Knuckler

  In fact, on some levels, Wakefield thought the entire winter felt like a cleansing. Carl Everett, for one, was traded to the Texas Rangers, and disgruntled veterans like Dante Bichette and Mike Lansing, who had been unhappy with their roles in Boston, left the club via free agency. Wakefield had healthy relationships with all of those players—as he did with most everyone—but he also felt that the Sox lacked chemistry and cohesion in 2001, and he knew the clubhouse needed changes. He wondered about the effect of his blowup with Kerrigan, with whom he had not reconciled, but he tried to prepare for the coming season as he had always done. He ran and got his legs in shape. He strengthened his upper body and core. He began throwing before camp and got his arm in shape. Baseball was his job, no matter who was in charge, and Wakefield believed that it was his responsibility to show up ready to contribute.

  As it turned out, the changes in the Boston organization were broader and deeper than even Wakefield expected, and they shook the Red Sox at the highest levels.

  When Wakefield arrived for spring training, the feeling was unlike any other spring during his time in Boston. More changes were coming, and everybody knew it. The uncertainty was palpable. Over the winter the Red Sox had installed former Sox catcher Mike Stanley as Kerrigan's bench coach, a move that Wakefield welcomed and thought was a good one. As a player, Stanley had been an enormously popular player in the clubhouse and someone to whom everyone went for advice, from superstars like Martinez to clubhouse attendant Joe Cochran. Wakefield and Stanley were friends and fellow Florida natives. As teammates, they had spent time fishing together during the off-season. Wakefield confided in Stanley throughout that winter, relying on the new bench coach as a conduit to his manager.

  What's my role going to be, Mike? Just let me know how Joe wants to use me.

  Mike Stanley never really had to answer Wakefield's questions.

  Though the new owners of the Red Sox were not formally installed until early March, heads almost instantly began to roll. Duquette was fired and replaced by assistant general manager Mike Port, who was named Duquette's successor on an interim basis. Wakefield breathed a sigh of relief when the new administration similarly wasted little time in disposing of Kerrigan. A search for a new manager began immediately. Wakefield hoped that the changes would result in his return to the starting rotation, but there was no way of knowing that until the Red Sox hired a new manager. Boston's search was believed to include Grady Little, who had been a bench coach during the early years of Jimy Williams's tenure. Wakefield beamed at the prospect of playing for Little, particularly following the departure of Kerrigan, because Little was someone he liked and a baseball man who understood him.

  The state of flux during this challenging time for the Red Sox was a feeling Wakefield knew all too well.

  In some ways, I feel used to this.

  My whole career has been a state of flux.

  Midway through March, with opening day rapidly approaching, Wakefield showed up at the team's spring stadium, as he did every morning, and parked his car in the gated lot behind City of Palms Park. He walked through the back entrance, said hello to security personnel, and strolled to his locker at the far left corner of a rectangular Red Sox clubhouse. Wakefield changed into his uniform and spent much of the morning sitting in the chair in front of his locker, which was stationed next to a set of stairs that descended down to the runway, which led to the Red Sox dugout at their spring home. Beyond the stairs was a hallway that housed a bat rack and led to the team offices, a corridor that essentially connected the uniformed members of the Red Sox to management.

  Later that morning, as Wakefield sat at his locker, a succession of Sox officials came through that corridor. Lucchino, Werner, and Henry all entered the room, and all three men were present as team president Lucchino addressed the team. The room was otherwise si lent. Lucchino told the players that the Red Sox were going through a transitional time, that the changes could be hard on all of them, but that things were steadily beginning to settle. The new owners were committed to winning. And then Lucchino introduced the man who would be the next manager of the Red Sox. Grady Little strolled into the room from the corridor to Tim Wakefield's immediate left as Wakefield and his Red Sox teammates exploded into thunderous applause.

  The worst is behind us.

  We're starting over.

