Knuckler (12 page)

Wakefield, for his part, was all but destroyed as he packed up his belongings and began the drive back home to Melbourne, to his previous life.
It's over,
he thought.
I'm done.
He was convinced of that. He was already planning for life without baseball. He was considering going back to school. Both the rise and the fall had occurred with astonishing speed, and years later Wakefield could still feel the turbulence when he recounted the early years of his career. From 1990 to 1992, he had gone from being a struggling positional player on the verge of release to a fluky knuckleballer who came within a whisker of being the MVP of the 1992 National Championship Series. From 1992 to 1994, he tumbled uncontrollably to such depths that the Pirates released him in the spring of 1995. This was the kind of journey that left onlookers with their heads spinning.

"Now imagine how
I
felt at the time," Wakefield said.

Although, at the time, he wasn't sure how he felt.

It hurt too much just to think about it.

Tim was so successful early, and then he just lost it. That's when it becomes very tough mentally to throw a pitch that everybody knows is coming. I've told him that he's got to keep learning, he's got to eat, sleep, walk, and talk the knuckleball until it floats in his bloodstream like a spirit inside of him.

—Phil Niekro

I
N ALMOST EVERY
baseball player's career, there comes a season in which everything neatly and predictably falls into place. For Tim Wakefield, that time came in the summer of 1995.

Released by the Pittsburgh Pirates during spring training, a desperate Wakefield searched for any way he could find to extend his baseball career, be it in Boston or Baja. He wasn't ready to quit yet. He didn't
want
to quit. He and agent Bill Moore immediately began looking for new places of employment, a task that was infinitely easier than in many other professions because Wakefield was, after all, a pitcher. In all of baseball, at any level, there is no scarcer resource. Almost everyone almost always needs at least some pitching, and the Pirates had given him a small measure of hope by emphasizing that, at the very least, he needed "a change of scenery." Wakefield remembered that part specifically. Leyland had said that the Pirates didn't think Wakefield was still capable of succeeding
here
—in
Pittsburgh
—where the expectations for him had been blown wildly out of proportion. Wakefield began to believe that he simply needed a new start. He
wanted
to believe that. He clung to whatever logic he could.

Indeed, in many ways, Wakefield's success with the Pirates during the 1992 playoffs gave him all the evidence he would need in convincing teams that he was capable of being a big league winner. Major league history is littered with players who failed with one team and succeeded with another—borderline Hall of Fame pitcher Luis Tiant was released
twice,
for goodness' sake—and the explanation for this has never become fully clear. Maybe it's a matter of timing, or maybe it's a matter of maturity. Wakefield's knuckleball fed into this kind of thinking—if it worked once, couldn't it work again?—and his 1992 performance was the ultimate lure, something both he and his agent could hold out in front of teams as if trying to sell them a time share in the Bahamas.

See? This is what you could end up with. All we need is a little of your time. The payoff could be huge.

In many ways, there were truly no strings attached. For the major league teams that operated with multimillion-dollar payrolls, Wakefield could be had for something close to the minimum major league salary—$109,000 per year in 1995—making the risk of such a signing minimal or virtually nonexistent. That financial reality could make the interest in someone like Wakefield greater than the interest in a higher-profiled star, if only for the simple reason that everyone could afford a pitcher like Wakefield. Most every team in baseball was willing to spend a dollar for a lottery ticket in exchange for the chance to strike it rich.

As it turned out, the Boston Red Sox were the ones to hit the jackpot.

Hired by the Red Sox slightly more than a year earlier, in January 1994, Boston general manager Dan Duquette, having inherited a Boston baseball operation that had deteriorated badly during the early 1990s under aging general manager Lou Gorman, had set about the business of rebuilding the Red Sox from the inside out. Although the Sox had played in one World Series and three postseasons under Gorman from 1986 to 1990, they hit rock bottom under overmatched manager Butch Hobson in 1992 and 1993, at which point de facto owner John Harrington opted for a shake-up. With the economic
landscape of baseball changing, Harrington bumped a willing Gorman into a ceremonial front-office position and handed the operation over to the younger, more corporate Duquette in January 1994. As baseball headed into the labor war that led to the 1994 work stoppage (and cancelation of the World Series) and dragged on into the start of the 1995 campaign, Harrington wanted someone in charge of his baseball team who could squeeze more from less, someone who could find and develop cheap, young talent to restore his club to competitive levels while minimizing costs.

