Knuckler

by Tim Wakefield

  For Tim Wakefield, the dips and turns were about to begin.

  In Florida—or more accurately, throughout the warm-weather regions of the United States—college baseball is a year-round sport. There is no real off-season. Teams work out and practice during the fall semester, making preparations for the start of the official season in spring. Baseball is serious business in Florida. Practice time is seen as instrumental in the development and success of a player, and so baseball was immediately part of Wakefield's curriculum at BCC.

  At the time, the coach at Brevard Community College was a man named Ernie Rosseau, a native of Nyack, New York, who had attended Satellite High School in Satellite Beach, Florida, and played college baseball years earlier at Florida Tech, located in Melbourne. Rosseau had spent four seasons as an outfielder in the minor league system of the St. Louis Cardinals, where he climbed as high as Double A. Rosseau's college coach, Les Hall, remembered Rosseau as tough, hard-nosed, and "demanding," the kind of player who almost certainly would go on to become a coach if and when his playing career ended.

  As a coach, unsurprisingly, Rosseau took the same aggressive approach he had brought to the game as a player, a philosophy that generally worked for him and produced a long, accomplished career, including a pair of junior college national championships and job opportunities with an assortment of major league organizations.

  In Wakefield's case, however, the coach and the player disagreed from the start. Wakefield thought that his scholarship meant something, that having been recruited entitled him to a spot on the team. In Rosseau's eyes, that was the furthest thing from the truth. Wakefield remembered showing up at the first day of team workouts in the fall and recognizing that most every other player at BCC was just as good as he was—if not better—and that a starting position on the team was not a given. The change made him uneasy. He suddenly had the feeling that he was not wanted. The transition to college and the challenge of winning a starting position were both far more difficult than Wakefield had imagined, and so between the fall and spring semesters he did something he never imagined himself doing. He quit the baseball team.

  Wakefield's inability to cope undoubtedly was a reflection of his immaturity at that stage of his life as much as it was a comment on Rosseau, whom Wakefield would later come to respect. In retrospect, he would see that he had made a mistake.

  It just didn't work out. I was immature. Those kinds of things happen.

  After remaining at BCC as a student for the balance of his freshman year, Wakefield resumed playing baseball for an assortment of select teams in the Melbourne area, including a team in a summer league for 16- to 18-year-olds. His decision to leave the BCC team had reached Hall, the same man who had coached Rosseau years earlier and who happened to be friendly with Steve Wakefield. Hall was the head coach at the Florida Institute of Technology—known today as Florida Tech—a school that played its games in the Sunshine State Conference, then regarded as one of the better Division 2 baseball conferences in the country.

  Through his wife, who had been a teacher at Melbourne High School, Hall knew of Steve Wakefield's standing as a track athlete in local history, and he certainly knew of Tim Wakefield's baseball career at Eau Gallie. Hall initially had not spent a great deal of time trying to recruit Wakefield out of high school because he felt he had little opportunity of securing him; Wakefield's long-term goal at the time had been to transfer to a bigger Division 1 program, and Hall thought he would have seemed like a misfit among a collection of Florida Tech players who were students first and athletes second.

  "Back then, Florida Tech was known for its engineering program," Hall, 74, said in the fall of 2010. "The [students there] wanted to be engineers. They didn't want to be baseball players.

  "Tim wasn't really a pitcher then. He was a position player, and he was very good. He was a natural athlete. He could play all kinds of sports."

  Florida Tech offered Wakefield a number of possibilities, all of them attractive. Because he had never played in a game at BCC, Wakefield could make the jump without using a year of his athletic eligibility, effectively becoming a redshirt freshman in the fall of 1985. (Though a sophomore under academic guidelines, he would qualify as a freshman athletically and still possess four years of eligibility.) Wakefield would get a better education at Florida Tech, he could still be close to home, and there remained the possibility that if he blossomed, he could transfer to a bigger program where he might be able to advance his playing career.

