Knuckler

  Almost any other pitcher with relatively little experience and an inconsistent history would have had no leverage at all. As allowed by major league rules governing the early part of players' careers, the team might have unilaterally renewed his contract without earnestly negotiating at all. Teams had the hammer in the early years and were frequently willing to use it, but the Red Sox took a far more diplomatic approach with Wakefield, whom they wanted to keep happy, focused, and productive.

  We're not going to mess with this guy.

  Still just 29, Wakefield was eager to put the entire process behind him, if for no other reason than that his Pittsburgh experience had literally been traumatic. They can still release me at any time. Despite his performance in 1995, he began the 1996 season, even as he said and did all the right things, still feeling like his job was at stake. The Red Sox earmarked a spot for Wakefield in their rotation along with Clemens, Gordon, Aaron Sele, and soft-throwing lefty Jamie Moyer, only the last of whom had to earn his way into the group. Wakefield was all but assured a spot from the moment he arrived in camp, but his experience in Pittsburgh had long since taught the knuckleballer that he could take nothing for granted, that he was never safe, that his fortunes could dip as quickly and unexpectedly as the pitch that had delivered him to Boston in the first place.

  If you pitch poorly, you're gone.

  Following a 1995 season that had been aberrational throughout the major leagues—again, the work stoppage had created a muddle from which teams would emerge slowly—the 1996 Red Sox were well positioned to disappoint. A number of unpredictable variables had contributed to the team's success in 1995, most notably the acquisitions of Erik Hanson and Wakefield. Hanson, who won 17 games, had been signed during spring training. Wakefield, who nearly won the Cy Young Award, had been released by another team at roughly the same time. Although this conjunction of events was highly out of the ordinary—a classic case of the right players being in the right place at the right time—now that Hanson was gone entirely and Wakefield had ended 1995 pitching at something far closer to a realistic level, baseball overall had equalized. Now the Red Sox were among the teams that had come back to the pack while others rose.

  Even so, the 1996 Red Sox badly stumbled out of the gate. The team lost their first five games of the season, 12 of their first 14, and 15 of their first 18. In hindsight it would become clear that they were crumbling beneath the weight and pressure of their own unreasonable expectations. After a poor spring, Wakefield began the regular season with a horrific outing against the Texas Rangers that produced a 13–2 Red Sox defeat. The next time out, 11 days later, he allowed nine hits and eight runs in an 8–0 loss to the Cleveland Indians, a performance that left him with more losses (two) than he had suffered during his first 17 starts in 1995. The 11-day gap between his first two outings was partly the result of a rainout and partly a response to Wakefield's poor spring performance—because he had been pitching poorly, the Red Sox skipped Wakefield when his turn came to pitch rather than skip someone else. This decision disrupted Wakefield's timing and confidence at an indisputably delicate time, triggering a chain reaction.

  And so, two weeks into a 1996 season that Wakefield and the Red Sox had entered with great anticipation, the knuckleballer and his team were both in a tailspin.

  The Red Sox wasted no time and sent Wakefield to Fort Myers for a remedial session with Phil Niekro, whom Wakefield was all too eager to see. Again, Niekro eased Wakefield's mind, stabilized his mechanics, set him back on track. They spent a mere two days together, Niekro again standing behind Wakefield as he threw, all but planting his voice between Wakefield's ears as if he were the Hardball Whisperer. Wakefield felt as if he had been reprogrammed. After returning to the Red Sox, he looked like a different man as he pitched seven strong innings in a 2–1 victory over a Cleveland team that had battered him only five days earlier. In his next outing, he backboned an 8–3 win over the Texas Rangers. Wakefield and the Red Sox then concluded the first month of the 1996 season with a lopsided 13–4 win over Texas, a victory that left Boston with a miserable 7–19 record. Two of the Boston victories in April had come in games started by Wakefield.