A New England native who grew up in Dalton, Massachusetts, Duquette seemed the perfect fit for the provincial Red Sox following.

Except for a collective bargaining agreement between the owners and players, Major League Baseball had no real governing rules during the historic work stoppage, no system under which to operate. In retrospect, the chaotic state of the game helped Duquette greatly during the winter of 1994–95, if only because competing organizations were thrown into a similar state of upheaval.
Nobody
in the game knew exactly what was going on. When parameters were finally put in place, an inordinate number of players were left without contracts in what had become a very condensed off-season, and so Dan Duquette was able to rebuild the Red Sox quickly with an assortment of bargain outlet purchases that included, among others, pitchers Erik Hanson and Zane Smith.

"That was a season unlike any other," Duquette said. "The players left [on strike] in August [1994], and spring training didn't even start until late March or April [1995].... There were a number of veteran pitchers [available], so we signed a couple of 'em. They hadn't done as well of late, but they had pitched well in the past, so we signed them."

Of course, that description applied to Tim Wakefield.

He hadn't done too well of late, but he had pitched well in the past.

Nonetheless, for as much as a team like the Red Sox benefited from the work stoppage, the Sox, like other clubs, incurred some penalties, too. Amid the protracted and fruitless discussions between the owners and representatives of the players' union, many players put off conditioning during the winter months and allowed themselves to get
woefully out of shape. Some reported to camp in laughable physical condition. And when spring training was condensed to three weeks because of the time already lost, a worst-case scenario developed for those who had made poor use of the winter months. Out-of-shape players needed more time, not less, and the result was predictable, particularly for pitchers: during spring training and the early stages of the regular season, there seemed to be an inordinate number of injuries to players who had tried to do too much, too quickly. The injuries threw off the competitive balance of the major leagues and created a new set of problems.

Because of the attrition rate, teams needed even
more
pitching than usual.

And Duquette was running an organization that had relatively little to begin with. Things reached the crisis stage for the Red Sox when an injury befell ace pitcher Roger Clemens, then a three-time Cy Young Award winner and easily the club's biggest star and most marketable commodity. Clemens had slipped some in the 1993 and 1994 seasons, going a combined 20–21 for a dreadful Red Sox team, but there was some renewed hope for him and for the team entering 1995 thanks largely to the overhaul in the Red Sox organization. During the work stoppage, Duquette had fired the underwhelming Hobson and replaced him with Kevin Kennedy, who had recently managed the Texas Rangers. (Hobson had had no prior major league managerial experience when the Red Sox promoted him from the minor leagues.) Duquette also had acquired rock star slugger Jose Canseco (a Kennedy favorite) from the Texas Rangers in an off-season trade, giving the Red Sox, if nothing else, another gate attraction (along with Clemens and budding slugger Mo Vaughn) that would help keep the Sox interesting should the team prove to be mediocre on the field. What the Red Sox lacked most was pitching, and that deficit explained why Duquette had been bargain-hunting—and buying in relative bulk—during the early spring. So it only added to Duquette's frustration when Clemens's right shoulder flared up during the early stages of camp, largely because Clemens, like many players, had taken a passive approach to conditioning during the work stoppage and shown up for camp out of shape.

Duquette therefore was looking for any pitcher who could give them, above all else,
innings.
He needed outs. Opening day was less than a week away when Duquette noticed that the Pirates had released Wakefield. Duquette was quite familiar with the knuckleballer from his time as an executive with the Montreal Expos, a team that was in the same division with the Pirates, the National League East, before baseball underwent realignment in 1994. Wakefield's availability immediately piqued Duquette's interest.