  And finally, at a place like Florida Tech, Wakefield could effectively start right away to get the playing time he needed to develop.

  This is more my speed.

  Hall, for his part, knew that Wakefield could excel at Division 2, and Wakefield took very little time to prove him right. Wakefield's addition to the team had an immediate and profound impact on the performance of the Florida Tech squad: the school's program went, in the words of the coach, "from mediocre to very good" almost overnight. In the spring of 1986, Wakefield still had yet to mature physically, but he was so eager and willing to do whatever Hall asked that he fit in immediately.

  "His first year at Florida Tech, we were short of pitchers at one point," Hall recalled. "We were playing a national schedule, and it was a nonconference game, so I was looking for options. We needed to save our pitching [for more important games], so he volunteered to pitch. He was throwing in the bullpen, and he threw a knuckleball, and the kid who was catching him couldn't handle it. I remember him looking at Tim and saying, 'I don't think we should use that pitch, it's not very good.'"

  In fact, though relatively no one recognized it at the time, the opposite was true.

  Tim Wakefield's knuckleball was too good.

  Still, Hall also regarded the pitch as nothing more than a party trick at the time, and in fact he fully believed that Wakefield's future rested in his abilities as a hitter. Hall recalled a game against Bethune-Cookman College during one of Wakefield's first seasons in which he belted a home run to right-center field that caught everyone's attention—"It was a bomb," mused Hall—and not solely for the distance the ball traveled. Wakefield, according to Hall, was a pull hitter in college. As a right-handed hitter, Wakefield's power was primarily to the left side of the field. At any level, for a right-handed batter, hitting a ball out to right-center required an exceptional amount of strength, discipline, and hand-eye coordination. The mechanics had to be perfect. And if a player could demonstrate that kind of ability consistently, he possessed the kind of exceptional talent that might draw the attention of professional scouts.

  "He worked hard at it," Hall said of Wakefield's commitment to hitting. "He loved to hit. That's what he really liked. He was a good first baseman, too, but hitting—that's what he really liked to do."

  And that is also what Tim Wakefield did well.

  Between his freshman and sophomore years, a period that coincided with his physical maturation—and remember, Wakefield effectively had the academic standing of a sophomore heading into his junior year, meaning he was a year older than many of his classmates—he fully invested in working out. When he returned to school in the fall, he was bigger and stronger than he had ever been. Wakefield struggled with the academics at Florida Tech—"I almost failed out of school," he said—but the baseball began coming more and more easily to him, to the point where he started to be recognized as a local phenom. In Wakefield's second season at Florida Tech, in the spring of 1987, he was compared routinely to a first baseman from the University of Tampa, Tino Martinez, a local prodigy who had played his high school baseball at Jefferson High School in Tampa. During the same spring, while Martinez was hitting 24 home runs for Tampa, Wakefield hit 22—in 48 games, no less—for Florida Tech. Local fans and media gave intense coverage to the two blossoming talents in the area—one batting left-handed (Martinez), one batting right-handed (Wakefield)—and the future for each seemed extremely bright.

  By the spring of 1988 Martinez was seen as one of the best players in
the country, but Tim Wakefield still was seen as a developing prospect, if for no other reason than the fact that he had matured later. For hitters especially, size and strength are important assets because the pitching gets more challenging at every level of development. The average velocity with which pitches are thrown increases dramatically at the professional levels. Off-speed pitches change direction far more acutely—and at higher speeds. The transition from aluminum bats (used in college) to wooden bats (used in professional play) is another major adjustment. Players like Martinez were seen as virtual can't-miss prospects because they hit everything and anything from a young age—and for power—whereas someone like Wakefield was still regarded as something of a project.

  Nonetheless, Tim Wakefield knew he had a chance to be drafted.

