Knuckler (7 page)

Besides playing catch with his father in the backyard of their home—where the knuckleball became part of his repertoire early in life—Wakefield went to public schools as a child, and like most boys
who spent mornings, afternoons, and evenings thinking about baseball, he liked to hit. He
wanted
to hit. It was the most enjoyable part of the game and something to look forward to. Unless he was pitching, the time he spent in the field, on defense, could be dull and seemingly endless. Many years later, Judy Wakefield still had memories of Tim going out into the yard, toting a plastic bat and ball. Standing in the back yard of the home that the Wakefields bought in 1969—and where they still reside—Tim would hit the ball over the house and into the front yard. He then would scamper around to the front, toss the ball up in the air again, and hit it over the roof and into the backyard. He would continue the practice, hitting the ball over and over—effectively playing a game of tennis with himself, albeit with the instruments he would employ throughout the rest of his life—until he got bored or tired or it got too dark.

"Every day," Judy Wakefield said by way of describing her son's affection for the game. Baseball "was his life" even at a young age. "He played his first game at five [years old]," she recalled. "He played T-ball, and then he never stopped. I think he played every year after that. We could see in Little League [that he was advanced]. He just kept getting better."

During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, there were no major league teams in Florida, but the state was home to some of the better college programs in the country and the weather was conducive for baseball. In the late winter and early spring, major league teams trained throughout the state. Minor league clubs were scattered about Florida, a good many of them in the Class A Florida State League, where teams sent draftees and prospects to begin playing in the earlier stages of their development. From Little League through high school and college, the baseball season in Florida was much longer than in most other parts of the country, a fact that paid obvious dividends for the boys and girls raised there who dreamed about playing outdoor sports.

If Tim Wakefield wanted to play baseball almost every day, he could—and he did. There was nothing to prevent him from doing so. Like other boys growing up in California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida—states that would produce nearly half of all professional play
ers drafted or signed during the 30-year period from 1965 to 1994, the period during which Wakefield grew up—Wakefield had the advantage of endless practice time to reinforce his obsession with baseball. In short, Tim Wakefield grew up in a baseball hotbed that allowed him to develop and cultivate his talents even though, until the early 1990s, the state of Florida still lacked something that it desperately wanted, something that would further validate its place as a baseball breeding ground.

A major league team.

Wakefield adopted the Atlanta Braves as his team of choice, largely because the Braves were the closest major league team to Melbourne. His favorite player was Dale Murphy, the multitalented Braves slugger who won consecutive Most Valuable Player Awards in 1982 and 1983 and who had slowly matured into one of the most complete players in baseball. During his prime, Murphy was a Gold Glove outfielder and elite hitter who once stole as many as 30 bases in a season, a man whose skills were so comprehensive that he could do just about anything on a baseball diamond. Murphy had caught and played in both the infield and the outfield, he could hit for average and power, and he could run, throw, and play defense. Murphy played hard and played hurt, and his durability was legendary. During the heart of his career, an 11-year period that began in 1980 and ran through 1990, Murphy never missed more than eight games in any season, and at one point he played four consecutive seasons in which he appeared in the maximum 162 games.

Dale Murphy, like Steve Wakefield, almost never missed a day of work.

And like Tim Wakefield would later prove on the pitcher's mound, Murphy could contribute to his team at a number of different positions and with a number of different skills.

That's who I want to be.

Wakefield was a skilled athlete as a boy and teen in Melbourne, having inherited the athletic ability of his father (though Steve Wakefield never played baseball). Wakefield's sister Kelly also was innately athletic, though she later lost interest in the game—she played softball for
a time—and in sports altogether. For Wakefield, the opposite was true. With baseball in particular, there was no such thing as too much. By the time he reached his midteens, Wakefield was one of the better players at Eau Gallie High School in Melbourne, the same high school that major leaguer Prince Fielder would later attend. His previous coaches had utilized his advanced skills at two of the more important positions on the diamond: like most major leaguers in their youth, Wakefield had pitched and played shortstop. That changed some at Eau Gallie, where coach Ken Campbell started playing Wakefield at first base because the team had a better shortstop. Wakefield also continued to pitch, albeit without really using the knuckleball. He would throw the pitch while playing catch with his teammates and sometimes dared to unveil it in a game "if we were winning like 10–0 or something." The pitch was not seen by anyone, however, as something
serious
and was regarded more as a novelty.