"I had seen him pitch late in '92, and he pitched the Pirates to the East Division championship over the Expos," Duquette recalled. "He provided the boost and the innings the Pirates needed to win the division, and that's when I became aware of him. So having seen him pitch brilliantly down the stretch for Pittsburgh, I knew he was the kind of pitcher who could pitch innings, but could also pitch when it counted because I saw him do it."

Naturally, Duquette was not the only baseball executive interested in Wakefield, particularly at a time when the game was in a state of flux and teams were scrambling. The Baltimore Orioles also expressed interest in Wakefield, the knuckleballer remembered, and Duquette recalled that the Florida Marlins had an eye on him. The Marlins' general manager at the time was Dave Dombrowski, who preceded Duquette as general manager of the Montreal Expos and had also seen Wakefield excel against the Expos as a member of the Pirates in 1992. Duquette knew how Dombrowski thought; if Dombrowski valued Wakefield, Duquette knew that the Marlins would make a push. Duquette believed that in order to acquire Wakefield the Red Sox would need to tap every available resource and make Boston the most appealing of any destination. Because all of the teams interested in Wakefield were likely to offer the pitcher similar financial deals—something close to the major league minimum salary—Duquette believed that other factors would determine where Wakefield landed.

Duquette had several advantages over Dombrowski and the Marlins as well as the Orioles, a division rival of the Red Sox and an organization in a state of flux. For starters, Duquette had a strong relationship with Bill Moore, the Arizona-based agent who operated almost ex
clusively with Wakefield's long-term interests, not the bottom line, in mind. Beyond that, Duquette's right-hand man and chief adviser was a man named Eddie Haas, a longtime baseball evaluator who embodied the cliché of the "crusty old baseball man." During many spring trainings, the white-haired Haas rode next to Duquette in a golf cart as the pair made their way from field to field around the Red Sox minor league complex, the older adviser gnawing on a cigar beneath the brim of a large straw hat. That Haas rarely spoke to anyone and hardly even exchanged pleasantries with anyone other than Duquette only added to the mystery of a man who always seemed shrouded in a puff of smoke.

The fact that Haas's full name was G. Edwin Haas prompted chuckles among the Red Sox beat reporters, who saw him as the "J. Edgar Hoover" of the Red Sox. (For what it's worth, the
G
stood for George.) The analogy was loose, at best, but Haas was nonetheless seen as Duquette's director of black ops—which was a colorful way to think of a man who had spent a lifetime in baseball and knew, well, just about everyone. A native of Paducah, Kentucky, Haas was then approaching his 60th birthday and had spent more than 40 years in professional baseball as a player, a coach, a manager, and a scout—a range of responsibilities and experiences that made him one of Duquette's most trustworthy evaluators of talent. Haas had spent many of those years in the organization of the Atlanta Braves, a stint during which he had encountered some of the game's most accomplished and unique talents, ranging from A (Aaron, Hank) to Z (Smith, Zane).

In Atlanta, too, Haas had learned about the value and whims of the knuckleball through the career of Phil Niekro, a career 318-game winner who thrice won 20 games in a season, twice lost 20 games in a season, and was regarded, quite simply, as perhaps the greatest knuckleball pitcher of all time.

"Eddie Haas was with the Braves when Niekro was with the Braves, and he extolled the virtues of the knuckleball," Duquette said. "He said the project was worth pursuing. He said, 'If we can stabilize the knuckleball, [Wakefield] could pitch for a long time.' I distinctly remember Eddie saying that [Wakefield] could pitch into his 40s."

Through conversations with Moore, Duquette learned that Wakefield's confidence had been badly shaken during his time with the Pirates, news that came as no surprise to the Red Sox general manager given the "whirlwind" existence that Jim Leyland had once described. During the six-year period from 1988 to 1994, Wakefield had been drafted as a positional player, nearly released, and converted to a knuckleballer, after which he experienced a dazzling and meteoric ascent to national prominence and then nosedived like a heavily weighted lawn dart. More than anything, Moore wanted stability for his client, something Duquette and Haas moved quickly to provide.