Knuckler (35 page)

"He's been doing this a long time," Red Sox manager Terry Francona said of Wakefield. "And I don't see him slowing down."

Indeed, in many ways, Tim Wakefield felt like he was just starting to hit his stride.

***

In the months immediately following the 2005 season, the Red Sox deteriorated into a state of civil war. Theo Epstein and team president Larry Lucchino, protégé and mentor, were locked in a bitter contract dispute for the young and already accomplished general manager. The matter turned public and rather ugly, at times feeling far more personal than businesslike, as if the younger man was trying to escape from the shadow of the older man who had schooled him.

Tim Wakefield watched from afar, staying careful not to choose sides and wondering if the drama would ever stop.

How much of this stuff will I live through?

In the aftermath of Theo versus Larry, the Red Sox were without a general manager—at least for a time. Epstein resigned from his post, leaving the Sox with an oligarchy headed by baseball lifer Bill Lajoie and Sox executive Craig Shipley, a former player now regarded as an excellent evaluator. Under the watch of Lucchino, Lajoie and Shipley executed a succession of major maneuvers that included the departures of center fielder Johnny Damon (via free agency to, of all teams, the Yankees) and prized young shortstop Hanley Ramirez in a trade with the Florida Marlins that brought pitcher Josh Beckett and third baseman Mike Lowell to Boston. The two also acquired second baseman Mark Loretta. In acquiring the heady Loretta, the Sox had parted ways with backup catcher Doug Mirabelli, whose place in the Red Sox organization was quite specific.

For five years, he had served as Wakefield's personal catcher.

Wakefield was disappointed at the departure of Mirabelli, whom he regarded as a big part of his success over the past five years.
Dougie knows how I think, and he knows how the pitch moves.
Red Sox officials had expected Wakefield to be disappointed, so they had taken the preemptive strike of calling Wakefield ahead of time to inform him of their decision and to ensure that he would have a say in finding Mirabelli's replacement. Wakefield nonetheless called Mirabelli and expressed his sadness at seeing his batterymate go. He also had some concern about his next catcher's ability to deal with the inevitable frustration of catching the knuckleball.

The experience with Varitek in Game 5 of the 2004 American
League Championship Series had proven that, and Varitek was someone Wakefield
trusted,
someone with whom he had shared a clubhouse for years.

"I had the ability, I guess," Mirabelli said when asked to explain his knack for handling the knuckler. "Most of all, I have God-given hands that were pretty good. I have good hand-eye coordination and the ability to relax in tough situations. When you think your energy could be flying through the roof, I had the ability to relax in those situations, and I think that's important for catching the knuckleball. It can move so much that if your hands and arms are tight, you're going to have trouble."

To their credit, Red Sox officials did not take the issue lightly, remaining quite aware of the problems that a knuckleballer could cause for his own catcher. First and foremost, the Sox knew that in order for Wakefield to be as effective as possible, he had to possess the confidence that the pitch would be caught. Beyond that, there was the issue of passed balls, which had nearly cost the Red Sox their season during Game 5 of the 2004 ALCS against the Yankees.

In fact, from 1995 through 2006, during the first 11 years of Wakefield's career with the Red Sox, Boston had totaled a major league–leading 277 passed balls, 110 more than the next-closest team, the New York Yankees. During that span, Boston's total was more than twice the league average of 125–130 passed balls per team. With Wakefield on the staff, the Red Sox had averaged 25 passed balls per season, the large majority of which occurred with Wakefield on the mound. And yet, the most astonishing part of these numbers was that the Sox passed-ball totals had dwindled to 97 over the last five years of that span, an average of slightly more than 19 per season that spoke volumes for Mirabelli's abilities as a receiver. Mirabelli's uncanny knack for tracking the knuckler and catching it was a skill that baseball people often referred to as
soft hands.

In the six years before Mirabelli arrived, with Wakefield on the staff, the Red Sox averaged exactly 30 passed balls per season. With Mirabelli behind the plate, the number dipped to a little more than 19, a difference that translated into a savings of just under 37 percent.

