Knuckler (34 page)

And yet, as Wakefield knew, the Red Sox had another season to play when February arrived far more rapidly than anyone had anticipated, a reminder that all good things, like bad things, come to an end.
We have to start playing again sometime.
While Red Sox manager Terry Francona knew that questions would abound throughout camp about the team's extraordinary comeback in the 2004 playoffs, he, too, knew that he and his team needed to prepare for another season.

For Wakefield, the winter had served as yet another reminder that baseball is a business. The Red Sox continued to make difficult personnel decisions over the winter; the front office allowed pitchers Martinez and Lowe to depart via free agency while re-signing catcher Varitek and formally entrusting him with the title and responsibilities of team captain. Wakefield, for his part, was entering the final year of a four-year, $13 million contract that would pay him slightly more than $4.6 million in 2005, but the events of the off-season only cemented the thoughts he'd had throughout his Red Sox career.
I want to finish my career here. I want to have what Varitek has. I want my career to be worth something more than just a pile of pay stubs.
Winning a World Series in Boston was the consummate achievement, Wakefield believed, and now he wanted to focus on solidifying his legacy as a Red Sox lifer during an age when the game had been defined by mercenaries who toted big contracts—and who were in pursuit of bigger ones.

The way I can be different is to be loyal,
he thought.

The feeling was mutual.

For the Red Sox, the Fenway Park opener on Monday, April 11, would be a day unlike any other in the history of Fenway Park. With
the Yankees again scheduled as the opponent, the Red Sox would raise their World Series championship banner and hand out their championship rings, a moment that the Red Sox and the entire New England region had been awaiting since the days of World War I.

The Red Sox, to their credit, planned the event perfectly, down to every last detail.

That day, Tim Wakefield would be their starting pitcher.

Wakefield learned of the team's intentions during spring training, and almost everyone involved with the club acknowledged that Wakefield was the obvious choice.
He's been here the longest. He's endured the most.
Wakefield regarded the assignment as an honor every bit as meaningful as pitching Game 1 of the World Series, and a fitting culmination to an off-season that had been an absolute blur.

Worn and weary from the events of the fall, winter, and spring, the Red Sox had generally sputtered to start the season, losing four times during their season-opening six-game road trip. Wakefield had backboned one of the two victories, dueling New York right-hander Mike Mussina for more than six innings in an eventual 7–3 Red Sox win in the second game of the season on April 6. Precisely five days later, on April 11, Mussina again was the pitcher Wakefield was paired against, though the start of the game almost seemed anticlimactic. Some of the players who had left the Red Sox over the winter, including Lowe, returned to Boston for the ring ceremony and created a minor stir with fans in their new markets by wearing their old Sox jerseys. (Lowe, for instance, took some criticism for adorning his old number 32 after having signed a four-year, $36 million deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers.) But to the Boston fans, it was as if the players had never left, each member of the Sox receiving a resounding ovation for his part in Boston's historic victory.

Wakefield, predictably, received one of the loudest ovations from the Fenway crowd.

We know you better than them. Thanks for sticking it out.

But then, Wakefield believed the cheers spoke to everyone in a different way.

"The fans are so knowledgeable about the game and so passion
ate about the team. You can hear that when all of our players are announced for the starting lineup or even on opening day," Wakefield said. "Each player has a uniqueness to the fans. There's a special connection there. I know I feel that special connection every time I walk on the field to take the ball."

The game was anticlimactic, as it turned out, at least in the competitive sense. The Red Sox rolled. Wakefield threw 110 pitches in seven superb innings, allowing just five hits, two walks, and one unearned run as the Red Sox rumbled to leads of 4–0 and 7–1. The eventual 8–1 win gave the Red Sox their third victory in seven games—two of the victories coming in the only games started by Wakefield—and gave Sox players the grateful feeling that finally the party was over. They could move on with their lives and careers and turn once again to the business of trying to win another championship.

"As special as it was, I think we all felt like we could finally put that to bed," Wakefield said.