  In June 1988, following a junior season in which he hit 13 more homers and raised his career total to a school record 40—the record still stands—the Pittsburgh Pirates grabbed Wakefield in the eighth round of the draft with the 200th overall selection. (Martinez, by contrast, was the 14th overall player taken, in the first round, by the Seattle Mariners.) Wakefield was elated. He wanted to turn pro immediately. Steve and Judy Wakefield were similarly excited about the prospect of their son becoming a major leaguer—"You're always hopeful, but that's a big dream," Judy Wakefield said—and there was little doubt that Tim would sign relatively quickly. Hall, for one, remembered advising Wakefield throughout the process, but Florida Tech was hardly a baseball factory and the experience was new for all of them.

  "I was at his house with his mom and his dad when he signed with the Pirates," Hall recalled. "I remember during the process [of negotiations], Tim turned to me and said, 'What do you think I should do?' I said, 'Tim, I don't know, but I'll tell you one thing: don't take the first offer.'"

  With some minor haggling, Wakefield negotiated a deal with the Pirates that guaranteed him a signing bonus of just $15,000 and ensured that the Pittsburgh organization would pay for the balance of his schooling, if and when Wakefield returned to college. At the time, the Wakefields believed that was a good deal for an eighth-round selection, because it ensured their son some security in the event that his major league career did not work out. Wakefield himself, of course, was certain that signing with the Pirates would eventually produce a major league career, a typical expectation for a young man approaching his 22nd birthday. He had excelled everywhere he played. On the baseball diamond, he was as confident in his abilities as anyone. Wakefield never stopped to consider that he was one of thousands of minor league players who aspired to make it to the major leagues and that the odds were overwhelmingly stacked against him. He never considered failure or even hardship.

  During the summer of 1988, along with his parents, Tim Wakefield made the trip from Melbourne to Bradenton, across the flatness of the Florida peninsula, entirely unsure of what to expect. Baseball was an adventure now. He would be competing against dozens of other prospects and draft picks just like him. The Pirates had selected 66 players in the 1988 draft, and those who had signed quickly were asked to report to extended spring training at Pittsburgh's training facility along the Gulf Coast. As the newest members of the Pirates organization arrived, all of them with the hope of making it to the major leagues, Wakefield felt like a college freshman at BCC again, showing up for school amid a mountain of cardboard boxes, packing tape, and wild uncertainty.

  How we got here doesn't matter. We're all the same now. Nobody is going to give me anything.

  "Everybody was even. Everybody was good," Wakefield said. "It was a lot like the switch I made from high school to college. It was a huge adjustment."

  In the grand scheme of any baseball career, extended spring training, in or around the time of the draft, qualifies as the major league equivalent of freshman orientation, or perhaps matriculation. The idea is to get everyone acclimated to a new environment, new life, new existence. The minor league structure subsequently allows teams to assign players to new locations immediately, and players are assigned according to their level of skill. Some begin at higher levels and some at lower levels, but all generally are faced with the same responsibilities. The idea is to show up every day, work hard, get better, and advance to the next level.

  Truth be told, Tim Wakefield did not need long to learn that his hitting skills were short, that the power he demonstrated in college would not translate to the next level, that the journey would be difficult. As a starting point, the Pirates assigned Wakefield to their affiliate in the New York–Penn League at Watertown, New York, a transitional league designed to help assimilate amateurs to a professional life. The New York–Penn League is the lowest level of minor league play—Class A—and it plays a short season of roughly 75 games. Because the season typically begins in June and runs through the summer, teams can immediately place those players from the annual June draft who signed quickly and showed the capability to play right away.

  At Watertown, Wakefield's first career hit as a professional was a home run in a game during which he went 3-for-4, a performance that might have launched the career of one of the game's great hitters had it not been for the simple fact that, in Wakefield's words, "it was all downhill from there." Wakefield had trouble adjusting to the wooden bats—years later he would playfully explain his difficulties by telling people that he was "allergic to wood"—but the problem caused him quite a bit of consternation at the time. And living in New York felt much different to him than living near the campuses of BCC or Florida Tech. Compared with his transitions in college—to BCC and then to Florida Tech—Wakefield saw the start of his career as something far more real, more permanent, more intimidating.

