Knuckler (2 page)

Indeed, for an array of reasons, Wakefield grew to be loved in Boston, a very traditional, guarded, and skeptical city where self-promotion is frowned upon, social responsibility is stressed, and group thinking is encouraged. As surely as Wakefield became part of the Red Sox in 1995, he also became part of the
city.
He routinely participated in charitable endeavors for the Jimmy Fund and Boston Children's Hospital as surely as he did for the Space Coast Early Intervention Center in his native Melbourne, Florida. At the end of the 2010 major league baseball season, Wakefield had finally won the award for which he had been nominated
seven times
: the prestigious and comprehensive Roberto Clemente Award. Named for the philanthropic Hall of Famer who began his career in Pittsburgh, like Wakefield, this annual award goes to the major leaguer who "best exemplifies the game of baseball, sportsmanship, community involvement, and the individual's contribution to his team."

The Red Sox, too, recognized this quality in Wakefield as surely as anyone. When the team mailed out a brochure highlighting its community contributions in 2010, Wakefield was the first player featured in it; on a similar billboard overlooking the Massachusetts Turnpike, Wakefield was the only player pictured.

"He has a wonderful reputation in baseball," said commissioner Allan "Bud" Selig. "We take for granted all the really decent human beings we have in the major leagues. Tim Wakefield ranks at the top of the list."

Amid all of that, of course, Wakefield also distinguished himself as a
pitcher,
no small feat given his reliance on the schizophrenic knuckler, which can destroy careers as easily—or perhaps
more
easily—as it can build them. By definition, the knuckleball is fickle. The knuckleball is wild. The idea is to relinquish almost all control and unleash the knuckleball in such a manner that its natural tendencies take hold, allowing the pitch to crazily float, flutter, and, ultimately, flummox.

The risks are enormous, and the rewards potentially great.

In his 16 seasons as a member of the Red Sox, Wakefield did not merely pitch more innings than any pitcher in franchise history; he also made more starts. He frequently sacrificed himself for the greater good while simultaneously winning more games than all but two pitch
ers in Red Sox history, Cy Young and Roger Clemens—the former the namesake of baseball's greatest pitching honor, the latter a pitcher who won that award a record seven times—proving that you could be a team player
and
be celebrated individually, the sports world's equivalent of
think globally, act locally.
Tim Wakefield was proof that you could be true to yourself by being true to your team, that success with something perceived as warily as the knuckleball was really just a matter of perspective.

"It just means that I've persevered," Wakefield said when asked to reflect on his career and accomplishments. "I've started, relieved, closed. I'm kind of proud that I've been able to do a lot and pitch in a lot of games. It means a lot, but I really don't think it has sunk in yet.... I think things can get overlooked when somebody stays in one place for a long time. You get young guys who come in, and they're like, 'He's old,' but let's look at
why
he's been here so long. I think that gets overlooked sometimes, to be honest with you."

In fact, as Wakefield climbed to the top of the Red Sox record book during his final seasons, his career achievements became more like items on a checklist and less like mileposts worthy of recognition. In 2009, for instance, after making the 380th start of his Red Sox career, Wakefield stood with his uniform top unbuttoned in a corner doorway of an emptying conference room at historic Fenway Park following a relatively methodical 8–2 dispatching of the Florida Marlins that had improved his record to a sparkling 9–3. As he approached his 43rd birthday, he was having another good year and was on the way to his first career appearance at the All-Star Game. Wakefield had enjoyed other, similar runs during his Red Sox career—some better, some worse—but the end result was almost always a remarkable consistency that Red Sox fans, above all others, seemed to appreciate. And yet, in this case and many others, almost nobody was aware that Wakefield had just made the 380th start of his Red Sox career, two shy of Clemens's club record of 382. It was an achievement far more worthy of recognition than anyone had taken the time to acknowledge.

In the end, after all, what real difference did two starts make? In a career marked by 380 starts, two games signified a difference of roughly 0.5 percent. Whether Wakefield finished at 380 or 382 games started, the conclusion was the same. His legacy had been forged. He had become, against all odds, part of the background, one of the most reliable and dependable pitchers in baseball history, particularly given that he pitched in a city and for a franchise that frequently devoured its own.