Wakefield also had other things on his mind, most notably a contract extension that would all but ensure his commitment to the Red Sox and their commitment to him. In discussions with agent Barry Meister, whom Wakefield had hired to handle his negotiations after the retirement of Dick Moss, Wakefield confided that remaining in Boston was his priority. He didn't want to go to free agency. He didn't want to play anywhere else. He had become as much a part of the community in Boston as his wife, Stacy, who had grown up in the Boston area. Wakefield considered himself a Bostonian as much as he considered himself a resident of Florida, and the idea of playing for another team did not appeal to him. When Meister reminded Wakefield that such an approach would hurt his leverage in negotiations—the agent was merely fulfilling his professional obligation—Wakefield expressed his complete understanding.

Then he told Meister to negotiate the deal anyway.

"I explained to him that the free-agent market is a strange and wonderful place," Meister said. "Tim kind of waved me off and said, 'This is not about the money.' He said, 'I prefer that we approach Boston now and that we make it clear I want to play with Boston for the rest of my career.'"

And so, slightly more than a week after the opening day victory against the Yankees, Wakefield and the Red Sox conducted a press conference at Fenway Park to announce one of the most unique and creative deals in baseball history, if not all of professional sports. With Wakefield headed to free agency, the Red Sox extended his contract by one year for a salary of $4 million, with an option for the 2007 season at $4 million. If and when the Red Sox exercised that option, another $4 million option would be generated. And then another. And then another. In fact, the option
regenerated
every time the Red Sox exercised it, making Wakefield's contract essentially an infinite loop. So long as he continued to pitch reasonably well, and so long as he wanted to continue pitching, the deal all but ensured that Wakefield would pitch for no other team than the Red Sox, that he would never go to free agency, and that if and when the time came that the Red Sox no longer deemed him a worthwhile $4 million investment, he would effectively call it a career.

Beyond the annual $4 million salary, Wakefield also could earn incentives based on health that could bump his earnings over $5 million annually, though those were just perks that would further reward him for a job well done.

Under normal circumstances, throughout the business world of baseball, a contract like Wakefield's might have been frowned upon, even scoffed at by super-agents like the renowned Scott Boras, who forever claimed to be representing the small man, the player, in the never-ending negotiations between "millionaires and billionaires." Such deals seemed to be far too team-friendly and failed to compensate the player adequately. But there was decidedly little objection to the contract that Wakefield signed with the Red Sox, and in fact his deal was heralded as groundbreaking—a creative device that allowed a team and a player to achieve a common goal together in unique circumstances.

So, almost exactly 10 years after he first pitched in a game for the Red Sox, in May 1995, Wakefield indeed had become a unique case. The man whose career had been on the scrap heap was now seen as the consummate loyalist, the company man whose gold watch had taken the form of a contract for his professional life. Tim Wakefield had be
come synonymous with the Red Sox franchise, with perseverance and hard work, with resiliency and selflessness. In committing to being a part of something much bigger than himself, he had become bigger than he could ever have imagined.

The man with perhaps the most unique pitch in baseball history now had a contract to match.

The beauty of experience, assuming one stays healthy, is that relatively little becomes unsettling. Most everything becomes a case of
been there, done that.
With the weight of 86 fruitless years having been lifted off the Boston organization, with a contract that would cover his professional life like an insurance policy, Tim Wakefield settled into some of the more comfortable years of his career. He entered the 2005 season with 114 career victories for Boston, needing just 10 more to surpass Bob Stanley (115), Pedro Martinez (117), Smoky Joe Wood (117), Luis Tiant (122), and Mel Parnell (123) and move into third place on the Red Sox all-time wins list.

At that point, only two men would sit ahead of him, tied at 192 wins for the most in the history of the Red Sox franchise: Cy Young, a man for whom baseball's top pitching achievement was named, and Roger Clemens, who had just won the award for a record seventh time.

Still four months shy of his 39th birthday, Wakefield started to see landmarks on the horizon that he had never imagined he would see.

I could actually catch them.