  This is my job now.

  He remembered feeling alone when his parents drove him to Bradenton for extended spring—"They basically just dropped me off and left—and I don't mean that negatively," he said—and he felt even more isolated after being assigned to Watertown.

  Nobody here knows me.

  He was earning a mere $700 per month. Along with a pair of teammates whom he had just met, Wakefield rented a room in the house of an elderly woman for $50 a week. He rode a bike to and from the stadium. He remembered his parents being "horrified" at these arrangements when they first came to visit him, though Wakefield was too young and too inexperienced to know any better.

  All in all, the start of Wakefield's professional career was hardly what he had envisioned, particularly when reality further intruded.

  Shortly after arriving at Watertown, Wakefield learned of the death of his grandfather, Lester Wakefield, with whom he had shared an extremely close relationship. His grandfather had been battling can cer, and Wakefield remembered being "devastated" by his death. He always had been able to confide in his grandfather, to speak to him, to share things with him. Hall was among those who described Lester Wakefield as "Tim's best friend," and with his death, Wakefield spent a good deal of his first official camp dwelling on what he had lost instead of the opportunity he had gained. He found it impossible to focus on baseball.

  "It was really the first time I had to deal with something like that," Wakefield said of Lester's death. "He was somebody who came to all my games, and he took me fishing all the time. It was my first time away from home. I don't remember if it was my mom or my dad who called me with the news, but I flew to Virginia and met up with an aunt and uncle, who drove me home. Those two or three days were a complete fog. I was depressed. Having to leave early and go back to work was very difficult."

  Along with baseball and fishing, Lester Wakefield shared something else with his grandson: music. Lester enjoyed playing the guitar, and he had spent some time trying to teach the skill to Tim before he died. The lessons never were completed. When Wakefield inherited the guitars his grandfather left behind, he committed himself to completing the teaching that his grandfather could not. And he did indeed teach himself to play the guitar, a skill he would never lose. Wakefield took a certain amount of gratification in that accomplishment, a sense
of fulfillment from having applied some of the lessons his grandfather taught him, and not just with the guitar.

  You have more talent than you think you do. You can adjust. You can still succeed.

  Just the same, Wakefield's return to Watertown was a struggle: it was immediately evident that he would ultimately fail as a hitter, that the level of competition had exceeded his talent. In 54 games at Watertown, Wakefield went 30-for-159—a .189 average—with just nine extra-base hits. Pitchers overpowered him. He could not make good contact consistently. Even in Class A, pitchers threw much harder than they did in college, and the crispness of their breaking pitches did not compare.

  Had Wakefield been able to hit some home runs despite a low bat ting average, the Pirates might have seen value in his talents. There was always latitude for a power hitter—who might grow in plate discipline and contact—because, quite simply, power cannot be taught. Nevertheless, the early signs were beyond discouraging—and for obvious reasons. If Tim Wakefield could not hit the pitching at Watertown, he certainly would not be able to hit the pitching in Boston, Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles—not now, not ever. A few months at Watertown hardly qualified as a final verdict on Wakefield's abilities, but it was an indication that he had farther to travel than anyone might have guessed.

  Wakefield returned home for the winter disappointed by his first professional season, and neither his performance nor his prognosis improved the following spring. He went back to Bradenton in February, when the Pirates began minor league camp, and he failed to make any of the club's affiliates out of spring training. He was caught in the netherworld between the lowest levels of minor league baseball and the highest level of amateur play, a no-man's-land that sends the large majority of aspiring professional baseball players off to lives filled with bar stools, beer taps, gas stations, mail rooms, public works, and office jobs. Wakefield was effectively relegated to the practice squad of professional baseball—Bradenton served as the "Land of Misfit Toys" for those struggling minor leaguers who were waiting for someone, somewhere, to suffer from an injury or extended failure.