By the time he graduated from high school, Wakefield was slotted as a Division 2–caliber college talent; he had the skill, but lacked some of the size, that would have made him an elite Division 1 college player. His options were relatively limited, particularly when Brevard Community College was the only program to offer him a baseball scholarship. BCC was an established junior college baseball program in Melbourne, and enrolling there allowed Wakefield to remain close to home. The idea was that he would distinguish himself at BCC, continue to develop, and maybe transfer to a bigger college program like Miami or Tampa or Florida after his sophomore year. In the short term, the comfort of being close to home could help him, something that would prove to be true over the course of his career.

It means something to me to be here.

Of course, as is usually true with most anything involving the knuckleball and those with the skill to unleash it, things did not go entirely according to plan.

For Tim Wakefield, the dips and turns were about to begin.

In Florida—or more accurately, throughout the warm-weather regions of the United States—college baseball is a year-round sport. There is
no real off-season. Teams work out and practice during the fall semester, making preparations for the start of the official season in spring. Baseball is serious business in Florida. Practice time is seen as instrumental in the development and success of a player, and so baseball was immediately part of Wakefield's curriculum at BCC.

At the time, the coach at Brevard Community College was a man named Ernie Rosseau, a native of Nyack, New York, who had attended Satellite High School in Satellite Beach, Florida, and played college baseball years earlier at Florida Tech, located in Melbourne. Rosseau had spent four seasons as an outfielder in the minor league system of the St. Louis Cardinals, where he climbed as high as Double A. Rosseau's college coach, Les Hall, remembered Rosseau as tough, hard-nosed, and "demanding," the kind of player who almost certainly would go on to become a coach if and when his playing career ended.

As a coach, unsurprisingly, Rosseau took the same aggressive approach he had brought to the game as a player, a philosophy that generally worked for him and produced a long, accomplished career, including a pair of junior college national championships and job opportunities with an assortment of major league organizations.

In Wakefield's case, however, the coach and the player disagreed from the start. Wakefield thought that his scholarship meant something, that having been recruited entitled him to a spot on the team. In Rosseau's eyes, that was the furthest thing from the truth. Wakefield remembered showing up at the first day of team workouts in the fall and recognizing that most every other player at BCC was just as good as he was—if not better—and that a starting position on the team was not a given. The change made him uneasy. He suddenly had the feeling that he was not wanted. The transition to college and the challenge of winning a starting position were both far more difficult than Wakefield had imagined, and so between the fall and spring semesters he did something he never imagined himself doing. He quit the baseball team.

Wakefield's inability to cope undoubtedly was a reflection of his immaturity at that stage of his life as much as it was a comment on
Rosseau, whom Wakefield would later come to respect. In retrospect, he would see that he had made a mistake.

It just didn't work out. I was immature. Those kinds of things happen.

After remaining at BCC as a student for the balance of his freshman year, Wakefield resumed playing baseball for an assortment of select teams in the Melbourne area, including a team in a summer league for 16- to 18-year-olds. His decision to leave the BCC team had reached Hall, the same man who had coached Rosseau years earlier and who happened to be friendly with Steve Wakefield. Hall was the head coach at the Florida Institute of Technology—known today as Florida Tech—a school that played its games in the Sunshine State Conference, then regarded as one of the better Division 2 baseball conferences in the country.

Through his wife, who had been a teacher at Melbourne High School, Hall knew of Steve Wakefield's standing as a track athlete in local history, and he certainly knew of Tim Wakefield's baseball career at Eau Gallie. Hall initially had not spent a great deal of time trying to recruit Wakefield out of high school because he felt he had little opportunity of securing him; Wakefield's long-term goal at the time had been to transfer to a bigger Division 1 program, and Hall thought he would have seemed like a misfit among a collection of Florida Tech players who were students first and athletes second.