The Red Sox have been part of the culture in Boston for well over a century, their history defined by everything from pure heartbreak (most frequently) to unfiltered glory (more recently). Consequently, loyal followers of the team have prided themselves a great deal on perseverance, grit, determination. Red Sox fans have long since learned to show up for work the next day, no matter what, and they have memorized all of the clichés that celebrate the most noteworthy achievements.
Slow and steady wins the race. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Focus on the journey, not on the destination.
In retrospect, no one more perfectly reflected those qualities than Wakefield, who had resurrected his career on more than one occasion and who continued to push forward—methodically, deliberately, undeterred.

And yet, when it came to instances like this and many others, Wakefield's achievements seemed to materialize out of thin air. Red Sox fans, too, sometimes could be distracted by the flash and glitz of the stars who came and went—men like Clemens, Mo Vaughn, Nomar Garciaparra, Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz. The list went on and on. Even Boston seemed to take Wakefield for granted sometimes, to overlook him entirely, to forget that the most commendable achievements can take place over years and years and years, like a steady, continuous construction project.

And then, one day, there it was.

Baseball was something of a religion in Boston, where the Red Sox, especially, were a passion, obsession, addiction, and psychosis all wrapped into one. ("Sometimes I almost wonder if it's a sickness," Wakefield chuckled.) The game was seen as a true test of endurance, where consistency and longevity reflected an ability both to perform and to survive. The Red Sox were dissected and analyzed over and over again, especially by those who deemed themselves to be card-car
rying members of
Red Sox Nation,
a fan base that sometimes seemed as widespread as Islam. All of that should have made Wakefield an obvious focus as he moved toward the end of an accomplished, hardworking career defined by resourcefulness and resiliency, if for no other reason than the fact that Boston was the kind of place where even the smallest sacrifices were recognized by a Red Sox following that typically paid great care to detail.

With Wakefield, however, his career was greater than any individual year. By the end, a man who rarely received top billing had compiled a résumé that was, in many ways, like no other in team history.

"I think I've stayed under the radar my whole career. I've never gotten too high or too low—that has helped me [survive]," Wakefield said. "I think there are a couple of reasons I have a connection with people here. I think I bust my butt and never make excuses, and I think they appreciate that. I think I care about the team more than I care about myself. I think I put the team first, and I think that's very much appreciated by the fans because they get that side of it. And I just think, from a philosophy standpoint, outside of baseball, I think they get that side of me, too. I care about the community, like everybody else. I care about the neighborhood. I give my time. I care about the community that I live in and the community that supports us on a daily basis.

"I've tried to stay humble for as long as I can," he said.

Indeed, while maintaining a healthy dose of humility—the knuckler, too, will do that to a man—Wakefield had long since decided that he wanted to pitch in no other place than Boston, where he felt the aforementioned connection from the moment he arrived. He saw Boston as far more intimate than many of the bigger America cities—"It's more of a blue-collar, deep-rooted neighborhood that cares about its own," he said—and that was, of course, how he saw himself. The glitz of New York or Los Angeles never really lured him. The idea of a nomadic existence never really appealed. In an age when professional athletes frequently were urged to market their services, to take the best deal available, Wakefield was an absolute anachronism, a man whose values left him terribly out of place. In those instances when free agency beckoned, Wakefield flirted with homier, more comfortable places
like Minneapolis—the Minnesota Twins, too, had a family-type environment—than he did with bigger, louder metropolitan areas. He grew up in Melbourne, Florida. He began his career in Pittsburgh. For Wakefield, Boston was the perfect landing spot, a place where the fans took their baseball seriously, but where citizenship mattered. More than anything else in his career, Wakefield had always wanted to
belong.
As such, he had never really tried to leave Boston, and the Red Sox had never really looked to dispose of him. They had built the kind of gold-watch relationship that had generally ceased to exist elsewhere in baseball.

"I just don't understand how some people can separate the personal side of it," he said.

As much as anyone else, Tim Wakefield saw himself as the last of a dying breed.

