Knuckler (15 page)

Still, his performance had sufficiently ebbed that the Red Sox pushed him back to Game 3 of the playoffs—Clemens had long since returned by that point and would start Game 1 while Hanson started Game 2. Ultimately, his position in the rotation was of little consequence. Matched against a Cleveland team that was by far the best in the American League, the Red Sox were unceremoniously swept out of the first round, losing the first three games in a best-of-five series. As disappointing as the conclusion of the 1995 baseball season in Boston should have been, the Red Sox braced for winter with an undeniable sense of optimism, the team having discovered an unexpected and newfound hope following a series of seasons in which it had enjoyed relatively none.

As for Wakefield, he finished 1995 with a 16–8 record and 2.95 ERA that placed him among the American League leaders in an array of categories and earned him a third-place finish in the American League Cy Young Award balloting, as well as a 13th-place finish in the American League Most Valuable Player Award balloting. And yet, despite all his success that year, Wakefield found himself unwilling to celebrate too
much, unable to feel too safe, and incapable of looking too far ahead.

"I was in survival mode," he said.

Though he didn't know it at the time, he already had survived.

The worst was over.

He would never see the minor leagues again.

"Do you ever know which way it's going to move?"
"Not really. I mean, no."

—Exchange between a reporter and catcher Kevin
Cash about Tim Wakefield's knuckleball

F
OR THE RED SOX,
following a 1995 season that unexpectedly produced a trip to the postseason, the bill came due in 1996. With labor peace between baseball players and owners finally established, there were no unsettling distractions. With the game back on track, the variables that had helped the Red Sox rumble to the 1995 American League East Division championship had been eliminated. Nonetheless, expectations in Boston were high, and the Red Sox were not especially well equipped to deal with them.

Tim Wakefield knew the problem quite well.

Four years after his meteoric rise with the Pittsburgh Pirates, Wakefield suddenly found himself in almost exactly the same place again, albeit this time with a Red Sox team that had not undergone the massive changes that reshaped the Pittsburgh team of 1992–93. The Red Sox were under no orders to trim payroll and cut costs. General manager Dan Duquette had made changes and additions to the Red Sox roster—in the modern, free-agency age of baseball, every team had a fair amount of turnover every year—but the Boston nucleus had generally remained intact. Though he was entering the final year of his contract, longtime Red Sox ace Roger Clemens was still with the club.
Reigning American League Most Valuable Player Mo Vaughn also returned. Jose Canseco, too, was back. And though the Red Sox had lost right-hander Erik Hanson to free agency, Duquette had replaced him with Tom Gordon, a durable young right-hander who had begun his career with the Kansas City Royals. The Red Sox were not expecting Wakefield to carry them so much as they were expecting him to give them precisely what he was capable of giving them—innings. Still, Wakefield's historic run in 1995 certainly sat in the back of most everyone's mind, especially Wakefield's.

I hope they're not expecting me to do that again.

Beyond the baseball, Wakefield also had other things on his mind. Given the turmoil of his first four years in the major leagues, it was understandable that Wakefield was especially concerned about his contract. He had gone from major league star to minor league laughingstock back to major league star again, and a guaranteed contract was the closest he could get to a tangible measure of security. A contract meant something to him. It would be an indication that the team was as bound to him as he was to them. Major league rules generally prohibited a player from earning big dollars—at least in baseball terms—until he had three full seasons of major league experience to his credit. At that point, the player would at least qualify for salary arbitration—which generally required the team to pay him at a level commensurate with his peers in terms of performance and experience. Once a player accrued six full years of major league service, he was eligible for free agency, under which he could peddle his services to the highest bidder. This was the kind of leverage that was fervently sought by every player.