Wakefield knew as well as anyone that whatever Doug Mirabelli lacked with his bat—the catcher generally hit for a notoriously low average but did have some power—he more than made up for with his glove.

Nonetheless, with needs throughout their lineup, the Red Sox made offense a priority, a move they soon came to regret. The original plan was to have Wakefield work with John Flaherty, a veteran catcher who was moving from starter to backup late in his career. For an assortment of reasons that included both an inability and an unwillingness to grapple with the knuckler, Flaherty instead opted to
retire.
After catching Wakefield for two innings in a spring game, he learned that chasing around the knuckler "wasn't something I wanted to do" and that, "if you're not fully committed to doing that, then you're not going to do a good job." The responsibility then fell on youngster Josh Bard, whom the Sox had acquired in a trade that also delivered outfielder Coco Crisp from the Cleveland Indians. The hope had been that Bard might someday replace an aging Varitek as the Boston starter.

For Bard, the knuckleball experiment was an utter disaster. Never having been asked to handle a knuckleballer before, the likable young man was charged with a whopping 10 passed balls in his first four games with Wakefield. As Bard seemed to be shuttling to and from the backstop on a regular basis, Wakefield found himself having great compassion for his catcher, who was doing his absolute best to rise to an extremely difficult challenge.
It's not his fault,
Wakefield repeatedly told both himself and anyone else who would listen. Baseball history was spotted with great catchers who had wanted nothing to do with the knuckleball. Johnny Bench, for instance, once told the coaching staff at an All-Star Game that he preferred that someone else catch knuckleballer Phil Niekro. Bard had been thrust into an impossible situation, Wakefield realized, and the knuckleballer was willing to nurture his new young catcher for the benefit of the long term.

Mirabelli, too, had experienced great difficulty with the knuckleball at the outset, but made adjustments as he went along. The first was to use an oversized glove, which many other catchers had done. Another involved shifting his body toward the second baseman so that
he could rotate to his right more easily. Most importantly, Mirabelli had to completely alter his standard for success and throw out conventional catching wisdom that no longer applied.

But it all took time.

"The hardest part is not really knowing what the knuckleball is going to do. It's so deceptive," Mirabelli said. "I've often told Wake, 'I think the knuckleball, by definition, is a wild pitch,' because that's really the whole premise behind it. You don't know what it's going to do. If it was consistent, it would get crushed because hitters eventually would figure it out.

"I remember when I first got traded to Boston, I was playing catch with him in the outfield, and I was pretty confident in my ability to catch the ball," Mirabelli continued. "I was like, 'Okay, I've got this down.' I caught him in the bullpen, and I was like, 'Okay, no problem.' Then the game started. We were in Toronto and the dome was closed, and for whatever reason, that thing always moved more in domes. It was moving like I've never seen. It's uncontrollable. Now my anxiety is going up, my back and arms are stiffening up, and I couldn't catch the thing. I think I had two passed balls right away, and every time I came in [to the dugout] I apologized to him. I was mentally exhausted that year.

"Right away, I had to throw away the notion that I was never going to have passed balls," Mirabelli went on. "That was hard for me to handle. As a defensive catcher, that's a big adjustment. Guys were stealing, and I wasn't throwing them out—things like that. As a player, you never want to be embarrassed. That was a hard thing to deal with at first."

Red Sox officials believed that Bard, too, would eventually solve the mystery of the knuckler, but they lacked the one thing Mirabelli initially had: time. They felt pressed to find a solution. When word came from San Diego that the Padres were frustrated and disappointed with Mirabelli's early performance and attitude—Wakefield's former catcher missed Boston—Epstein and his former boss, Padres general manager Kevin Towers, worked out a very simple trade: Bard for Mirabelli, backup catcher for backup catcher, a deal the Red Sox quickly made
just as the New York Yankees were set to arrive at Fenway Park for the opener of a series in which Wakefield would be pitching.

Only in a baseball-obsessed city like Boston could a backup catcher return to the team, on a chartered jet, greeted by a police escort prepared to take him to Fenway Park.

