Knuckler (16 page)

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 going 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.

On that night, quite simply, Tim Wakefield was being made a sacrificial lamb. The Red Sox were in such a battered state that they needed someone to give their pitching staff a reprieve.

Who better than the team knuckleballer?

Had he been wired differently, Wakefield might have bristled at such a request. Future Sox great Pedro Martinez, for instance, sacrificed a start and prematurely pulled the plug on his 2002 season because the Sox were out of contention. Wakefield took the opposite approach.
I can do something for the team that other guys can't and won't.
The knuckleballer offered no complaints and no excuses for the outing, which once again landed him in the history books.

Over a 50-year span since 1960, only seven pitchers in baseball have pitched a complete game while allowing as many as 16 hits and 19 base runners; no one has done it since Wakefield in 1996. The feat, in fact, has been accomplished only 16 times since 1920; six of those performances came in games in which the starting pitcher received at least 10 runs from his offense, and three came in games that featured 18 or more runs of support for the pitcher. Indeed, modern pitchers are almost never asked to do what Wakefield did for the Red Sox that night, which was to completely swallow his pride and sacrifice his own personal statistics—Wakefield's ERA climbed from 5.70 to 5.80—while the rest of the pitching staff licked its wounds.

At the lowest point of the 1996 Red Sox season, Tim Wakefield did the dirty work.

Truth be told, Wakefield's sacrifices went beyond one start, a fact that was sorely overlooked at a time when the Red Sox were struggling and team followers had no frame of reference with regard to Wakefield's value. Kennedy, in fact, had moved Wakefield up a day, pitching him on three days of rest, for a very specific reason: doing so effectively would give Red Sox relievers and pitchers three full days of rest, an unheard-of break during the course of the season. On Sunday, Sox pitchers had labored through a day game against Milwaukee. On Monday, they had the day off. On Tuesday, Wakefield gave everyone a break. By the time starter Vaughn Eshelman took the mound for the second game of the Chicago series, nearly 72 hours had passed since someone other than Wakefield had thrown a pitch in a game.

With their arms at least temporarily recharged, the Red Sox went on their longest winning streak of the season, claiming four straight victories and five in six games. Wakefield suffered the only loss, a development that was unsurprising. Coming off his sacrificial 158-pitch outing against the White Sox, Wakefield took the mound for the third time in nine days and allowed five runs in the first inning of an eventual 13–3 loss to the Texas Rangers. Overall, the Red Sox certainly were
playing better, but their short-term improvement had come at the expense of their knuckleballer, whose first half had consisted of starts on short rest and abnormally long rest, as well as outings in which he allowed 16 hits and 10 unearned runs.

As the Red Sox were stabilizing, Tim Wakefield was being jerked all over the place.

Part of him wondered if anybody noticed.

Part of him didn't care.

He was simply happy to have a job.

For whatever reason—the law of averages, the actions of management, or the resiliency of their players—the Red Sox made a complete turnaround at the midpoint of their 1996 season. Frustrated with the team's defensive play, particularly in the middle of the diamond, general manager Dan Duquette acquired second baseman Jeff Frye from the Texas Rangers and, later, outfielder Darren Bragg from the Seattle Mariners. Frye and Bragg were both gritty, competitive players who infused the Red Sox with the kind of fight they had lacked during the first three months of the season.

As soon as the Red Sox stabilized, Wakefield, too, found a comfort zone, offering further evidence of the symbiotic relationship that could exist between a knuckleballer and the team for which he pitched.