In the spring of 1996, Wakefield was still a year short of qualifying for salary arbitration. He knew this. He also knew that he had given the Red Sox 16 victories and nearly 200 innings in a season shortened by a work stoppage, a reality that made him one of the most underpaid players in the game. Wakefield discussed the issue at length with his agent, Bill Moore, who advised him to report to camp as usual, to do his work, to be patient. Wakefield considered holding out and at one point declined to pitch in an intrasquad scrimmage because his con
tract issue was still unsettled, though a resolution to the matter really was just a matter of time. Ultimately, Wakefield agreed to a salary of $450,000 with bonus clauses that could earn him even more. These were extremely fair terms for a pitcher with his track record and a sign, on some small level, that the Red Sox regarded him as a part of their future.

Almost any other pitcher with relatively little experience and an inconsistent history would have had no leverage at all. As allowed by major league rules governing the early part of players' careers, the team might have unilaterally renewed his contract without earnestly negotiating at all. Teams had the hammer in the early years and were frequently willing to use it, but the Red Sox took a far more diplomatic approach with Wakefield, whom they wanted to keep happy, focused, and productive.

We're not going to mess with this guy.

Still just 29, Wakefield was eager to put the entire process behind him, if for no other reason than that his Pittsburgh experience had literally been traumatic.
They can still release me at any time.
Despite his performance in 1995, he began the 1996 season, even as he said and did all the right things, still feeling like his job was at stake. The Red Sox earmarked a spot for Wakefield in their rotation along with Clemens, Gordon, Aaron Sele, and soft-throwing lefty Jamie Moyer, only the last of whom had to earn his way into the group. Wakefield was all but assured a spot from the moment he arrived in camp, but his experience in Pittsburgh had long since taught the knuckleballer that he could take nothing for granted, that he was never safe, that his fortunes could dip as quickly and unexpectedly as the pitch that had delivered him to Boston in the first place.

If you pitch poorly, you're gone.

Following a 1995 season that had been aberrational throughout the major leagues—again, the work stoppage had created a muddle from which teams would emerge slowly—the 1996 Red Sox were well positioned to disappoint. A number of unpredictable variables had contributed to the team's success in 1995, most notably the acquisitions of Erik Hanson and Wakefield. Hanson, who won 17 games, had been
signed
during spring training.
Wakefield, who nearly won the Cy Young Award, had been
released
by another team at roughly the same time. Although this conjunction of events was highly out of the ordinary—a classic case of the right players being in the right place at the right time—now that Hanson was gone entirely and Wakefield had ended 1995 pitching at something far closer to a realistic level, baseball overall had
equalized.
Now the Red Sox were among the teams that had come back to the pack while others rose.

Even so, the 1996 Red Sox badly stumbled out of the gate. The team lost their first five games of the season, 12 of their first 14, and 15 of their first 18. In hindsight it would become clear that they were crumbling beneath the weight and pressure of their own unreasonable expectations. After a poor spring, Wakefield began the regular season with a horrific outing against the Texas Rangers that produced a 13–2 Red Sox defeat. The next time out, 11 days later, he allowed nine hits and eight runs in an 8–0 loss to the Cleveland Indians, a performance that left him with more losses (two) than he had suffered during his first 17 starts in 1995. The 11-day gap between his first two outings was partly the result of a rainout and partly a response to Wakefield's poor spring performance—because he had been pitching poorly, the Red Sox skipped Wakefield when his turn came to pitch rather than skip someone else. This decision disrupted Wakefield's timing and confidence at an indisputably delicate time, triggering a chain reaction.

And so, two weeks into a 1996 season that Wakefield and the Red Sox had entered with great anticipation, the knuckleballer and his team were both in a tailspin.

The Red Sox wasted no time and sent Wakefield to Fort Myers for a remedial session with Phil Niekro, whom Wakefield was all too eager to see. Again, Niekro eased Wakefield's mind, stabilized his mechanics, set him back on track. They spent a mere two days together, Niekro again standing behind Wakefield as he threw, all but planting his voice between Wakefield's ears as if he were the Hardball Whisperer. Wakefield felt as if he had been reprogrammed. After returning to the Red Sox, he looked like a different man as he pitched seven strong innings in a 2–1 victory over a Cleveland team that had battered him
only five days earlier. In his next outing, he backboned an 8–3 win over the Texas Rangers. Wakefield and the Red Sox then concluded the first month of the 1996 season with a lopsided 13–4 win over Texas, a victory that left Boston with a miserable 7–19 record. Two of the Boston victories in April had come in games started by Wakefield.