By then, there was relatively little that could fluster Wakefield, who had not mastered the knuckleball—who really does?—so much as he had harnessed it. Often, even the unforeseen could no longer derail him. For a knuckleballer, something as seemingly insignificant as a broken fingernail could become a relative crisis, but Wakefield had long since learned to manage the situation by treating his fingernails as his tools. He carried his suitcases and travel bags with his left hand so as to avoid breaking a nail on his right, and he always tried to snap together the metal buttons on the waistband of his uniform pants using his glove hand.

Wakefield typically used clippers to trim the nails of the thumb, ring
finger, and pinky finger of his right (pitching) hand, but on his index and middle fingers, which he used to grip the baseball, he used a file with the precision of a sculptor. Wakefield had an array of methods for fixing broken nails, ranging from athletic tape to Q-tips or cotton swabs, all of which were made up of very fine fibers. Wakefield would sit in front of his locker or in the trainer's room, delicately plucking the individual fibers from a strand of tape or swab, and lay them across the broken area of his nail. Then he would apply small amounts of super glue that instantly bonded with the fibers and his skin, creating a hard, shell-like solid that allowed him to grip the baseball with familiar feel.

Voila.

Take that, Elizabeth Grady.

Phil Niekro had taken similar care of his nails, as he and Wakefield had discussed more than once. Niekro remembered taking the mound sometimes with fake, plastic fingernails marketed for women, and everyone knew the story of his brother, Joe, being ejected from a game for carrying an emery board in his back pocket. Accused of illegally scuffing up the baseball while on the mound, Niekro was ordered by umpires to empty out his pockets on the field, at which point he realized that he effectively was carrying a piece of sandpaper in his pocket, something that would not sit well with the umpires.

Recognizing that the emery board would all but cement his perceived guilt, Niekro unsuccessfully tried to cast it aside, away from the view of the umpires, only to get caught red-handed.

"I used to carry an emery board with me in my pocket all the time, too," cracked Phil Niekro, who defends his brother to this day. "Those two fingers are the most important part of my body. A lot of people talk about that game, about how he got suspended and thrown out of the game, but think about it: four umpires are out there on the field at all times. How are you going to get that thing out of your pocket and file down the ball without anybody seeing?"

Of course, Niekro was right.

The only place a pitcher might have been able to extract a file from his pocket was in the dugout, where he wouldn't have possession of the baseball being used in the game.

Wakefield often could be seen filing his nails at his locker before a game, when he was similarly seen doing crossword puzzles. Later in his career, these habits gave him the look of a man comfortably settled into the middle and later stages of his life—or in this case, his career. He looked to be in complete control now. Even something as free-spirited as the knuckleball could not rattle him. The 2005 Red Sox struggled with an assortment of issues—injuries, undying interest in the 2004 season, a positively wretched relief corps—but Wakefield seemed almost entirely unaffected. He had one of the best and most consistent seasons of his career, going 8–7 with a 4.05 ERA before the All-Star break, 8–5 with a 4.26 ERA after it. The Red Sox seemed to be running on fumes throughout 2005—the 2004 season, after all, had come
after
the similarly grueling postseason of 2003—and the season ended as it began, with Wakefield pitching the final home game, a 5–3 defeat that completed a three-game sweep by the White Sox in the first round of the playoffs and sent Chicago along on its own historic course.

The White Sox had not won the World Series since a 1919 season that produced the great
Black Sox scandal
in which Chicago players were paid to lose. In 2005, the White Sox finally won
their
first World Series title in exactly 86 years.

Though Wakefield was the losing pitcher in Game 3, the outcome hardly put a damper on an individual season during which he was, quite simply, the best Red Sox pitcher. Wakefield led the team in victories (16) and innings pitched (a career best 225⅓), and he blew past Stanley, Martinez, Wood, Tiant, and Parnell into sole possession of third place on the team's all-time list for victories. For an organization as old as the Red Sox, however pitching-deprived they might have been during some long stretches, Wakefield's accomplishment qualified as positively astounding.