Knuckler

by Tim Wakefield

  ***

  Between the end of the 1992 season and the start of spring training in 1993, the Pittsburgh Pirates underwent massive changes, many of them triggered by a baseball landscape that, in need of major reform, was undergoing major renovations. Teams like the Pirates that played in small markets did not have the revenue to compete with larger clubs on an open market, which benefited the big spenders. Baseball was built on capitalism, not socialism, and so while teams like the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox annually earned millions of dollars in local broadcast fees, teams like the Pirates earned relative pennies on the dollar. There was no sharing of wealth then. And so, when it came time for teams to bid on players, the big-market clubs had an enormous advantage over the smaller-market clubs, which more often than not had to restock their shelves with younger, less proven, less effective talent.

  Following the 1992 season, the Pirates faced economic crisis. The team had drawn 1.8 million fans in 1992, but escalating player costs required the Pirates to slash payroll from $33 million in 1992 to $23 million in 1993, a 20 percent cut. For a club like Pittsburgh, that was an enormous downsizing, and it would turn the Pirates from a perennial championship contender (as they were in 1990, 1991, and 1992) into a club that would conclude the 2010 campaign with an incredible 18 straight losing seasons. During that period, the Pirates would lose the most games and post the worst winning percentage (including expansion franchises) of any club in baseball.

  But while the Pirates bade farewell to, among others, Bonds and Drabek during the winter of 1992–93, Tim Wakefield did not seem especially concerned. He was too caught up in his own success. Wakefield reported to spring training as a star following his improbable ascension in 1992, and as most any 25-year-old would, he reveled in it. We'll still win because we still have me. What Wakefield neglected to acknowledge, of course, was that his performance had been a wild aberration, that the Pirates had succeeded because they had been a team, and that baseball is a game where the absence of one player can adversely affect another by changing the distribution of labor, workload, and demands.

  "At the time, I didn't realize it. I just wanted to be the man," Wakefield said. "I went from having two months in the big leagues to being the opening day starter."

  The results were predictable, if not downright awakening. Wakefield opened the season with a 9–4 victory over the San Diego Padres, a game in which he had nine strikeouts to go along with nine walks. Four starts later, he walked 10 and threw 172 pitches, albeit in a 10-inning victory over a Braves team he was facing for the first time since the previous October. Wakefield subsequently went 11 outings without a victory—partly as the result of bad luck, partly as the result of relative ineffectiveness—and ended up in the bullpen for a time, his ERA ballooning to such heights (6.35) that the Pirates did what any team would do with a young player who was struggling: they sent him back to the minor leagues.

  Wakefield did not know what hit him. The game that had seemed so easy to him only a year earlier was now impossibly difficult, and he was left to sort through the rubble with the Double A Carolina Mudcats, a team for which he had gone 15–8 in 1991 and one for which he never really wanted to play again. The Pirates, in fact, were sending Wakefield all the way back to Double A, leapfrogging Triple A Buffalo entirely, a decision that was both symbolic and, to Wakefield, crippling. Wakefield understood the significance as well as anyone. Triple A teams flew to road games, traveled more comfortably, and were treated relatively well. The Double A leagues meant bus trips, long days, and a bigger and longer uphill climb back to the big leagues. Wakefield's confidence was destroyed. He was devastated. He sulked.

  Unsurprisingly, his season further deteriorated. Wakefield went 3–5 with a 6.99 ERA in nine starts, at which point even Mudcats loyalists began to question whether he belonged there. Wakefield was on the mound pitching one night when the public-address announcer revealed that Pirates general manager Cam Bonifay was in attendance to scout some of the younger players in the Pittsburgh organization, and some fans regarded that as an opportunity to express their feelings about the struggling young knuckleballer.

  "Hey, Cam!" one spectator yelled loud enough for the whole sta dium to hear. "Why don't you take Wakefield back to Pittsburgh with you and throw him in one of the three rivers? We're trying to win a pennant down here."

  Wakefield would have chuckled had he not been embarrassed.

