Knuckler (17 page)

When the Red Sox needed help returning to an even keel, Wakefield was willing to make the necessary sacrifices to promote stability. And when the team found that balance, Wakefield could settle into a more proper role in the middle of the rotation, where he could more freely endure the bumps and turns of the knuckler to give the Red Sox what they needed most from him: innings.

Though Wakefield did not realize it at the time, his performance through the first half of the 1996 season helped solidify his place in the Boston clubhouse, where he was becoming a fixture. Wakefield generally went about his work and kept quiet, and his attitude, particularly during times of crisis, was endearing him to teammates and management alike.
This guy isn't afraid to take a bullet.
The man who was still happy to have a job was planting roots in Boston, his place in the major
leagues growing steadier, more secure, more certain. Teammates respected his team-first attitude. Management recognized his willingness to help. Privately, Wakefield hoped that people would take notice of his sacrifices, but he also knew, and had learned, that baseball was a results-oriented business.

Even in victory, Wakefield labored. Though credited with the win in an 8–6 victory over the New York Yankees, Wakefield allowed 13 hits and six runs in five innings. His ERA climbed to a disturbing 6.45, still well above the league average and exactly 3.5 runs per game higher than the 2.95 ERA he had posted during the 1995 campaign. He still wasn't pitching well and had yet to find a rhythm. Wakefield found those moments particularly isolating, Phil Niekro's words once again reverberating in his mind.

Managers and pitching coaches, they can't help you much with the knuckleball. You're basically your own coach.

As it turned out, Wakefield was not as isolated as he thought.

The Red Sox had a handful of leaders in Wakefield's first years with the team, none of them more noticeable than gregarious left fielder Mike Greenwell, whose mouth seemed to move nonstop. Greenwell, who was in the midst of his last major league season, spent much of the 1996 season on the disabled list and in the minor leagues on a rehabilitation assignment, but he returned to the team in July. Greenwell was just 33—only a few years older than Wakefield—but he had suffered an elbow injury earlier in his career that damaged what was already a weak throwing arm. As he crept toward his mid-30s, Greenwell was becoming more of a defensive liability and less of a threat at the plate, where an absence of power was contributing to his decrease in value. On the one hand, Greenwell wasn't a good enough outfielder to play in the field anymore. On the other, he didn't hit for enough power to be a designated hitter.

Mike Greenwell was on the way out, the classic in-betweener caught between youth and old age, a holdover from a previous Red Sox regime who was about to be swept out in the transition to a new general manager.

Wakefield respected players like Greenwell, who was playing in his
12th major league season and had played in a pair of All-Star Games while finishing as high as second in the Most Valuable Player Award balloting (1988). Wakefield also personally liked Greenwell, a live wire who injected a great deal of personality into the Red Sox clubhouse but also played hard, played hurt, performed. He got the most of his ability. Wakefield believed that players like Greenwell were to be respected. Greenwell's antics and outspoken nature often made him an easy target for fans and media—players, too, often liked to needle him—but he was generally quite well liked. And in a city like Boston, where the Red Sox had built a long tradition, a 12-year career was nothing to sneeze at, particularly for a left fielder who followed the line of kings that had run from one Hall of Fame player to the next—Ted Williams (1939–60), Carl Yastrzemski (1961–83), and Jim Rice (1974–89). Greenwell fancied himself an extension of that reign—and in many ways he was—and Wakefield saw him as the rare player who was a representative and ambassador for his team.
Mike Greenwell, Red Sox.
As much as baseball followers identified the Red Sox through players like Roger Clemens, Greenwell's name deserved to be right there on the masthead, whatever his title.

But in 1996 Wakefield didn't necessarily recognize that Greenwell was much nearer the end of his Red Sox career than the beginning.
I was just happy to have a job.
The knuckleballer was far more concerned with his own seemingly never-ending struggles. On the night of July 20, Greenwell had finally returned from hand surgery and watched from the dugout bench as Wakefield took the mound against the Baltimore Orioles. While Wakefield was setting down the Orioles, Greenwell talked with teammates about the knuckleballer's effort to reclaim the magic he had unlocked during the 1995 season and offered a rather simple, succinct observation.

