Knuckler

by Tim Wakefield

  Though his bullpen was now pitching extremely well—Boston relievers had pitched 6⅓ scoreless innings to that point in the series—Little nonetheless sent Wakefield out to the mound for the eighth, albeit on a very short leash. When Wakefield opened the inning by walking Giambi on his 100th pitch of the game, Little hooked his knuckleballer and turned the game over to Timlin, who retired the next three batters. Williamson followed and surrendered Boston's first bullpen run of the series on a solo home run by Ruben Sierra, but the reliever responded by striking out both David Dellucci and Alfonso Soriano to preserve a 3–2 Red Sox victory that stabilized the series in every way imaginable.

  Two days after questioning the methods of the Red Sox starter, Torre found himself now praising a Boston pitcher.

  "He was terrific. . . . I have a great deal of respect for him," said the esteemed Yankees skipper. "He's probably great for a manager because you can start him, you can relieve him, he's pretty durable, and he's a class act."

  Said Little: "He has come through very big for us in the two games he's started here in this series. It couldn't happen to a better fella. This guy has pitched well for us, and he's been very consistent throughout the season. We're just glad he's on our side right now."

  Indeed, there was no telling where the Red Sox would have been without Wakefield at that point. In his last three appearances—Game 4 of the Oakland series and Games 1 and 4 of the Yankees series—the Red Sox were 3–0. In the ALCS, now tied 2–2, Wakefield had both Boston victories. Wakefield had pitched in four postseason games overall and posted a 2.61 ERA, evoking memories of his performance for the Pittsburgh Pirates as a 26-year-old unknown in 1992.

  For the Red Sox, however, Game 4 had come at a price. Because of the rainout, Boston and New York lost an off-day that had been scheduled between Games 4 and 5. Beginning with Game 4, and barring additional weather issues, the clubs would be required to play the final four games of the series in four days. That schedule would make it harder for Little to make the best use of Wakefield's versatility—and Lowe's as well—at least until the series reached a seventh game.

  Fearful of matching Burkett against the Yankees, Little went to Lowe for Game 5. Torre, by contrast, opted for the more rested David Wells, who had yet to pitch in the series. (By doing this, Torre lined up Andy Pettitte, who had defeated Lowe in Game 2, to pitch Game 6.) The Yankees scored three times in the second inning to take early command of Game 5 and stake Wells to a 3–1 lead through seven innings. Once more, Little sent his starter back out for the eighth inning, a decision that again backfired when Lowe walked the leadoff man. Little left Lowe in the game for two more at-bats. The second was Jorge Posada, who stroked a one-out single that placed runners at first and third base—the key blow during an inning in which the Yankees would extend their lead to 4–1.

  Though Embree was on the mound when the Yankees extended their lead that inning, the run was officially charged to Lowe, who left the runner in scoring position when he departed the game amid more questions about Little's unwillingness to trust his bullpen. Lowe finished the game with 119 pitches, a total surpassed only by Martinez in any postseason game played by the Red Sox after 1990 (the point in time when teams became increasingly cautious about overburden ing their starters). Martinez, for his part, had thrown more than 119 pitches on only two occasions during his Red Sox career, but one of them was Game 1 of the Oakland series, when Little had allowed his ace to throw a preposterous 130 pitches.

  Torre, by contrast, yanked Wells after the seventh and turned the game over to rested and trusted closer Mariano Rivera, who closed out a 4–2 Yankees win and sent the series back to New York with the Yankees holding a 3–2 series edge.

  Once again, the Red Sox were on the brink.

  And yet, as the team traveled to New York, Wakefield felt exactly as he had all year long—that the Red Sox were far from dead.

  This is when we do our best work.

  Now faced with almost no choice but to start Burkett in Game 6, the Red Sox came out and made an early dent in Pettitte, erasing an early 1–0 deficit with four runs in the third inning. After the Yankees responded with an outburst of their own and took a 6–4 lead into the seventh—Burkett was long gone by then—the Sox scored three times in the seventh against reliever Jose Contreras and twice more in the ninth on a towering home run by Trot Nixon, cruising to a 9–6 victory that evened the series at 3–3 and forced a decisive Game 7. Despite Burkett's difficulties, the Red Sox had shut down the Yankees over the final 5⅓ innings thanks to the continued and entirely unexpected brilliance of the Boston bullpen, which was redeeming itself tenfold.