  In hopes of boosting Wakefield's confidence, the Pirates recalled him after rosters expanded on September 1, but Wakefield still felt "lost." He felt as if he were "searching." Still, he concluded the 1993 season with a pair of brilliant, complete-game shutouts against the Chicago Cubs and Philadelphia Phillies that allowed him to finish the year with a 6–11 record and 5.61 ERA, numbers that were an enormous disappointment given his contributions to the Pirates a year earlier. Nonetheless, the final two outings were an extremely encouraging sign, a suggestion to Wakefield and everyone else that he had reclaimed his grip.

  I've got it back.

  I can't wait until next year.

  As it turned out, next year never came. In the aftermath of minor elbow surgery to remove a bone chip that had troubled him throughout the 1993 season, Wakefield had difficulty getting a feel for the knuckler throughout spring training. When camp broke, he wasn't even on the big league team, the Pirates having opted instead to send him to Triple A Buffalo with the hope of bringing him back to the majors within weeks.

  It wasn't Double A, but still, Wakefield was overcome with the frustration of traveling down through the system, not up. He took the mound and constantly tinkered. He tried anything and everything to harness his knuckleball. He got little or no help from coaches to whom the knuckleball was foreign, and he crumbled beneath the weight of his own expectations and his prior success.

  Wakefield spent the entire 1994 season pitching for the Bisons, going 5–15 with a 5.84 ERA in 30 outings (29 starts, one relief appearance). While he led the Bisons in starts (29), innings (175⅔), strikeouts (83), and complete games (4) and finished second in wins (5), he led the entire minor leagues—all teams at all levels—in virtually every negative pitching statistic, from hits (197) to runs (127) to walks (98) to home runs (27). In his mind, the games all ran together, one bad start followed by another, then another, then another. Whatever control Wakefield had over his emotions disappeared as quickly as his command of the knuckler. He found himself incapable of the focus he had brought to the 1992 season or, for that matter, the end of 1993. He tried everything. He altered his grip. He tinkered with his delivery. Obsessing on regaining control of the pitch, maybe he tried too much. Like Kevin Costner at the driving range in Tin Cup, Wakefield felt like a golfer with a case of the shanks. He was willing to stand on one leg, with his hat on inside out and his pocket linings pulled out, if that posture would have brought back the effectiveness of his knuckleball. Like "Nuke" Laloosh in Bull Durham, he would have even tried breathing through his eyelids.

  But nothing worked.

  Ultimately, the Pirates reached their end with him, though that did not come until the spring of 1995, following a work stoppage that had cut short the 1994 major league season and canceled the World Series while simultaneously cutting into the start of the 1995 campaign. (At Triple A in 1994, however, Wakefield had no such luxury. He continued to pitch, continued to lose, continued to search, because the work stoppage did not affect minor league players.) By the time the work stoppage was settled and baseball was set to begin anew, the Pirates had decided that it was time to cut bait. Huyke could not pass Wakefield at the team's training site in Bradenton, Florida, without looking away. Leyland, to the present day, regarded it as one of the most difficult conversations he had ever taken part in, partly because of what Wakefield did for the Pirates in 1992, partly because he liked the pitcher personally.

  "I really don't have the answer to that question. That's also kind of a mystery [like the knuckleball]," Leyland said when asked about the end of Wakefield's career in
Pittsburgh. "The success came so fast. I don't know if the expectations mounted on Tim or not. He's one of the best people you'll ever meet and a wonderful human being. I always suspected that stuff just happened too fast. Everybody liked him. Everybody wanted a piece of him. He was the talk of the whole country.

  "It was very difficult," Leyland continued. "I kind of remember sitting there with Cam Bonifay [the Pirates general manager], and it was just a very difficult thing. I think we felt that if he was ever going to get it back, it wasn't going to be with us. That was such heartbreak. In the long run, that was probably good for him, because I think it did kind of resurrect and resuscitate him, but it was hard at the time."