  Though Little was unfamiliar to some of the new members of the Red Sox, many of the existing Sox knew him and adored him from his previous tenure as a bench coach with the club. Little spoke in a slow, southern drawl and never seemed to overreact to anything, and he had a clever wit to go along with his easygoing nature. He made others laugh and kept them loose, and he had enjoyed Williams's complete confidence as bench coach because both had most recently come from the Atlanta Braves organization, where Little had been an accomplished minor league manager. Little knew how to speak with players, and he knew how to treat them. Those skills made him a most refreshing and welcome change given the shortcomings of Kerrigan.

  The moment Little appeared in the clubhouse, Wakefield felt an enormous sense of relief. This guy knows me and knows what I can do. Because the Red Sox were so late into camp, and because roster decisions had been made, Little informed Wakefield that he would remain in the bullpen to start the year. The simplest truth was that it was far too late to make changes. Wakefield still wanted to start, to be sure, but as he lamented his plight in the past to Little, he felt like he could communicate openly with his new manager. His specific role didn't seem to matter as much anymore. As bench coach of the Red Sox, Grady Little had heard out Wakefield on more than one occasion, and he had assured Wakefield that his contributions were valuable.

  "I just felt like he appreciated me," Wakefield said.

  And in the end, that was really all Tim Wakefield wanted.

  In the first month of the 2002 season, thanks to unforeseen injuries and issues, Wakefield made two starts and three relief appearances, recording a win and a save while posting a 3.10 ERA. Over the next three months, he pitched almost exclusively out of the bullpen. On the morning of July 31, Wakefield was 4–3 with a 3.50 ERA and three saves, again having filled any and all gaps the Red Sox had asked him to fill. He was having another good year. The Red Sox had gotten off to a blazing start under Little before playing the final months of the season on a rather uninspiring plateau. They began the season 40–17 and finished it 53–52—for a total of 93–69—and ended up missing the playoffs by six games. Their spot in the standings was partly the result of a bullpen that undermined their efforts, but also partly the effect of an unusual season in which the fourth and final American League playoff spot, the wild-card entry, went to an Anaheim Angels team that had won 99 games.

  Beginning on July 31, because of injuries, Little had permanently moved Wakefield into the starting rotation, a decision that paid enormous dividends for the team as well as the player. Over the final two months, Wakefield went 7–2 with a 2.01 ERA while the Red Sox went 8–3 in his 11 starts. He was positively brilliant. Opponents batted a paltry .193 against him, and he walked just 20 batters in 76 innings, a rate of 2.4 walks per nine innings that would have been commendable for a traditional pitcher. Wakefield finished the year with an 11–5 record, a 2.81 ERA, and three saves to go along with the lowest ERA of his Red Sox career, all as he approached an off-season during which the Red Sox again held an option on his contract.

  Suddenly, all of the pieces for Wakefield seemed to be back in place. He had a manager who understood and appreciated him. He had acquired the wisdom and experience of a veteran knuckleballer. And he had reason to believe that the best years of his career were still in front of him and that the worst was indeed behind him.

  Still, for Tim Wakefield, the damage done to his career during the Kerrigan years remained impossible to overlook.

  During the four-year period from 1999 to 2002—what should have been the heart and peak of his career—Wakefield pitched in 190 games and made only 66 starts, his versatility hur
ting him as much as it helped him. Given what Wakefield had contributed to the Red Sox prior to that span—and what he would contribute after—it is clear that the Red Sox badly misused him. From 1995 to 1998, a four-year period during which Wakefield was used as a starter (with relief outings when necessary), he had averaged 15 wins and 206 innings per season; during the period 2003 to 2005, the three years after his turbulent four-year stretch, Wakefield would similarly average 13 victories and 205 innings. The four-year period from 1999 to 2002 thus stands out as a time when the Red Sox failed to get maximum use out of their knuckleballer, depriving him of the victories that by 2010 would already have made him the winningest pitcher in Red Sox history.

  Let's look at the numbers: Wakefield's contributions during those seasons was an 8–10 record and a 4.28 ERA over a yearly average of 157⅔ innings pitched. Wakefield did record 21 saves during that span, but the Red Sox cost themselves roughly 50 fewer innings (or 150 outs) per year while stripping Wakefield of a potential 20 to 28 wins—the figure that would have delivered him to the highest total in club history.