Whether by circumstance or coincidence, Wakefield's fortunes—and those of the team—took a dramatic turn for the better upon Mirabelli's return. Wakefield was 1–4 with an above-average 3.90 ERA through his first five starts without Mirabelli, largely owing to wretched run support during a stretch in which the Red Sox lost games by scores of 3–0, 5–1, and 7–1. But as soon as Mirabelli showed up just before the first pitch and donned his equipment, then scurried out to home plate without even warming up, everything changed. Wakefield went seven strong innings in a 7–3 victory over the Yankees, and the knuckleballer began a stretch during which he ripped off three wins a row.

As rapidly as it had dissolved, karma had been restored.

"I do think Mirabelli, with how good he is at it, is taken for granted sometimes," Epstein said of the catcher, whom the general manager also referred to as "the best knuckleball catcher on the planet" amid the comical drama. "He makes it look easy, so he becomes like the umpire or the third-base coach [who is good at his job]. You don't notice. That's a good thing. But he's pretty darn good at it."

Indeed, Mirabelli's receiving skills were a gift. The key to catching the knuckler, Mirabelli often said, was to wait and
react
to the pitch rather than to jab at it, a mistake that many catchers made. Mirabelli's glove almost seemed to be moving backward when he caught the pitch—that is, away from Wakefield—as if he were attempting to catch an egg without breaking the shell.

After going 14–11 before Mirabelli's return, the Red Sox almost immediately started playing better baseball and caught fire in June, at one point ripping off 12 straight wins and 14 of 15 to improve to 49–29, a record that earned them a four-game lead in the American League East. And then, slowly, they began to fall apart. The Red Sox already were playing poorly when they were hit by a rash of injuries at midseason, two factors that contributed to a damaging five-game series sweep
at the hands of the hated Yankees—at Fenway Park no less—in mid-August. The Sox stumbled to an 86–76 finish that left them in third place in the division, marking the first time in Epstein's young career as a GM when the team he built failed to make the postseason.

Wakefield was among those Sox players who ended up on the disabled list, derailed by a back injury later diagnosed as a stress fracture in his ribs. He was never sure how the injury occurred. What he did know was that he was in pain every time he pitched. He labored through the pain for a short period, but when the problem intensified he needed to take time off. By the time Wakefield returned in the middle of September, the fate of the 2005 Red Sox had long since been decided, and he was badly out of rhythm, posting a 7.52 ERA over a span of four starts, all of which produced Red Sox losses. A season that got off to a fast and promising start had been derailed just as quickly, Wakefield finishing with a 7–11 record and 4.63 ERA in just 140 innings, an innings pitched total that matched the lowest of his Red Sox career to that point. Wakefield also felt that his won-lost record did not accurately reflect how he had pitched. Among the 45 American Leaguers who threw at least 140 innings that season, only two had worse run support.

During the off-season, predictably, there were questions about the direction the Red Sox suddenly seemed to be headed in following their World Series win two years earlier, a theme that trickled down to the individual players.
Was 2004 a case of one and done?
For Wakefield, the obvious issue was his age, particularly following a season when he had suffered the first major injury of his career and celebrated his 40th birthday (in August).

True to knuckleballing form, Wakefield recommitted himself to his conditioning. Phil Niekro, after all, pitched his last game when he was 48. And Doug Mirabelli knew as well as anyone that Tim Wakefield had plenty left in the tank, that his partner possessed far more fire and competitiveness than anybody was ever willing to give him credit for.

"It's funny because he has this competitiveness in him as much as anybody," Mirabelli said. "He loves to compete. He loves to fight. He always had this chip on his shoulder that he didn't throw 99 miles per
hour, but that he would prove he was just as good. And he could compete from a stats standpoint with a lot of those guys.

"I remember we were in a team meeting one time, and Pedro [Martinez] stood up and said, 'I've got a lot of respect for Wake because he goes out on the mound and fights. If he doesn't have a good knuckleball he ain't got shit, but he fights.' Pedro absolutely meant it as a compliment," Mirabelli said. "[Wakefield] was the ultimate competitor and a very caring person."

And while most of the Red Sox already knew that, they would soon get another firsthand look at what Tim Wakefield could do.