  Wakefield, for his part, was all but destroyed as he packed up his belongings and began the drive back home to Melbourne, to his previous life. It's over, he thought. I'm done. He was convinced of that. He was already planning for life without baseball. He was considering going back to school. Both the rise and the fall had occurred with astonishing speed, and years later Wakefield could still feel the turbulence when he recounted the early years of his career. From 1990 to 1992, he had gone from being a struggling positional player on the verge of release to a fluky knuckleballer who came within a whisker of being the MVP of the 1992 National Championship Series. From 1992 to 1994, he tumbled uncontrollably to such depths that the Pirates released him in the spring of 1995. This was the kind of journey that left onlookers with their heads spinning.

  "Now imagine how I felt at the time," Wakefield said.

  Although, at the time, he wasn't sure how he felt.

  It hurt too much just to think about it.

  Five

  Tim was so successful early, and then he just lost it. That's when it becomes very tough mentally to throw a pitch that everybody knows is coming. I've told him that he's got to keep learning, he's got to eat, sleep, walk, and talk the knuckleball until it floats in his bloodstream like a spirit inside of him.

  —Phil Niekro

  IN ALMOST EVERY baseball player's career, there comes a season in which everything neatly and predictably falls into place. For Tim Wakefield, that time came in the summer of 1995.

  Released by the Pittsburgh Pirates during spring training, a desperate Wakefield searched for any way he could find to extend his baseball career, be it in Boston or Baja. He wasn't ready to quit yet. He didn't want to quit. He and agent Bill Moore immediately began looking for new places of employment, a task that was infinitely easier than in many other professions because Wakefield was, after all, a pitcher. In all of baseball, at any level, there is no scarcer resource. Almost everyone almost always needs at least some pitching, and the Pirates had given him a small measure of hope by emphasizing that, at the very least, he needed "a change of scenery." Wakefield remembered that part specifically. Leyland had said that the Pirates didn't think Wakefield was still capable of succeeding here—in Pittsburgh—where the expectations for him had been blown wildly out of proportion. Wakefield began to believe that he simply needed a new start. He wanted to believe that. He clung to whatever logic he could.

  Indeed, in many ways, Wakefield's success with the Pirates during the 1992 playoffs gave him all the evidence he would need in convincing teams that he was capable of being a big league winner. Major league history is littered with players who failed with one team and succeeded with another—borderline Hall of Fame pitcher Luis Tiant was released twice, for goodness' sake—and the explanation for this has never become fully clear. Maybe it's a matter of timing, or maybe it's a matter of maturity. Wakefield's knuckleball fed into this kind of thinking—if it worked once, couldn't it work again?—and his 1992 performance was the ultimate lure, something both he and his agent could hold out in front of teams as if trying to sell them a time share in the Bahamas.

  See? This is what you could end up with. All we need is a little of your time. The payoff could be huge.

  In many ways, there were truly no strings attached. For the major league teams that operated with multimillion-dollar payrolls, Wakefield could be had for something close to the minimum major league salary—$109,000 per year in 1995—making the risk of such a signing minimal or virtually nonexistent. That financial reality could make the interest in someone like Wakefield greater than the interest in a higher-profiled star, if only for the simple reason that everyone could afford a pitcher like Wakefield. Most every team in baseball was willing to spend a dollar for a lottery ticket in exchange for the chance to strike it rich.

  As it turned out, the Boston Red Sox were the ones to hit the jackpot.

  Hired by the Red Sox slightly more than a year earlier, in January 1994, Boston general manager Dan Duquette, having inherited a Boston baseball operation that had deteriorated badly during the early 1990s under aging general manager Lou Gorman, had set about the business of rebuilding the Red Sox from the inside out. Although the Sox had played in one World Series and three postseasons under Gorman from 1986 to 1990, they hit rock bottom under overmatched manager Butch Hobson in 1992 and 1993, at which point de facto owner John Harrington opted for a shake-up. With the economic landscape of baseball changing, Harrington bumped a willing Gorman into a ceremonial front-office position and handed the operation over to the younger, more corporate Duquette in January 1994. As baseball headed into the labor war that led to the 1994 work stoppage (and cancelation of the World Series) and dragged on into the start of the 1995 campaign, Harrington wanted someone in charge of his baseball team who could squeeze more from less, someone who could find and develop cheap, young talent to restore his club to competitive levels while minimizing costs.