  "There aren't a lot of people who understand the value of a knuckleballer on your staff," Duquette admitted. "There were people on Tim's [coaching] staff, in our clubhouse [from 1999 to 2002], who didn't understand Tim's value to the team. Those were misconceptions.

  "Did Joe Kerrigan fail to understand Tim? Absolutely," Duquette continued. "That's part of the story. It boggles my mind as to why there aren't more knuckleball pitchers in major league baseball. It's a hard pitch to master, but you have more time to master it. Look at the amount of money that major league teams spend on pitching, and look at the amount of money that teams spend on pitchers who are on the disabled list."

  Indeed, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, baseball was littered with so many bad pitching contracts that teams became increasingly wary of signing veteran, free-agent pitchers. The Yankees, for example, signed right-hander Carl Pavano (the same man whom the Red Sox traded for Martinez in late 1997) to a guaranteed contract worth $40 million over the 2005–08 seasons. When Pavano made just 26 starts and pitched only 145⅔ innings during that four-year period, New York ended up paying him slightly more than $91,743 per out. The Dodgers signed veteran right-hander Jason Schmidt to a three-year contract worth a guaranteed $47 million from 2007 to 2009, a period during which Schmidt made a mere 10 starts and pitched just 43⅓ innings, numbers that translate into a shade more than $361,538 per out. After experiences like these, teams came to the conclusion that they could pay younger, healthier pitchers far less and get far more, a realization that could dramatically shorten the prime earning years of an established major league pitcher.

  And yet, during a period in which the Red Sox had one of the game's most efficient and cost-effective weapons in Wakefield, the team used him improperly. From 1999 to 2002, when used largely as a reliever, Wakefield cost the Red Sox a little more than $7,761 per out, a figure that still made him a valuable commodity. But in those seasons between 1995 and 2005 when Wakefield was used as a starter, the Sox got a better pitcher for even less—approximately $4,546 per out—while teams like the Yankees and Dodgers were spending tens (or hundreds) of thousands per out on damaged, inferior goods.

  During that time, Joe Kerrigan did not merely cost Tim Wakefield wins.

  He hurt the Red Sox, too.

  Fortunately for the knuckleballing Wakefield, the new owners and operators of the Red Sox were not about to make the same mistake.

  Nine

  It's like snowflakes—no two are ever alike.

  —Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek describing Tim Wakefield's knuckleball

  THE RED SOX had far more pressing questions than their veteran knuckleballer entering the 2003 season. Theo Epstein, the team's new and progressive young general manager, was planting the seeds of dramatic change.

  Tim Wakefield, for once, was a constant far more than a variable, the Red Sox having signed him to a new three-year contract for slightly more than $13 million almost immediately after the season. During the winter, on numerous occasions, Epstein and Little had made it quite clear that Wakefield would be a starter. The knuckleballer's personal life similarly tumbled into place over the winter when he married his girlfriend, Stacy Stover, a Boston-area native to whom he had been introduced by a friend at a kickoff party for a charity golf tournament.

  Finally, I feel like I can stop worrying so much.

  Indeed, almost everyone around the Red Sox was focused on other things. Much of the skepticism surrounding the Red Sox concerned the absence of a true closer, a deficit that raised eyebrows around baseball given that an effective closer was now thought to be a fundamental ingredient of any winning team. That was only one of the long-held beliefs that Epstein was willing to challenge. The new general manager had signed a handful of relievers during the off-season—right-handers Mike Timlin, Chad Fox, and Ramiro Mendoza chief among them—and his idea, shared by manager Little, was to employ them in situations that best suited their specific skill sets. With left-hander Alan Embree and right-hander Bobby Howry in the mix, too, the idea was to give Little as many options as possible on any given night to effectively play a game of musical chairs with both his bullpen and opposing lineups.

