Knuckler

  But this time Wakefield never made it that far.

  Facing the prospect of significant annual pay raises for a pitcher who was giving them an average of 200 innings per season—from 1995 to 1997, only 17 other pitchers in baseball won as many games as Wakefield (42) while pitching 600 or more innings—the Red Sox made the obvious and more prudent financial decision: they signed Wakefield to a long-term contract. Talks between the player and the club began on the final weekend of the regular season and concluded about a month later, the team getting a discounted rate for buying in bulk (three years) and Wakefield getting the kind of financial security (a guaranteed $12 million, an average of $4 million per season) that he never dreamed of while laboring for the Buffalo Bisons in Triple A during the summer of 1994.

  Wakefield wasn't just a long shot anymore.

  He was a bona fide success story.

  On a broader scale, the timing of the deal was significant for other reasons. The winter of 1997–98 was expected to be a relatively volatile off-season, though nothing quite like the labor-dispute winter of 1994–95. Major League Baseball was inducting two new teams into the major leagues, the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, which were set to begin play in 1998 after filling their rosters through the expansion draft. To prevent their core players from being available to either of the new teams, existing teams had to identify those players and, in some cases, secure them to contracts. The moment the Red Sox signed Wakefield, they effectively warded off any interested parties by identifying him as their sole property.

  Keep off.

  That winter, after a long, losing season, public confidence in the Red Sox was sorely lacking. As a result, Duquette was looking to reconstruct the franchise in history-making ways. In the days leading up to the expansion draft, Duquette put in place the pieces of a blockbuster deal that would bring pitcher Pedro Martinez to Boston. A 26-year-old Dominican right-hander who had been named that year's National League Cy Young Award winner, Martinez had just completed a season during which he went 17–8 with a microscopic 1.90 ERA and an eye-popping 305 strikeouts, numbers that bordered on the superhuman. Originally the property of the Los Angeles Dodgers, the 5-foot-11, 185-pound Martinez had been labeled early in his career by Dodgers ambassador Tommy Lasorda as someone who lacked the physical size to succeed in the major leagues as a starting pitcher; the Dodgers had promptly traded him to Montreal for a second baseman named Delino DeShields. At the time, Martinez was a young and especially raw talent whose natural ability piqued the interest of Montreal's general manager, then a young, budding executive who already had a knack for finding diamonds in the rough.

  The executive's name?

  Dan Duquette.

  Now with the Red Sox, Duquette had the chance to acquire Martinez a second time, this time under far different circumstances. The Expos knew how good Martinez was, but the team could no longer afford him. Martinez was due for a considerable pay raise through arbitration and would be eligible for free agency following the 1998 season, so Montreal general manager Jim Beattie had little choice but to trade him. And because Duquette had drafted shrewdly through the first four years of his tenure as Red Sox GM, Boston was in a position to offer the Expos cheap, young pitching talent (right-handers Carl Pavano and Tony Armas Jr.) in exchange for Martinez, whom Duquette secured to a six-year, $75 million contract that included an option for a seventh season, bringing the value of the deal to $90 million over seven seasons.

  For Wakefield, the impact of the Martinez deal was enormous—and he knew it. Martinez was a true ace among aces, someone whose ability would allow the other pitchers on the Boston staff to settle more comfortably into their roles. The idea of pitching on the same staff as people like Martinez and Saberhagen (who had two career Cy Young Awards to his credit) was beyond appealing. Suddenly, Wakefield found himself with a long-term contract to go along with ample help on the pitching staff and an offense built around affable slugger Mo Vaughn and dynamic young shortstop Garciaparra, all forming the nucleus of a team that could contend for a championship.

  This is the best situation I've ever been in, Wakefield thought.

  He was right.

  And it showed.

  "He's a lot more comfortable and a lot more relaxed," Red Sox pitching coach Joe Kerrigan noted of Wakefield at the start of spring training. "He's established himself now. He's a proven multi-game winner. He doesn't have too many ups and downs with the knuckleball anymore."