  A New England native who grew up in Dalton, Massachusetts, Duquette seemed the perfect fit for the provincial Red Sox following.

  Except for a collective bargaining agreement between the owners and players, Major League Baseball had no real governing rules during the historic work stoppage, no system under which to operate. In retrospect, the chaotic state of the game helped Duquette greatly during the winter of 1994–95, if only because competing organizations were thrown into a similar state of upheaval. Nobody in the game knew exactly what was going on. When parameters were finally put in place, an inordinate number of players were left without contracts in what had become a very condensed off-season, and so Dan Duquette was able to rebuild the Red Sox quickly with an assortment of bargain outlet purchases that included, among others, pitchers Erik Hanson and Zane Smith.

  "That was a season unlike any other," Duquette said. "The players left [on strike] in August [1994], and spring training didn't even start until late March or April [1995].... There were a number of veteran pitchers [available], so we signed a couple of 'em. They hadn't done as well of late, but they had pitched well in the past, so we signed them."

  Of course, that description applied to Tim Wakefield.

  He hadn't done too well of late, but he had pitched well in the past.

  Nonetheless, for as much as a team like the Red Sox benefited from the work stoppage, the Sox, like other clubs, incurred some penalties, too. Amid the protracted and fruitless discussions between the owners and representatives of the players' union, many players put off conditioning during the winter months and allowed themselves to get woefully out of shape. Some reported to camp in laughable physical condition. And when spring training was condensed to three weeks because of the time already lost, a worst-case scenario developed for those who had made poor use of the winter months. Out-of-shape players needed more time, not less, and the result was predictable, particularly for pitchers: during spring training and the early stages of the regular season, there seemed to be an inordinate number of injuries to players who had tried to do too much, too quickly. The injuries threw off the competitive balance of the major leagues and created a new set of problems.

  Because of the attrition rate, teams needed even more pitching than usual.

  And Duquette was running an organization that had relatively little to begin with. Things reached the crisis stage for the Red
Sox when an injury befell ace pitcher Roger Clemens, then a three-time Cy Young Award winner and easily the club's biggest star and most marketable commodity. Clemens had slipped some in the 1993 and 1994 seasons, going a combined 20–21 for a dreadful Red Sox team, but there was some renewed hope for him and for the team entering 1995 thanks largely to the overhaul in the Red Sox organization. During the work stoppage, Duquette had fired the underwhelming Hobson and replaced him with Kevin Kennedy, who had recently managed the Texas Rangers. (Hobson had had no prior major league managerial experience when the Red Sox promoted him from the minor leagues.) Duquette also had acquired rock star slugger Jose Canseco (a Kennedy favorite) from the Texas Rangers in an off-season trade, giving the Red Sox, if nothing else, another gate attraction (along with Clemens and budding slugger Mo Vaughn) that would help keep the Sox interesting should the team prove to be mediocre on the field. What the Red Sox lacked most was pitching, and that deficit explained why Duquette had been bargain-hunting—and buying in relative bulk—during the early spring. So it only added to Duquette's frustration when Clemens's right shoulder flared up during the early stages of camp, largely because Clemens, like many players, had taken a passive approach to conditioning during the work stoppage and shown up for camp out of shape.

  Duquette therefore was looking for any pitcher who could give them, above all else, innings. He needed outs. Opening day was less than a week away when Duquette noticed that the Pirates had released Wakefield. Duquette was quite familiar with the knuckleballer from his time as an executive with the Montreal Expos, a team that was in the same division with the Pirates, the National League East, before baseball underwent realignment in 1994. Wakefield's availability immediately piqued Duquette's interest.

  "I had seen him pitch late in '92, and he pitched the Pirates to the East Division championship over the Expos," Duquette recalled. "He provided the boost and the innings the Pirates needed to win the division, and that's when I became aware of him. So having seen him pitch brilliantly down the stretch for Pittsburgh, I knew he was the kind of pitcher who could pitch innings, but could also pitch when it counted because I saw him do it."