  Some nights, Mendoza might close. The responsibility might belong to Fox in the next game. Timlin and Howry both had some closing experience to their credit, as did Embree, though none of them had excelled in the role. Regardless, Epstein and Little theorized that, since sometimes the most important outs of a game are recorded not in the ninth inning but in the seventh or eighth, it made little sense to have a closer and to earmark him exclusively for the ninth. They believed that their closer-by-committee system, as it came to be called, could work.

  Of course, the experiment failed miserably. With no clear responsibilities on a nightly basis, Red Sox relievers struggled mightily. For as much as their theory made perfect sense—it had been promoted by longtime statistical analyst Bill James, whom the Red Sox had hired—it completely disregarded the human element. Relievers, like most baseball players, are accustomed to specific job descriptions and responsibilities. Some pitch in the seventh, some pitch in the eighth, some pitch in the sixth. Some face only left-handers, and others face largely right-handers. The uncertainty that came with the closer-by-committee approach required the Red Sox pitchers to be ready at all times. They were left unsettled, uncertain of when or how they would be used on any given night.

  Performing under those kinds of conditions was extremely difficult.

  And given his experience as a starter or reliever at a moment's notice, Tim Wakefield could have told them that.

  Fittingly, the Sox blew the season opener in the ninth inning of a game at Tampa Bay (then a vastly inferior team) when Fox surrendered a three-run home run to Carl Crawford on the final pitch of the game. For Epstein and Little, the game was their worst nightmare come true. The Red Sox had held a 4–1 lead entering the ninth thanks to the typical brilliance of Martinez, but both Embree and Fox melted in the heat of a closing situation. Culminating with Crawford's homer, the pair of relievers allowed five runs and dealt the Sox a 6–4 defeat. The bullpen problems continued for much of the first two months of the season, ultimately forcing Epstein to make a trade for a closer. At the end of May, he acquired enigmatic Korean right-hander Byung-Hyun Kim, who also came with question marks. Most recently, he had been starting for the Diamondbacks after a tumultuous experience trying to close for Arizona against the Yankees in the 2001 World Series. He was just 24 years old, however, and possessed dynamic talent, a combination that appealed to someone like Epstein.

  "It hasn't been good enough. We've got to be better," Little said of his team's pitching woes. "I don't think very many times in our careers can we look at the stat sheet and see a team ranked in pitching where we are and be in the standings where we are. That speaks a lot for our offense."

  While Epstein refused to entirely give up on the closer-by-committee approach, leaving the
door open for another attempt sometime during his baseball career—"I still believe it can work," he said—the 2003 Red Sox had too much at stake for the experiment to continue any longer. Wakefield had suspected that the Sox might come to that realization. During his time with the Red Sox, Wakefield had effectively shuttled between the starting rotation and the bullpen, which was difficult enough to manage. But at least on many of those occasions Wakefield had known what his role would be and could mentally prepare himself for it. On the one most obvious occasion when he was caught by surprise—the first time Williams brought him into a game to close in 1999—Wakefield had nearly been overcome with anxiety and was able to calm himself only through the serendipity of a spectator running onto the field and stopping the game. Wakefield did not know Mike Timlin, Alan Embree, and the other new relievers especially well at that point, but he knew that if all players, like most anyone, need time to prepare, that was especially true for relievers, who are usually thrust into games under already difficult circumstances.

  Adding an additional level of uncertainty to the reliever's role would turn the final innings of a game into a fire drill.

  Still, on the more positive side, the events of the first two months had made two other things quite clear. First, Little was right about the prolific Red Sox offense: Boston had an extremely potent lineup that could overcome deficiencies in the pitching staff. Second, the early-season developments proved that Theo Epstein was fearless when it came to challenging the establishment and that the young general manager was, in many ways, a revolutionary thinker open to all kinds of ideas and suggestions. At just 29 years old, Epstein was willing to try things that others were not. A lifetime spent in the game had not tainted him. Epstein believed in performance, for sure, but he also had a more modern, analytical approach to baseball that allowed him to measure things that others could not or would not.