  The 1998 Red Sox also enjoyed a relatively stable, solid ride, winning 17 of their first 23 games and rumbling to a 92–70 finish that earned them a return trip to the playoffs for the first time since 1995. Wakefield played an enormous role. Early in the season, he ripped off a stretch of eight consecutive starts during which he went 6–0 with a 3.20 ERA. Shortly thereafter, he went 4–1 with a 4.08 ERA over six consecutive outings. Suddenly, the good stretches were lasting longer and the bad outings were limited to isolated performances now and then, the kind of ebb and flow that was far more customary for reliable, traditional pitchers than it was for knuckleballers (at least in the eyes of the traditional baseball world). The Red Sox were rolling along, and Wakefield suddenly was blessed with the best of both worlds—the durability and resiliency of a knuckleballer and the consistency and reliability of a traditional starter—a blend that indisputably made him one of the very best pitchers in baseball on one of the best teams in baseball.

  In fact, as Wakefield approached the end of the season, he had a chance at one of pitching's truly timeless accomplishments: a 20-win season. Superstitious as ever—and unforgettably battle-scarred—Wakefield dismissed that kind of talk out of hand, saying that such an achievement would be "nice," but that he was "not really thinking about that." Of course, the number was a clear and obvious goal. The tandem of Martinez and Wakefield in particular created quite the contrast: each was within range of 20 victories, the knuckleballer baffling hitters while the fireballing right-hander simply blew them away.

  Two completely different pitching strategies, but with remarkably similar results.

  Said Williams of his tandem, which was more like a trio when Saberhagen was thrown into the mix: "It's like, one day, you're on one of those really fast trains and you go where you're going. The next day, you go back to where you started and get on a stagecoach."

  Whatever the analogy, the Red Sox were enjoying the ride.

  Wakefield finished with a 17–8 record, a 4.58 ERA—the league average was 4.66—and precisely 216 innings pitched, the last statistic ranking second only to Martinez, who faded down the stretch and finished with 19 wins. (No one attributed Martinez's slump to the unpredictable nature of the knuckleball.) The Red Sox faced the Cleveland Indians in the first round of the playoffs and were ousted in four games in the best-of-five affair—Wakefield pitched poorly—but there was nonetheless a feeling in Boston that the Red Sox were building again, primar ily on a foundation that included Martinez, Garciaparra, Wakefield, and Tom Gordon, who turned in a spectacular season after being converted into a reliever.

  In any given game, the Red Sox were good at the beginning, good in the middle, and good at the end.

  For Wakefield, the 17 victories established a career best and gave him 59 wins in 824⅓ innings during his Red Sox career, numbers that translated into 15 victories and 206 innings per season. While those totals underscored Wakefield's value to the club, they also made him one of the best bargains in baseball. Martinez, for instance, had signed a six-year, $75 million contract that guaranteed him $12.5 million a year during the life of the deal, more than three times the average annual value of what the Red Sox were paying Wakefield in his three-year, $12 million deal. And while Martinez was a better pitcher, his bottom-line contributions (63 wins, 886⅓ innings) were not three times as great as those of Wakefield, offering even more evidence that baseball people were willing to spend for fastballs, but the knuckler still made them nervous.

  And then there was this: while someone like Martin
ez had pitched exclusively as a starter during the span—all of his 127 outings were starts—Wakefield had also pitched out of the bullpen, filling gaps when the Red Sox needed him to. His individual statistics suffered as a result, and as he would be reminded throughout his career, his versatility and sacrifices earned him relatively little when it came time to sit down at the negotiating table.

  Still, if they asked, he delivered.

  To Tim Wakefield, the rise of Tom Gordon was, at the very least, instructive.

  Though the Red Sox had signed Tom Gordon as a starter prior to the 1997 season, Gordon had spent his career shuttling to and from the bullpen, a pattern that continued during the 1997 season, his first in Boston. Out of the bullpen, Gordon had been used as a long reliever: he would pitch for two to three innings per appearance, but his outings were limited to roughly two a week. In 1998, in the kind of radical move that Jimy Williams was most unafraid to try, the Red Sox made Gordon their closer, pitching him for one or two innings at a time at the end of games but increasing the frequency of his appearances to three or four a week. The change produced stunning results: Gordon secured a Red Sox record 46 saves in 46 opportunities during a total of 73 appearances, the highest total of his career.