During the game, Greenwell approached catcher Bill Haselman and told him he had noticed that Wakefield seemed to be throwing the knuckleball harder than he had in 1995. The outfielder then waited for the right opportunity to relay the same message to the pitcher—a veteran player sidling up to a younger one in as nonthreatening a manner as possible.

Hey, Wake, got a minute?

Sure.

It looks to me like you're throwing that thing harder this year.

It does?

Then came the words that might as well have come from Phil Niekro.

Try taking a little off.

And just like that, as if keyhole tumblers were falling into place, Tim Wakefield found his groove again.

For Wakefield, of course, the entire story served a rather fitting purpose, touching on many of the pressure points that would exist throughout his career with the Red Sox. Greenwell was precisely the kind of player Wakefield wanted to be: a fixture. Someone like Clemens, who had Hall of Fame talent, was not a fair comparison. And what Greenwell told Wakefield was a terribly appropriate message for a player who was throwing every pitch as if his career depended on it, who was holding on too tight. Greenwell had seen that Wakefield's problems, ironically, came not from throwing the ball too soft but from throwing it too hard, which could be particularly counterproductive with a pitch like the knuckleball.

Ease up a little.

Don't put so much pressure on yourself.

You're trying too hard.

Whatever the reason—Greenwell's advice, Wakefield's natural ability, a little of each—Wakefield began pitching better instantly. Against the Orioles that night, Wakefield pitched 8⅓ innings without allowing a run in a 2–0 Red Sox victory. Two starts later, against the Kansas City Royals, he again went 8⅓ innings. From that point forward, Wakefield pitched at least seven innings in all but two of his final 11 starts—and in those two games he lasted six innings, still above the league average—and settled into the happy medium that has housed the long careers of many productive major league players. In all, over his final 14 starts of the 1996 season, Wakefield went 8–4 with a 3.83 ERA during a time when the Red Sox were similarly making a wildly improbable turnaround.

The 1996 Red Sox made a memorable stretch run before ultimately succumbing, finishing with an 85–77 record that left them a mere three games behind the Baltimore Orioles for the final playoff spot in the American League. During the second half of the season, the Red Sox had posted a 49–28 mark that was the best in baseball and had almost everyone in and around the Boston team, including Wakefield, wondering how different the season's outcome might have been had they played better in April.
If only we had gotten off to a better start.
And yet, for the Red Sox and Wakefield both, the second half of the 1996 season was a critical step in their development, a sign that they might be headed in the right direction.

But now, at a time when the Red Sox and Wakefield seemed destined to suffer identical fates, things had gone differently. Wakefield had
survived.
He and the Red Sox had fought back. For the first time in his career, Wakefield had made it through an entire major league season, from the very beginning to the very end, finishing with a 14–13 record and 5.14 ERA in 211⅓ innings pitched. He had been one of the anchors of the Boston pitching staff. Wakefield's performance gave him more than three full years of major league service spread out over parts of four seasons, qualifying him for salary arbitration for the first time in his career and putting him in position to earn the first multimillion-dollar salary of his career.

As surely as Wakefield had harnessed his knuckleball, he now had a firmer grasp on his career.

But then the winds changed again.

For all of the success the 1996 Red Sox enjoyed on the field at the end of the season, they were a team in transition and, consequently, inner turmoil. Clemens and Greenwell, longtime cornerstones of the team, were at the end of their contracts and eligible for free agency. The goal of general manager Dan Duquette was to overhaul the roster, not preserve it, and the Red Sox were headed for one of the more unsettling seasons in their recent history.

Tim Wakefield was unsure of how all the changes in Boston would affect him, but his experience in Pittsburgh had taught him that ev
eryone would feel the impact. Between 1992 and 1993, the Pirates had cut ties with, among others, outfielder Barry Bonds and pitcher Doug Drabek, the linchpins to that team. For any club, superstars are usually the building blocks. Wakefield knew he was not a superstar, and he also knew that he would be among those who felt the greatest impact in the absence of a staff ace if Clemens and the Sox could not agree on terms.