  He was better, to be sure, but Wakefield at times still felt as if he were fighting himself and the knuckleball. Maybe those struggles were one and the same. Wakefield tried desperately to apply what Niekro had taught him, but the process was less natural, more forced. Part of him feared the worst. He was still learning to deal with failure. Few players in history have had the kind of success Wakefield enjoyed as a rookie in 1992. And then, three years later, Wakefield went on a similar run in his first weeks with the Red Sox, during his first year in Boston, this time going 14–1. In baseball, those kinds of streaks are the exception rather than the rule, and the game is built on failure far more than success.

  And so, this time, Wakefield did everything in his power to remain composed. Like the 1993 Pirates, the 1996 Red Sox were stumbling amid expectations, prompting most every member of the Boston team to try a little too hard and squeeze a little too tightly—particularly a maturing knuckleballer trying to apply the counterintuitive logic to a pitch that had failed him once before, leading to a destructive fall.

  Tim Wakefield, like the Red Sox, was in inner turmoil, his mind and emotions sparring with one another as Niekro's lessons echoed in his head.

  Use the uncertainty to your advantage.

  But what if I'm unsure of it myself?

  It's the only pitch in baseball where, every time you throw it, it can be an out pitch.

  But what if I can't control it?

  If you learn to command this pitch, you can pitch until you're 45.

  But if I can't, I could be out of baseball at 29.

  Tim Wakefield dug in defiantly and braced himself. He had gone from success to failure to success again, and the early pattern of his career suggested that failure was coming next. The ride was getting as turbulent as the track of the pitch itself. Wakefield loved the highs but dreaded the lows. What he wanted most of all was a more stable existence somewhere in the middle that would make him feel safe and less vulnerable, a place he could trust, a place somewhere between 1994 and 1995.

  But then, even at 29, Wakefield's life as a knuckleballer was just beginning.

  He was learning about the pitch as much as he was about himself.

  If charted on a graph, the early stages of Tim Wakefield's career would look something like this: long, high spikes followed by steep, precipitous drops. The knuckleball had given Wakefield extended bursts of success and failure as he harnessed the pitch for good chunks of time and then completely lost control of it for others.

  On May 5, 1996, Wakefield learned that the knuckler could also blow in and out with the force and unpredictability of a midwestern thunderstorm, causing enough damage in an extremely short period of time to leave onlookers wondering precisely what had happened.

  Wakefield and the Red Sox seemed well on their way to a victory, with a 3–0 lead entering the fourth inning, when a game that had seemed under complete control spontaneously combusted into a raging ball of fire. There was little or no warning. While athletes routinely speak of the fine line between winning and losing—in any sport—often overlooked is the reality that, over time, talent and execution generally win out. This is especially true in baseball, where, over the course of a 162-game season, luck tends to even out and talent most often separates the good teams from the bad ones. The gap between success and failure, as it turns out, is not nearly as great in the major leagues as it might be in some other arenas, if for no other reason than the fact that the game is a marathon and not a sprint.

  As a result, small missteps can be overcome, mistakes can be erased, and transgressions frequently can be overlooked.

  But for Wakefield, the line between success and failure that spring was microscopically thin. His confidence was brittle. Knuckleballers had less margin for error to begin with, to be sure, but Wakefield, the Red Sox, and the entire six-
state region of New England were about to learn about the whims of the knuckleball through a trial by fire. Whether Wakefield and Boston liked it or not, there were going to be growing pains. And that never was more apparent than in the middle innings of what would become a historic game for the knuckleballing member of the Red Sox, even if for all the wrong reasons.

  Having allowed only two hits and a walk through the first three innings, Wakefield opened the fourth by allowing a single to Joe Carter, the likable Toronto outfielder and first baseman who had made a career of torturing the Red Sox. Carter was running with the pitch when teammate Ed Sprague followed with a line drive to third baseman Tim Naehring, a sure-handed fielder who would end his major league career with 77 consecutive errorless games, all at third base. Naehring merely had to catch the ball and throw to first base for an easy double play, a relatively routine play that the gritty third baseman could virtually make in his sleep.

  Of course, Naehring missed the ball. And so, instead of having two outs with nobody on base, the Jays had runners on first and third with nobody out.