  As usual, Game 7 left no uncertainties. In a rematch of the emotional Game 3, Martinez and Clemens were the scheduled starters. Both managers were expected to exhaust all options on their pitching staffs. The Red Sox quickly came out and hammered Clemens for three runs in the second inning—two on a homer by Nixon—then extended the lead to 4–0 in the top of the fourth. Boston seemed poised to break open the game when a desperate Torre summoned his starter in Games 1 and 4—the surgical Mussina—in hopes of preserving any chance at a Yankees win. And just as Lowe and Wakefield had done for Little and the Red Sox at earlier points during the postseason, Mussina stabilized what was a very shaky situation for the Yankees, preventing major damage and keeping New York within striking distance.

  Martinez, meanwhile, shut the Yankees out for the first four innings before allowing solo home runs to Giambi in the fifth and seventh. On the latter occasion, the Yankees followed with consecutive, two-out singles by pinch hitter Sierra and outfielder Garcia before Martinez struck out Alfonso Soriano, leaving the Red Sox with a 4–2 lead entering the eighth inning and leaving Little in an eerily familiar situation that had presented itself over and over again throughout the playoffs.

  His starter or his relievers?

  Which way should he go?

  Seated in the Red Sox bullpen by that point—it was Game 7, after all—Wakefield similarly wondered which option his manager would choose. It was one of the major disadvantages of being a reliever. In any baseball game, the dugout served as master control, that place where things were discussed and decisions made. Out in the bullpen, particularly during intense postseason play, relievers could feel lost and detached. Okay, what are we going to do here? Little could call down to the bullpen and ask relievers to begin warming, as he did in Game 7, but nobody in the bullpen was privy to the discussions taking place in the dugout on a pitch-by-pitch basis. It was not as if Little could keep them on speakerphone. Relievers could do nothing but watch through the tensest moments, like spectators, until a call came or a decision was made. Okay, now go! The situation was unsettling for the relievers, who could get just as anxious as any nervous fan glued to the television set.

  After the Sox extended the lead to 5–2 in the top of the eighth on a home run by Ortiz, Little sent Martinez back out for the eighth despite the availability of a bullpen that had pitched brilliantly throughout the series. Wakefield did not wonder so much about whether that was the right decision as he did about when relievers might be thrust into duty. Timlin and Embree had warmed and were hot, fully prepared to enter the game, as Martinez allowed one hit, then another, then another. The Yankees strung together four hits in all, the last a two-run hit by the switch-hitting Posada that locked the game at 5–5. Like the rest of the Red Sox relievers, Wakefield only watched. As much of New England groaned in horror and disbelief, Embree and Timlin finally were summoned and worked out of the inning, but the damage had been done. The game was now tied, and New York had the momentum. Martinez had thrown 123 pitches—the second-highest total by a Sox pitcher since 1990 in the team's postseason history—and there was the indisputable feeling that the Sox had just blown their chance.

  Red Sox fans had seen this kind of thing far too many times, after all, to think that things would end well.

  With each manager now operating as if the next run would determine the outcome of his team's sea
son—next run wins—Torre turned the game over to his closer, the incomparable Rivera, already by then regarded as one of the great postseason performers of all time. Because the game was in New York, that option was also a luxury afforded Torre that Little did not possess: even if the Red Sox went ahead, Little still needed someone to get the last three outs. Torre, by contrast, needed to shut down the Red Sox first and score later, a fact that inspired him to use Rivera for three full innings, the second-longest postseason relief appearance of the pitcher's career. Little countered by using Timlin for 1⅓ innings, then did what he had done throughout the playoffs.

  He turned to one of his starters.

  And given the early developments of the series with the Yankees, he called upon Tim Wakefield over Derek Lowe.