The message behind the eventual ugly breakup between Clemens and the Red Sox reverberated with Wakefield as harshly as it did with everyone else who had ever played in the major leagues.
If Roger Clemens can leave the Red Sox, then no one is safe.
Red Sox greats like Williams, Yastrzemski, and Rice had played their entire careers in Boston, long known as a place that conferred undying loyalty on its star players. Williams got most everything he wanted. So, too, did Yastrzemski. But now Clemens was leaving an organization that no longer seemed to want him. His departure was the biggest and most ground-shaking change during an off-season in which the Red Sox also fired manager Kevin Kennedy and cut ties with Greenwell, among others, all as Duquette tried to transfuse the Red Sox organization with younger, more dynamic players who did not need or expect to be coddled.

In the mind of Dan Duquette, who operated as if he were the new sheriff in town, the Red Sox needed an overhaul.

It was time to restore order.

Wakefield was headed for a bump in pay as a result of arbitration, but he wondered if that, too, could work against him.
Do they really want to pay me? Will I make too much?
For all of the money that major league players made, the game was also a ruthless business. At manageable salaries, many players had great value. But once those salaries began to escalate, players could price themselves out of a job, depending on their level of talent and contribution. If a team could get 80 percent of a player's production at 20 percent of the cost, that trade almost certainly was worth making. As long as teams drafted and developed reasonably good talent, signing cheaper and younger labor was always an option.

During the winter, amid the dramatic changes that were taking place in the Boston organization, the Red Sox sent out a letter to their season-ticket holders, a sales pitch intended to convince an increasingly skeptical fan base that the Red Sox had, well,
hope.
Seventy-eight years had passed since the Red Sox last won a World Series. Now the Red Sox were parting ways with arguably the greatest pitcher that had ever worn the Boston uniform in Clemens, someone who changed the culture in Boston by proving that a pitcher could lead the team. (Left fielders Williams, Yastrzemski, and Rice had all been position players.) During Clemens's time in Boston, statistics bore out the fact that the Red Sox were a playoff contender when he pitched and an extremely mediocre team when he did not. His presence made all the difference in the world. And while Clemens had skidded some recently—after he left, Red Sox officials were quick to point out that he had been a mere 40–39 in his final four seasons—the club also knew that Clemens's departure left an enormous void at the front end of the Boston rotation and stripped the club of its identity.

In their letter to the fan base, the Red Sox urged fans to renew their tickets, attempted to convince them that the Sox would be fine over the long haul, and insisted that life would go on without Clemens and that the Red Sox still had many capable players in the organization. The idea was to convince fans that the Red Sox were rebuilding the franchise and that the construction had already begun. To this end, the letter highlighted some of Duquette's shrewder maneuvers and identified some of the key players whom the club expected to be central contributors in 1997 and beyond.

One of the first names mentioned was Tim Wakefield.

With his arbitration case against the Red Sox looming, one of Wakefield's agents, Dick Moss, had caught wind that the team was using Wakefield as a marketing tool with its season-ticket base. Moss regarded this as leverage to use against the club if and when negotiations reached an arbiter. Although most teams avoid arbitration hearings with eligible players by coming to terms beforehand—think of it as a pretrial settlement—there are always cases that go the distance. Duquette himself regarded the arbitration process as "distasteful," as
he often put it, but he had to admit that there was sometimes no other way to settle a dispute. In the arbitration process, a player enters the hearing with a proposed salary (Wakefield wanted $2.5 million) while the team comes in at another (the Red Sox offered $1.55 million), and the arbiter is required to pick one or the other based on arguments made by each side. Unsurprisingly, most cases settle before the hearing at the midpoint between the two exchanged figures, but every once in a while one side or the other (or both) feels so strongly that a hearing is inevitable.