  When Wakefield followed up that gaffe by striking out John Olerud, all of Fenway Park, from the deepest rows of the center-field bleachers to the first row of the box seats behind home plate, shared the same observation: He should be out of the inning already. Wakefield, too, briefly processed the thought. Still eight years away from the world championship that would end an epic 86-year drought, the Red Sox organization and its followers were still weighed down by a doomsday mentality that usually played out like a self-fulfilling prophecy and almost always reaffirmed one of Murphy's Laws: Anything that can go wrong will.

  Understandably, given the early track of his career, Wakefield was not immune to this line of thinking. To that point, any string of success for Wakefield had usually meant that disaster was waiting around the corner. The failure had been difficult to handle. And so, after throwing a passed ball that scored Carter from third and moved Sprague to second, Wakefield allowed six of the next seven Jays to reach base on a walk, three singles, a double, and a home run, the final and most destructive blow delivered by Carter. The final four of those hits came with two outs. Just like that, a 3–0 Red Sox lead had turned into an 8–3 deficit, an avalanche triggered by a simple fielding miscue by the third baseman.

  Or was it?

  After Naehring's error, Wakefield had many opportunities to reclaim control. Instead, as baseball people often put it, he caved in under the weight of a crisis spiraling badly out of control. Deep down, Wakefield knew this. If he didn't want to admit it to himself then, he certainly would later in his career. But Wakefield in the spring of 1996 was still unsure of himself and of the knuckleball, and he was in little position to assume the weight of a Red Sox team that simply could not get out of its own way. During and after the inning, Wakefield was conflicted. On the one hand, as he sat in the home dugout at Fenway Park, he had been victimized by the misplay. They failed me. On the other, he knew that Naehring was an exceptional fielder and that part of being a team was to minimize the mistakes of others. No, I failed them. The entire, sudden series of events had left him confused and frustrated, the knuckleball confounding the pitcher as much as it could the hitters.

  Recognizing not only the volatility of the knuckleball but the fact that Wakefield could reclaim his touch as quickly as he had lost it, manager Kevin Kennedy left him in the game. With the Red Sox now facing a five-run deficit, Wakefield pitched a scoreless fourth and fifth before the Jays rallied in the sixth—thanks again, in part, to the Boston defense. The Red Sox made two more errors in the inning—one by all-thumbs second baseman Wilfredo Cordero, the other by typically slick-fielding outfielder Milt Cuyler—and triggered a three-run Jays rally that made the score 11–3. Wakefield ultimately left the game after throwing 133 pitches and facing 33 batters, producing a pitching line that remains among the most unique and peculiar in both his career and the history of the game:

  In 5⅔ innings, he was responsible for 10 hits, 11 runs, one earned run, five walks, and six strikeouts.

  As much as anyone, Wakefield recognized the irony of the per formance, if for no other reason than the fact that baseball protects pitchers from mistakes committed by teammates. That is why the ERA (earned run average) was created in the first place. In any game, all runs are classified as either earned (meaning they are the pitcher's responsibility) or unearned (meaning they are not), and ERA has thus become a standard by which all pitchers are measured. ERAs have fluctuated over time—the average ERA in the American League was 4.71 in 1995 and 4.99 in 1996—but the statistic has been heavily weighted since its inception in the early 20th century, a fascinating fact given the manner in which statistical analysis has exploded in the modern game.

  There was an obvious catch to Wakefield's performance against the Jays: of the 11 runs that Toronto scored, 10 were unearned as a result of Boston's defensive ineptitude. It would have been easy to blame his teammates Naehring, Cordero, and Cuyler for that fact, but Wakefield also knew that he had hardly done his own job to the best of his ability. Wakefield believed in the code that prevails in any major league clubhouse—you watch my back and I'll watch yours—and he knew, too, that statistics can be very misleading. During the loss to the Jays, Wakefield's ERA decreased from 5.97 to 5.24, though that was of little solace to him or the Red Sox, who ultimately suffered one more defeat—this one 11–4—in a season that had them all frustrated.

