Knuckler (20 page)

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 strategy, 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.

Handed a 5–3 lead over the Royals, Wakefield began the ninth inning by striking out Chad Kreuter and Scott Pose. He then struck out Johnny Damon, too, but when the third strike eluded Varitek, Damon safely scampered to first base. Carlos Febles then belted a game-tying, two-run homer before Wakefield struck out a
fourth
batter in the inning, Carlos Beltran, in a succession of events that delivered all of the knuckleball's traits in one highly concentrated package: strikeouts, passed balls, and home runs. The Red Sox then rallied for four runs to take a 9–5 lead that ultimately would grant the Red Sox (and Wakefield) a win, but Williams was forced to pull Wakefield for right-hander Rich Garces with two outs in the bottom of the 10th inning after Wakefield had struck out two more
and
been charged with another passed ball.

"His knuckleball was so good that 'Tek couldn't catch it," Williams chuckled. "I had to take him out and bring in Garces to get the last out."

Of course, while a traditional closer might not have matched Wakefield's outing in terms of peculiarity, the reality is that a hard thrower might just as easily have blown the game in as frustrating a manner as Wakefield had. Two years earlier, after all, fireballing Anaheim closer Troy Percival had blown a game in such fashion against the Red Sox in the contest that marked Williams's managerial debut, and at the time Percival was regarded as one of the best in the business. And yet, while most baseball observers were willing to chalk
up Percival's failure that night as a fluke, many of the same people looked at Wakefield's carnival ride in Kansas City as far more predictable, a just verdict for a manager who tempted the baseball fates.

The reality, of course, was that Wakefield was as good as most anybody else at closing games during the 1999 season, if not better. That season, of the 38 major league pitchers who finished with at least 10 saves—the Red Sox had three of them—Wakefield finished a respectable 16th in save percentage, the statistic that measured his efficiency in his new role. He successfully converted 15 of 18 opportunities, a conversion rate of 83.3 percent that placed him ahead of, among others, Percival of the Angels (79.5 percent), Armando Benitez of the New York Mets (78.6 percent), teammate Lowe (75 percent), Mike Timlin of the Baltimore Orioles (75 percent), and Scott Williamson of the Cincinnati Reds (73.1 percent).

Wakefield understood all of that, naturally.

Jimy Williams clearly did, too.

But there were others in the Boston organization who understood neither Wakefield's value to the team nor the many uses of the knuckleball.

YOUNG KNUCKLEBALLER: After being drafted as a power-hitting first baseman, a desperate Tim Wakefield made the conversion to a knuckleballer in 1989. By the time he reached the Triple-A Buffalo Bisons in 1991, the Pittsburgh Pirates were beginning to realize what they had stumbled upon.

Courtesy of the Buffalo Bisons