He was better, to be sure, but Wakefield at times still felt as if he were fighting himself and the knuckleball. Maybe those struggles were one and the same. Wakefield tried desperately to apply what Niekro had taught him, but the process was less natural, more forced. Part of him feared the worst. He was still learning to deal with failure. Few players in history have had the kind of success Wakefield enjoyed as a rookie in 1992. And then, three years later, Wakefield went on a similar run in his first weeks with the Red Sox, during his first year in Boston, this time going 14–1. In baseball, those kinds of streaks are the exception rather than the rule, and the game is built on failure far more than success.

And so, this time, Wakefield did everything in his power to remain composed. Like the 1993 Pirates, the 1996 Red Sox were stumbling amid expectations, prompting most every member of the Boston team to try a little too hard and squeeze a little too tightly—particularly a maturing knuckleballer trying to apply the counterintuitive logic to a pitch that had failed him once before, leading to a destructive fall.

Tim Wakefield, like the Red Sox, was in inner turmoil, his mind and emotions sparring with one another as Niekro's lessons echoed in his head.

Use the uncertainty to your advantage.

But what if I'm unsure of it myself?

It's the only pitch in baseball where, every time you throw it, it can be an out pitch.

But what if I can't control it?

If you learn to command this pitch, you can pitch until you're 45.

But if I can't, I could be out of baseball at 29.

Tim Wakefield dug in defiantly and braced himself. He had gone from success to failure to success again, and the early pattern of his career suggested that failure was coming next. The ride was getting as
turbulent as the track of the pitch itself. Wakefield loved the highs but dreaded the lows. What he wanted most of all was a more stable existence somewhere in the middle that would make him feel safe and less vulnerable, a place he could trust, a place somewhere between 1994 and 1995.

But then, even at 29, Wakefield's life as a knuckleballer was just beginning.

He was learning about the pitch as much as he was about himself.

If charted on a graph, the early stages of Tim Wakefield's career would look something like this: long, high spikes followed by steep, precipitous drops. The knuckleball had given Wakefield extended bursts of success and failure as he harnessed the pitch for good chunks of time and then completely lost control of it for others.

On May 5, 1996, Wakefield learned that the knuckler could also blow in and out with the force and unpredictability of a midwestern thunderstorm, causing enough damage in an extremely short period of time to leave onlookers wondering precisely what had happened.

Wakefield and the Red Sox seemed well on their way to a victory, with a 3–0 lead entering the fourth inning, when a game that had seemed under complete control spontaneously combusted into a raging ball of fire. There was little or no warning. While athletes routinely speak of the fine line between winning and losing—in any sport—often overlooked is the reality that, over time, talent and execution generally win out. This is especially true in baseball, where, over the course of a 162-game season, luck tends to even out and talent most often separates the good teams from the bad ones. The gap between success and failure, as it turns out, is not nearly as great in the major leagues as it might be in some other arenas, if for no other reason than the fact that the game is a marathon and not a sprint.

As a result, small missteps can be overcome, mistakes can be erased, and transgressions frequently can be overlooked.

But for Wakefield, the line between success and failure that spring was microscopically thin. His confidence was brittle. Knuckleballers had less margin for error to begin with, to be sure, but Wakefield, the
Red Sox, and the entire six-state region of New England were about to learn about the whims of the knuckleball through a trial by fire. Whether Wakefield and Boston liked it or not, there were going to be growing pains. And that never was more apparent than in the middle innings of what would become a historic game for the knuckleballing member of the Red Sox, even if for all the wrong reasons.