  Still, from a record-keeping perspective, Wakefield's performance was truly historic. Since 1920, in all of baseball, a pitcher had allowed as many as 10 unearned runs in a game only six times. Of those six games, only one had occurred after 1930 (a 13–6 loss to the Baltimore Orioles by New York Yankees right-hander Andy Hawkins in which all 10 runs he allowed were unearned). Wakefield would remain the only other pitcher to be credited with such a dubious distinction in the last 80 years, the kind of oddity that Wakefield, the Red Sox, and their followers would chalk up to one very obvious explanation: the knuckleball.

  But soon Wakefield and the Sox would learn that the quirks of the pitch brought certain advantages, too.

  When the Red Sox arrived at Comiskey Park on June 10, 1996, for the opener of a three-game series with the Chicago White Sox, their hopes for a successful season were continuing to dwindle. The leaders of the team were getting visibly frustrated. The Sox were just 24–36, 12 games under .500, the second-worst record in the American League. One of their recent defeats had come via a 3–2 decision in which ace Clemens had departed with a 2–1 lead over the Milwaukee Brewers. The win was the first of two consecutive extra-inning losses to the Brewers, defeats that had not only demoralized the Red Sox but also drained them physically.

  Simply put, the Red Sox were running out of pitchers. Starters were getting knocked out of games early, and relievers were repeatedly blowing late leads, increasing the strain and workload for a pitching staff that had relatively little depth to begin with.

  Wakefield knew this as the Sox prepared to face the White Sox, but any doubt he might have had was eliminated when manager Kevin Kennedy delivered a message to him on the flight to Chicago. Because scheduled starter Aaron Sele was sick, the Red Sox needed a pitcher immediately. Kennedy naturally turned to Wakefield, who could serve as both his starter and his bullpen on the same night. No matter what, I need innings from you tonight. Wakefield had pitched better since the Toronto game, but his previous outing had been a brief, 3⅔-inning affair during which he threw just 77 pitches of an eventual 10–7 Red Sox victory. As always, Wakefield took great satisfaction in knowing that at least the team had won the game. Given the manner in which Kennedy had been compelled to aggressively employ his bullpen in the Milwaukee series and the overall sorry state of the Boston pitching staff, Wakefield had already been scheduled to take the mound on only three days of rest. Now he was being asked to make the kind of contribution that he knew he could deliver and that Niekro had foretold.

  There are going to be days when it's goi
ng to be there for you and days when it's not, but no matter what, the next day, you take your glove and your spikes with you because you can pitch. That's the advantage a knuckleball pitcher has. It's in our heads and in our arms.

  In fact, even at that stage of his career, Wakefield relished opportunities like this one when the Red Sox were in need and a manager, coach, or teammate would come to him and make it clear that he was needed more than usual. They're asking for my help. These were the moments when Wakefield most felt a part of the team, felt appreciated, and felt that he belonged. They were all in it together. Wakefield found a great deal of satisfaction in these moments partly because he was making a contribution and partly because his kind of contribution highlighted the communal approach. Nobody was pointing any fingers and nobody was issuing any blame. Rather, the Red Sox were interested in finding solutions. In the middle of the 1996 run, when the Red Sox were at the nadir of their season, Wakefield took a great measure of pride in the fact that he was the one—not Clemens, not Gordon, not Sele, not anyone else—who was called into the manager's office.

  They needed him.

  What transpired on the field that night was not unpredictable so much as it was eye-opening, bringing into focus just how desperate the Red Sox had become. Wakefield allowed two runs in the first inning, another in the second, two more in the third, and another in the fourth. The White Sox had at least one base runner in each of their eight team at-bats, eliminating any need to bat in the bottom of the ninth inning as they rumbled to an easy 8–2 victory. The most noteworthy part of the game was not that Wakefield pitched all eight innings for Boston, but that he was never even in danger of being lifted from an affair in which he allowed an absurd 16 hits, eight runs, three walks, and 19 base runners while throwing an insane 158 pitches. During the game, in fact, Kennedy took it upon himself to make the kind of conversational visit to the mound normally conducted by the pitching coach—just to reaffirm to Wakefield that his performance was appreciated, that he was helping the team, that his efforts were for the greater good.