  But in 1999 the predictable happened.

  Gordon injured his weary right throwing arm, suffering ligament damage that all but ended his season.

  While Gordon's injury was unfortunate—most pitchers need the stability of a routine—it also further highlighted the value of someone like Wakefield, whose arm was not just effective but also resilient. Prior to 1998, Gordon had never pitched in more than 49 games in any of his 10 seasons. In 1998 he pitched in 73. And while Gordon's innings total in 1998 was limited to just 79⅓—he had pitched in as many as 215⅔ innings in prior seasons—the change in routine was too much for his arm to endure over an extended period of time, leading to a physical breakdown. The bottom line was that Gordon's arm and pitching style were better suited for slightly longer stints, not shorter ones, though teams were far more interested in him as a short reliever (where he could be dominating) instead of as a starter (where he was generally mediocre).

  With Gordon sidelined, Williams had one logical option at his disposal, young right-hander Derek Lowe. Acquired from the Seattle Mariners in 1997 as a starter, Lowe had been transitioned to the bullpen during the 1998 season, and the results were similarly striking. In 53 appearances out of the bullpen in 1998, Lowe went 3–2 with a sterling 2.88 ERA, becoming one of the more effective setup men in baseball. Lowe's arm had proven quite resilient during the span, and his skill set at that point in his career also was more suited for the bullpen. Baseball evaluators usually reason that a starting pitcher needs at least three effective pitches to succeed in the major leagues—a fastball, curveball, and changeup, for example—because the longer stints require starters to face the same hitter as many as three, four, or five times in a game. In each at-bat, a pitcher needs to be able to offer something different enough to keep the hitter off balance.

  Derek Lowe had a truly dominating sinker that could handcuff even the most skilled right-handed batter, and so the Red Sox began using him in late-inning situations, particularly when a string of right-handed batters was due up.

  The problem was that Lowe was still developing and still quite temperamental, which made him ill suited for the final inning of a game, when the competition intensified and the outcome was often on the line. He just wasn't ready for the stress of closing yet. Williams tried Lowe in the closer's role for a time, with varying degrees of success. The young pitcher had a hard time getting over his failures, suffering the kind of hangover that a manager could not afford in a game that provides precious few breaks along the way. In baseball, as the colorful Martinez liked to point out, there is no crying. There is another game to be played. Mental toughness is a prerequisite.

  And so, with the Red Sox in the midst of a crisis—where were they going to find a closer?—Jimy Williams did something that led many people to wonder whether he was downright cuckoo.

  He turned the responsibility of closing over to his knuckleballer.

  "When [Gordon] got hurt, we put Lowe in that situation," Williams recalled. "To be very honest, he struggled at the outset. The one thing about Wake is that he would always take the ball. He would relieve in between starts—he didn't care. He just wanted the ball, and he was so strong mentally that I believed he could handle it."

  On May 6, 1999, in a game the Red Sox led 3–1 in the ninth inning, Tim Wakefield was among a group of unsuspecting relievers when manager Jimy Williams lifted the receiver from the dugout phone and delivered a message to his relief corps: get Wakefield up. Wakefield glanced at the other relievers in the Boston bullpen, all of them wearing the same surprised facial expression as if it were part of the Boston uniform. Is he serious? The knuckleballer, as always, had made himself available for relief duty between starts, but the Red Sox were in a save situation. In this game, his time had come and gone. No one expected him to close. Wakefield hurriedly began his warm-up routine, his heart "racing a thousand miles an hour"—and his mind hurrying along at roughly the same speed—as left-hander Rheal Cormier began the ninth by retiring Rafael Palmeiro on a lineout. Jimy must be joking. Texas catcher Ivan Rodriguez then singled before Todd Zeile doubled him home. The Red Sox now led by the slimmest of margins, 3–2, with one out and the tying run on second base.