  Taking the ball with only two days of rest after his Game 4 performance—Wakefield, in fact, had speculated that he might be able to pitch as soon as Game 5 if needed—the knuckleballer jogged to the mound for the 10th inning with the same confidence he had possessed throughout the series. I still feel locked in. He set the Yankees down in order in the bottom of the 10th. Wakefield then returned to the mound for the bottom of the 11th and took his customary warm-up pitches before Mirabelli fired the ball down to second base—Mirabelli, unsurprisingly, had entered the game precisely when Wakefield did—before Wakefield stepped onto the mound for one of the most devastating and unforeseen moments in his career.

  As he had done so many times, Wakefield planted his fingernails into the cover of the baseball and spun on his right heel, kicking his left leg into the air as he cocked his arm. Grip, kick, throw. He lofted a knuckleball that harmlessly floated to home plate, targeted for the lap of his catcher, but Yankees third baseman Aaron Boone swung and connected squarely, lofting a parabolic blow that headed like a final cannonball into the left-field seats at a delirious Yankee Stadium.

  Before the ball had even landed, a knowing Wakefield slumped off the mound as Boone raised his arm triumphantly and jogged to first base, declaring a 6–5 Yankees win that delivered New York to the World Series. The knuckleballer lowered his head and dropped his shoulders, disappearing down the runway steps and into the Boston clubhouse, where he broke down and confessed his greatest fear to his close friend and confidant Joe Cochran, a New England native and longtime Red Sox employee.

  "I just became Bill Buckner," he wept.

  In a somber Boston clubhouse after the defeat, as some Red Sox players refused to concede that the Yankees were a better team, Wakefield stood before his locker and wondered how one of the best years of his career could have ended so badly. He never saw the end coming. Just a few innings earlier, with Boston holding a 5–2 lead, he had stood to be the Most Valuable Player of the American League Championship Series. Now he had trouble seeing himself as anything other than Buckner. Prior to Boone's homer, the Red Sox and Yankees had played 64 innings in the ALCS and scored precisely 29 runs each, a testament to just how evenly matched the teams were. Red Sox players repeated over and over again that Wakefield was not to be blamed for the loss, that he was to be praised for the manner in which he performed, that he was to be lauded for the grace he demonstrated to the bitter end.

  Wakefield felt inconsolable. I let us down. He had spent an entire career priding himself on being a team player, on doing whatever was necessary for his team to win, on doing the grunt work. He did that for his teammates, for them, more than he did it for anyone else. Now he felt as if he had failed them. Now he felt like a bad teammate. Almost to a man, the Sox players took turns attempting to console him—Timlin, Mirabelli, all of them—and yet Wakefield simply could not shake the feeling that he had ruined things for them, that he would be regarded as an eternal failure by Red Sox fans, that he forever owed an apology to anyone who had invested in the 2003 Red Sox as he had.

  I'm so sorry.

  Of course, Wakefield had nothing to be sorry for.

  The end of Game 7 in 2003 proved to be nothing more than a beginning.

  And Tim Wakefield soon would learn that the curse of being the next Bill Buckner would descend on someone else, and that the life of a knuckleballer could rise again as acutely as it dipped.

  Ten

  You don't catch a knuckleball, you defend against it.

  —Longtime catcher and manager Joe Torre

  ROUGHLY THREE MONTHS after Aaron Boone ended Boston's 85th consecutive season without a World Series championship, Tim Wakefield fidgeted at the base of a small staircase, waiting for his introduction to a dinner crowd of about 1,000. As always, the knuckleballer tried to get a handle. Wakefield had become a regular attendee and crowd favorite at the annual Boston Baseball Writers dinner, but this year he simply did not know what to expect.

  While dinners like this one had died off in most every other major baseball market in America, the annual event in Boston was still thriving, further evidence of the passion the city held for the Red Sox.

  The dinner represented Wakefield's first opportunity to assess public sentiment in the wake of the Boone homer, which had caused him great anxiety over the winter. He was still worried about his legacy. He still wondered whether fans would forgive him. At the dinner, Wakefield mingled with his teammates, members of the media, and Sox officials beforehand, his typically pleasant manner disguising his concerns as he approached the dais to address the crowd. What if I get booed? What if they won't take me back? Thoughts like these weighed on him. Wakefield had spent nine full seasons with the Red Sox, and he had found a home in Boston. He knew, however, that Red Sox history was littered with tragic figures, from Johnny Pesky (who allegedly held the ball as Enos Slaughter scored the winning run in the 1946 World Series) to manager Joe McCarthy (who bypassed young lefty Mel Parnell in favor of veteran righty Denny Galehouse in a one-game playoff in 1948) to Buckner himself. In a place like Boston, there was no outrunning your past.

