manager's office at Fenway Park and a culture that placed the individual before the team. Beginning in 1948—just short of the midpoint of Williams's career—the Red Sox would not have a single manager last as long as five consecutive full seasons until after the turn of the century, and that was hardly a coincidence. In the Fenway Park clubhouse that served as both a sanctuary and a locker room for Red Sox players, the Red Sox had a clear hierarchy. Williams handed his crown to Yastrzemski, who handed it to Rice, and so forth. The organization was segregated on many levels.

  Those policies began to change in the late 1980s, but only because Rice placed the scepter in the hands of a pitcher instead of a positional player. Clemens made his debut for the team as a highly touted rookie in 1984, but he did not fully blossom until 1986, the last productive year of Rice's career. Just as Rice was about to begin fading, Clemens ascended. Triggered by a historic 20-strikeout performance against the Seattle Mariners on April 29, 1986, Clemens raced off to an unforgettable 14–0 start that season and finished the year at a sterling 24–4, winning both the Most Valuable Player Award (his first and only) and the Cy Young Award (his first of seven) while bringing the Red Sox this close to a victory over the New York Mets in the 1986 World Series. Though the Sox ultimately failed—again in seven games after a crushing collapse in Game 6—there was nonetheless a sentiment that the Red Sox had entered a new era in their history built on the young, bullish Clemens, the kind of ace and cornerstone pitcher the Red Sox had so often lacked.

  Clemens, in fact, frequently referred to pitching as having been "a second-class citizen" before his rise to power in Boston—and he was right.

  Following his breakthrough season of 1986, Clemens spent ten more seasons in Boston and won two more Cy Young Awards (1987, 1991), which only added to the individual awards won by Williams (American League MVP in 1946 and 1949), Yastrzemski (AL MVP in 1967), and Rice (AL MVP in 1978). The Red Sox qualified for the postseason three more times during Clemens's stint with the team—in 1988, 1990, and 1995—but they never again reached the World Series. Clemens left the team via free agency following the 1996 season in what proved to be a landmark change in the club's history—unlike Williams, Yastrzemski, and Rice, Clemens would not play his entire career in Boston. Under a bold and controversial general manager named Dan Duquette, the Red Sox seemed to be intent on reclaiming the rule of their own kingdom after having let their players run roughshod for a good chunk of the century. (For what it's worth, one Boston sports columnist called Duquette "Dictator Dan" throughout his tenure with the team.)

  In keeping with a Red Sox tradition established prior to World War II, however, the Red Sox continued to operate more like an aristocracy, the regal Clemens starting his own line of kings. This time the royal bloodline of the Boston clubhouse ran not to left field but rather to the pitcher's mound. One year to the day after Clemens snubbed the Red Sox to sign with the Toronto Blue Jays, Duquette acquired Pedro Martinez from the Montreal Expos in a blockbuster trade. Just as Williams begot Yastrzemski, who begot Rice, Clemens begot Martinez, who begot Curt Schilling, who begot Josh Beckett, who begot Jon Lester. Along the way, the Red Sox finally changed owners and, thankfully, cultures, transitioning from a team that overvalued its superstars to one that preached the team concept and togetherness, commitment and dedication.

  Having arrived during the final days of the Clemens years, Tim Wakefield was the only member of the Boston organization who had been there to see it all. And only people like Duquette saw Wakefield for what he was: "the glue that's held that pitching staff together for a long time."

  Truth be told, Tim Wakefield already could have been, should have been, and would have been the winningest pitcher in Red Sox history were it not for the simple fact that he was asked, along the way, to serve as the club's emergency response unit. For the bulk of Wakefield's career in Boston, he often was asked to pitch on short rest, to pitch out of the bullpen between starts, to fill gaps, to plug holes. Whether in the regular season or the postseason, Wakefield almost always was the man on the other end of the line when a Red Sox manager—particularly when he had just decided it was time to dial 9-1-1—picked up his dugout phone and called the bullpen.

  For that, Wakefield had his knuckleball to thank.

  Or perhaps blame.

  Knuckleball pitchers are regarded by most baseball historians as nothing more than .500 pitchers, which is to say, they lose as frequently as they win. In fact, given the difficulty of harnessing the pitch and the disproportionate number of those who have failed trying to do so, many
knuckleballers have lost more than they won, and many never reached the major leagues at all. Only the good ones have been fortunate enough to tread water and spend some time at the highest level of baseball played in the world. Only the great ones have endured and won more than they lost to become members of one of the more exclusive fraternities in sports.

  In 2010, at the end of his 18th major league season and his 16th with the Red Sox, Wakefield owned a career record of 193–172, a winning percentage of .529 that most teams would have eagerly embraced. (In baseball a .529 winning percentage translates into an 85–77 season, a record that most teams would consider a success.) And yet, even that simplest of truths, a .529 winning percentage, could not quantify Wakefield's contributions to the Red Sox, especially in a baseball world where managers, coaches, fans, and teammates had learned to become as wary of the knuckleball's whims as Wakefield himself.

  In baseball more than any other sport, the games are connected, which is to say that one can affect the next. On June 10, 1996, for example, the struggling Red Sox were in the midst of a bad losing streak that had required manager Kevin Kennedy to rely heavily on his relief pitchers, who had been worked to the bone. He sent Wakefield out to the mound with a very unappealing and demanding task—to remain in the game come hell or high water. Wakefield subsequently allowed 16 hits and eight runs while issuing three walks and throwing a whopping 158 pitches in an 8–2 Red Sox defeat that was not nearly that competitive, all because the Red Sox quite simply needed someone to take a bullet so that they could get their house in order.