  Williams came out of the dugout and walked to the mound, raising his arm and signaling Wakefield into the game.

  Here we go.

  Now approaching his 33rd birthday, Wakefield had already pitched in an array of pressure situations during his career. He had shone in the 1992 National League Championship Series. On more than one occasion, he had felt as if he was pitching to save his career. And yet, no event during Wakefield's career had made him more nervous than his first closing opportunity, an occasion on which he "specifically felt like my heart was going to beat out of my jersey." Looking tight and restricted in his delivery, Wakefield threw ball one to the left-handed-hitting Lee Stevens. Then he threw ball two. And then, as Wakefield settled into the stretch position to throw his third pitch, a fan sprinted onto the field at Fenway Park, causing a temporary stop in play as security pursued and secured the trespasser. This interruption gave Wakefield a moment to step back off the mound and take a long, deep breath.

  Whew.

  "It was enough to calm me down," he said.

  The third pitch to Lee Stevens was a strike. So was the fourth. The fifth produced a groundout to the left side for the second out, Zeile remaining at second base. Wakefield threw just two more pitches on the day, the last resulting in Luis Alicea's harmless fly ball to right field that landed in the glove of Red Sox outfielder Trot Nixon for the final out in a 3–2 Boston victory that successfully challenged conventional wisdom and earned Wakefield his first career save.

  Wakefield made two more scoreless relief appearances—one in a save situation—before Williams returned him to the starting rotation on May 11. About a month later, when the Red Sox again had a need in their bullpen, Williams made a more significant, longer-term switch.

  "I thought, Wakefield can do this," said the manager. "I went and talked to him, and he was all for it."

  Or so he told his manager.

  Willing as ever to fill a team need, Wakefield had his doubts about closing. He regarded himself as a starter and wasn't sure he was suited for the closer's role, which had an entirely different routine. And yet, as uncomfortable as he was with the switch, Wakefield took a great deal of pride in the fact that Williams had come to him to handle a part of the game that was an enormous responsibility. He felt the obligation to try. Closers are entrusted with leads, and it is their job to transform those advantages into wins. The job is completely different from the job of a starter, who must keep the team close and often has to let other factors determine the outcome.

  For as much second-guessing as Williams endured for his strat
egy, his decision may not have been as unusual as many had deemed it. Knuckleballers had closed games before, after all, the great Hoyt Wilhelm chief among those who had done it effectively. Wilbur Wood had closed, too. But somewhere during the 20 years that separated the end of Wood's career from the heart of Wakefield's, the transformation in baseball had made some beliefs—for lack of a better word—outdated. As the salaries of all players rapidly escalated in the wake of free agency, starters were treated with great care, their outings shortened in hopes of preventing injury. Relievers were used and cast aside like disposable razors, particularly those who pitched in the middle of the game. And the relievers used at the end of a game were almost always intimidating, hard-throwing bullies expected to prevent contact and blow opponents away.

  During that 20-year period, the responsibility of pitching the ninth inning had taken on colossal proportions, and so managers took no chances. They wanted strikeouts. Any contact on the part of an opposing hitter could be costly. Even brilliant and widely respected men like Jim Leyland fretted at the prospect of a ground ball to shortstop in the ninth inning, let alone a passed ball or stolen base, and so the idea of closing with anyone but a fireballer was deemed illogical.

  A knuckleballer?

  That was, in a word, crazy.

  Maybe even stupid.

  Nonetheless, between June 13 and August 17, 1999, Jimy Williams summoned Tim Wakefield out of the bullpen 25 times, 15 of those appearances coming in save situations. Wakefield successfully converted 12 and blew three. Though he remained skeptical about himself in the closer role, he got used to it. He adapted. During that stretch, the Red Sox went 17–8 in Wakefield's 25 appearances and remained in the thick of playoff contention. Once again, the knuckleballer provided great stability in an area where the Red Sox desperately needed it. During one game in Kansas City, Wakefield's knuckleball was moving so unpredictably that young catcher Jason Varitek simply could not handle it, the pitch producing the kind of results that led Williams's critics and other skeptics to offer a predictable I told you so.