  What if they don't forgive me?

  Later, as Boston baseball writers and various baseball players, coaches, and executives lined up to be introduced to the crowd, Wakefield's pulse quickened. His mind raced, too. Had things turned out differently, he might have won a World Series by now, maybe been the Most Valuable Player of two League Championship Series. Instead, he was left to wonder whether a single, floating knuckler could undo the work of a career during which he had thrown thousands upon thousands of pitches.

  His name was finally announced to the crowd, and as Wakefield stepped up the small staircase onto the dais the room erupted with applause. Fans stood and clapped wildly. Not a single person dissented. Wakefield's body and mind eased all at once, relief and emotion washing through him. Red Sox fans seemed to embrace him the way a father would a dejected Little Leaguer.

  It's not your fault. You did your best. We're proud of you.

  "I had tears in my eyes," Wakefield said.

  Indeed, for all of the criticisms Red Sox fans had absorbed over the years, they could prove to be an extremely compassionate lot. Had Wakefield thoroughly reviewed the tale of Buckner, for instance, he would have discovered the ending to be far happier than most realized. Released by the Red Sox during the 1987 season nine months after his historic blunder against the New York Mets in the 1986 World Series, Buckner returned three years later during spring training of 1990. Then an aged, broken-down veteran, he was a long shot to make the team. Buckner nevertheless had a productive spring and played his way onto the team's opening day roster, and he hobbled onto the field from the top step of the dugout when he was customarily introduced, along with the rest of the Red Sox, to the opening day crowd at Fenway Park.

  To the surprise of no one that day, Bill Buckner was cheered wildly, a sellout crowd at Fenway Park standing throughout the ovation.

  Bill Buckner, like Tim Wakefield in January 2004, felt like a hero.

  During the 88 days between Boone's homer and Wakefield's first public appearance in Boston, the Red Sox had undergone dramatic changes and another scapegoat had been identified. Shortly after the Game 7 loss
to the Yankees, amid escalating public outcry about the manner in which Grady Little had handled his pitching staff throughout the postseason and, more specifically, in Game 7 of the Yankees series, the Red Sox fired their manager. Grady Little, as it turned out, was the one who would be labeled the scapegoat for their failure in the ALCS and lumped with Bill Buckner. From owners John Henry and Tom Werner down to team president Larry Lucchino and Epstein, the Red Sox seemed more determined than ever to improve a team that possessed a champion's heart and drive—if not the pitching staff. Even though the Red Sox front office felt that Little had become an obstruction during the playoffs, they also acknowledged that the manager frequently was forced to play musical chairs with a pitching staff that was a little short on both ends. Several changes were in order.

  First, following Little's firing, the Sox hired the more cerebral Terry Francona as manager, hoping for a leader who could both handle modern players and effectively manage the game. Second, Epstein orchestrated a blockbuster trade with the Arizona Diamondbacks that brought ace and certified big-game starter Curt Schilling to Boston for a package of prospects. Third, the Sox signed A's closer Keith Foulke as a free agent to bring order to a bullpen that had lacked a reliable anchor until the final days of Boston's postseason.

  The message was clear.

  The Red Sox weren't fooling around.

  Watching and listening with great interest from his home in Melbourne, Wakefield was surprised and saddened at the dismissal of Little, who had been a key element in returning the knuckleballer to his rightful place in the starting rotation. He liked Grady. He believed in Grady. He felt that teams won and lost together, and the reality of the game sometimes frustrated him. Little might have summoned Embree and Timlin in place of Martinez in Game 7, and the Red Sox still might have lost. Had Martinez been more effective, the Red Sox might have won. There had been countless points in that game, as in every other, where events could have turned, both teams missing opportunities along the way that might have changed the outcome.