"Back then, Florida Tech was known for its engineering program," Hall, 74, said in the fall of 2010. "The [students there] wanted to be engineers. They didn't want to be baseball players.

"Tim wasn't really a pitcher then. He was a position player, and he was very good. He was a natural athlete. He could play all kinds of sports."

Florida Tech offered Wakefield a number of possibilities, all of them attractive. Because he had never played in a game at BCC, Wakefield could make the jump without using a year of his athletic eligibility, effectively becoming a
redshirt
freshman in the fall of 1985. (Though a sophomore under academic guidelines, he would qualify as a freshman athletically and still possess four years of eligibility.) Wakefield would get a better education at Florida Tech, he could still be close
to home, and there remained the possibility that if he blossomed, he could transfer to a bigger program where he might be able to advance his playing career.

And finally, at a place like Florida Tech, Wakefield could effectively start right away to get the playing time he needed to develop.

This is more my speed.

Hall, for his part, knew that Wakefield could excel at Division 2, and Wakefield took very little time to prove him right. Wakefield's addition to the team had an immediate and profound impact on the performance of the Florida Tech squad: the school's program went, in the words of the coach, "from mediocre to very good" almost overnight. In the spring of 1986, Wakefield still had yet to mature physically, but he was so eager and willing to do whatever Hall asked that he fit in immediately.

"His first year at Florida Tech, we were short of pitchers at one point," Hall recalled. "We were playing a national schedule, and it was a nonconference game, so I was looking for options. We needed to save our pitching [for more important games], so he volunteered to pitch. He was throwing in the bullpen, and he threw a knuckleball, and the kid who was catching him couldn't handle it. I remember him looking at Tim and saying, 'I don't think we should use that pitch, it's not very good.'"

In fact, though relatively no one recognized it at the time, the opposite was true.

Tim Wakefield's knuckleball was
too
good.

Still, Hall also regarded the pitch as nothing more than a party trick at the time, and in fact he fully believed that Wakefield's future rested in his abilities as a hitter. Hall recalled a game against Bethune-Cookman College during one of Wakefield's first seasons in which he belted a home run to right-center field that caught everyone's attention—"It was a bomb," mused Hall—and not solely for the distance the ball traveled. Wakefield, according to Hall, was a pull hitter in college. As a right-handed hitter, Wakefield's power was primarily to the left side of the field. At any level, for a right-handed batter, hitting a ball out to
right-center
required an exceptional amount of strength, discipline,
and hand-eye coordination. The mechanics had to be perfect. And if a player could demonstrate that kind of ability consistently, he possessed the kind of exceptional talent that might draw the attention of professional scouts.

"He worked hard at it," Hall said of Wakefield's commitment to hitting. "He loved to hit. That's what he really liked. He was a good first baseman, too, but hitting—that's what he really liked to do."

And that is also what Tim Wakefield did well.

Between his freshman and sophomore years, a period that coincided with his physical maturation—and remember, Wakefield effectively had the academic standing of a sophomore heading into his junior year, meaning he was a year older than many of his classmates—he fully invested in working out. When he returned to school in the fall, he was bigger and stronger than he had ever been. Wakefield struggled with the academics at Florida Tech—"I almost failed out of school," he said—but the baseball began coming more and more easily to him, to the point where he started to be recognized as a local phenom. In Wakefield's second season at Florida Tech, in the spring of 1987, he was compared routinely to a first baseman from the University of Tampa, Tino Martinez, a local prodigy who had played his high school baseball at Jefferson High School in Tampa. During the same spring, while Martinez was hitting 24 home runs for Tampa, Wakefield hit 22—in 48 games, no less—for Florida Tech. Local fans and media gave intense coverage to the two blossoming talents in the area—one batting left-handed (Martinez), one batting right-handed (Wakefield)—and the future for each seemed extremely bright.