By the time Wakefield concluded 2009 and signed what looked to be a final, two-year contract that would keep him with the Red Sox through the 2011 baseball season, he was one of a unique group of major league players—and not solely because he was one of the few in history to have mastered the knuckleball. Wakefield was one of only 19 pitchers in baseball history to have spent at least 15 seasons with a single franchise; along with the incomparable New York Yankees closer Mariano Rivera, he was one of only two active pitchers in the game (and the only starter) to have remained with the same team since the start of the 1995 season. And somewhat incredibly, Wakefield had spent more time with the Red Sox than any pitcher in the history of the organization, an accomplishment that only grew in magnitude when one considered that Wakefield did so while making the journey with his impulsive knuckler, a pitch that frequently operates as if it has a mind of its own and one that had caused him as much angst and anxiety as it gave him dignity and delight.

By that point, Wakefield had long since accepted the fact that the knuckleball was as much a part of him as the wins and the innings, the number 49 he wore on his back, and the mustache and goatee he had sported throughout his stint with the Red Sox. The knuckler could inspire both wonder and fear. The knuckleball had produced some of
Wakefield's most glorious successes and some of his most gut-wrenching failures, and he had long since learned to make peace with the pitch and accept its flaws.

Along the way, the Red Sox and their fans learned to do the same with the knuckleball as well as with the man who had brought it to them.

"I think a lot of it is the pitch. I really do. It
is
me," Wakefield said when asked about the identity and legacy he built in Boston. "It's what's gotten me to where I am. It's hard to separate that. My biggest thing is—and you hear me say this every spring training when people say, 'What are your goals?'—I want to give the team innings. I mean, results—yeah, I'd love to win 20 games. I'd love to do that. But my job is to go out there and keep us in the game as long as possible. And I think I've proven that over time, if you go back historically and look at my career."

To do that, with Tim Wakefield as with anyone else, we have to go back to the beginning, to things that happened long before he came along, things he had absolutely nothing to do with.

That Wakefield would succeed in Boston, of all places, was as unforeseeable as the knuckleball is unpredictable. For the large majority of their history, the Red Sox were an organization defined by power hitters and heartbreaking failure, not necessarily in that order. By the time Wakefield arrived in Boston in late May 1995, Clemens had only just begun to alter the organization's lineage of royalty—a
pitcher,
of all beings, now ruled the Red Sox—and Boston was a championship-starved baseball town so desperate for a winner that the slightest bit of failure prompted irrational, illogical thinking and responses.

The Red Sox and their followers were willing to try anything by then, but they were just as quick to dismiss it.

The sale of Babe Ruth to the rival New York Yankees in 1920 served as the proverbial fork in the road at which the Red Sox had clearly made the wrong turn, but the history of the organization after 1920 was marked not by failure so much as by torture. In the 86 years from 1919 to 2003, a period during which the Red Sox failed to win even a single championship, the team had qualified for the postseason ten
times and made four trips to the World Series, losing all four chances at a title in the maximum seven games. The Red Sox were always good enough to contend and flawed enough to fail—qualities that made them the perfect landing place for someone like Wakefield, whose career had followed a similar track thanks to the unreliable nature of his favorite pitch. When he was good, Wakefield could be very, very good. But when he was bad, he could be very, very bad.

And sometimes he could be both within a matter of seconds.

The Red Sox had taken on their identity long before Wakefield's arrival, however, thanks largely to Ted Williams, the Hall of Fame left fielder who debuted in 1939 and remained with the club through 1960. Beginning with "The Kid"—and Williams was, in some ways, a boy king—the Red Sox had assembled a line of royalty like few organizations in professional sports. Williams batted .327 with 31 home runs and 145 RBI as a 20-year-old
rookie
in 1939, launching a truly legendary career that produced a .344 career average and 521 home runs despite time lost to serve his country during World War II and the Korean War. He became a truly iconic figure in American history and was widely regarded in the baseball world as the greatest hitter who ever lived. Williams's Red Sox played in just one World Series, losing to the St. Louis Cardinals in 1946, and it was during his career that the Red Sox began to take on the identity of their star player. That problem would plague them for decades.