Knuckler (26 page)

For Wakefield especially, all of these developments were reassuring and signaled that the Red Sox finally had figured out the secret to winning a championship, something they had not done as an organization since 1918. He had prided himself on his team play since arriving in the major leagues, but he had especially demonstrated a selflessness and willingness to sacrifice for the greater good since arriving in Boston.
Even though I wanted to start, I did my job as a reliever.
He now felt that the entire Boston organization was operating with a togetherness that had been absent from teams like the 2001 Sox, who grumbled about roles and playing time during a year that resulted in the firing of manager Williams. The 2003 club had little or none of that attitude.
Winning
was the objective. If that meant that some people got more playing time and others got less, so be it. Selfish wants and needs could only hurt the cause.

As a result, Tim Wakefield
believed
these Red Sox could win.

The idea of another outcome did not even cross his mind.

At least not yet.

Along with the Red Sox, the Oakland A's, New York Yankees, and Minnesota Twins qualified for the postseason in 2003, the Red Sox as the American League wild-card entry given their second-place fin
ish to the Yankees in the East Division. The Red Sox had won more games (95) than the Twins (90), and just one fewer than the A's (96). Since Major League Baseball prohibited teams in the same division from facing one another in the first round of the playoffs, Boston drew Oakland, which made for a fascinating matchup.

During the regular season, while the Sox had scored more runs than any major league team and set a major league record for slugging percentage, the A's had allowed the second-fewest runs in the American League and finished the year ranked first in pitching. The battle of Boston's bats against Oakland's arms was seen as baseball's version of the irresistible force and the immovable object.

"I think everyone knows what kind of offense we have," said Red Sox manager Grady Little. "A lot of times you'll have a well-pitched game going against the best offense I've ever been around and do a number on them. But it hasn't happened very often this year. We know what our offense is capable of doing, we know what that pitching staff over across the way is capable of doing. It should be a good series."

Of course, for all of the attention paid to the matchup between Red Sox batters and Oakland pitchers, the opposite matchup was equally vital: Red Sox pitchers versus Oakland batters. During the regular season, Oakland's lineup had been extremely mediocre, finishing ninth in the AL with 768 runs scored. The Red Sox, by contrast, had scored 961. Boston's starting pitchers, meanwhile, had finished fifth in the league in ERA thanks to the performance of people like Martinez, Wakefield, and Lowe, whom Little had scheduled, in that order, to pitch Games 1, 2, and 3 of the series. Because the first round of the American League Division Series was a best-of-five affair, neither Little nor Oakland manager Ken Macha scheduled his rotation beyond Game 3.

If the A's had any noticeable advantages in the series, two were obvious. First, because Oakland won the AL West while the Red Sox finished second in the East, Oakland was afforded home-field advantage: Games 1, 2, and 5 would be played at the Network Associates Coliseum in the Bay Area. Second, the A's had an effective bullpen, anchored by closer Keith Foulke, that had finished third in the American League in ERA; by contrast, Red Sox relievers finished 12th. The prevailing
theory was that Oakland would have the edge in games that were close entering the late innings—a likely scenario in any postseason game.

Sure enough, the bullpens decided Game 1.

With Boston starter Martinez and Oakland ace Tim Hudson effectively neutralizing one another, the Red Sox took a 4–3 lead in the seventh inning on a two-run home run by second baseman Walker, his second homer of the game. The score remained that way until the ninth, when Little summoned Kim, whose three most recent career postseason appearances in the National League (all with Arizona) had produced disastrous results. On this occasion, Kim fared no better. He walked one batter and hit another, prompting Little to call upon left-hander Alan Embree with two on and two outs in the bottom of the ninth. Embree promptly allowed a single to the left-handed-hitting Erubiel Durazo, tying the game at 4–4 and sending the affair into extra innings.

In the bottom of the 12th, with the bases loaded, Oakland won the game on an improbable two-out bunt single by catcher Ramon Hernandez that scored third baseman Eric Chavez. With the rest of his teammates, Wakefield looked on in disbelief.
You've got to be kidding me.
No member of the Sox was more stunned than Lowe, the scheduled Game 3 starter who had been summoned to pitch the final 1⅔ innings of Game 1 after Little had run through the only trusted members of his relief corps—Timlin, Kim, Embree, and Williamson.

And thanks to the Game 1 performance of Kim in particular, Little's circle of relievers he trusted was getting even smaller.

By then, Wakefield had already addressed the media with regard to his upcoming start in Game 2. As was customary in baseball, the Game 2 starters had taken questions from reporters in formal press conferences held before Game 1 was even played, a schedule designed to accommodate newspaper reporters working on deadline. Game 1 of the series was played on a Wednesday, and Game 2 was scheduled for a Thursday. Back in Boston, by dawn on Thursday, fans could pick up the morning paper and read about Game 1 while seeing what Wakefield had to say about the now all-important Game 2.

This is the beauty of baseball: win or lose, there is little use in dwell
ing too much on what happened because another game is fast approaching and demanding focus and attention.

"I really feel this team, there is something special about it," Wakefield said when asked to compare the 2003 Sox to other playoff teams on which he had played. "I don't know if it's chemistry or offense, but one thing the organization did great this winter was get a bunch of ballplayers, a bunch of gamers. The chemistry we have among each other can't be bought. You can't go out and buy that. You have to tip your hat to the organization with Theo and Grady and the acquisitions that they made in the off-season to put together such a great team."

Still, Wakefield suddenly had a great deal on his mind, none of which had to do with the A's. Shortly after the Red Sox had arrived in Oakland, Wakefield received a call from his wife, Stacy, who was six weeks pregnant with the couple's first child. Stacy Wakefield had just come home from her first ultrasound exam, where doctors had been unable to locate the baby's heartbeat. They immediately scheduled another ultrasound in hopes of better assessing the status of the pregnancy, but Wakefield could discern from the tone in his wife's voice that she was scared.

I'm afraid, too.

I wish I were there with you.

Wakefield shared the news with very few people outside of Red Sox clubhouse attendant and equipment manager Joe Cochran, who had become a close friend. He was thus preoccupied when he took the mound for Game 2, which proved to be an effective distraction in the sense that it required Wakefield's concentration and focus, but it also proved frustrating. Paired against a near-perfect Barry Zito, Wakefield pitched a scoreless first inning before his control and defense briefly escaped him in the second inning, when the A's erupted for five runs, the final two of them unearned as the result of an error by second baseman Todd Walker.

Wakefield found the inning maddening. He had good stuff and he knew it, and yet the knuckleball—as it was wont to do—ran wild for a short burst of time, causing enough damage to put the outcome in great jeopardy. Wakefield reclaimed control of the pitch in the third
and allowed just one hit while racking up five strikeouts over the next four innings, but the early mistakes were too much for the Red Sox to overcome against Zito, who was brilliant. In seven innings, Zito allowed just one run while striking out nine, pitching Oakland to a 5–1 victory in a mere 2 hours, 37 minutes. The A's now had a 2–0 series lead.

Just 24 hours into the playoffs, the Red Sox had already lost twice and were one defeat away from elimination in the best-of-five series. Wakefield was reminded that the postseason, unlike the regular season, allows almost no margin for error. During the press conference with reporters after the game, he said nothing about his wife's visit to the doctor, preferring to keep the matter private and unwilling to make an excuse for his performance.

I just didn't get it done.

Still, as the Red Sox returned home and the series shifted to Fenway Park for Games 3 and 4, Wakefield believed that there was reason for optimism—for his family and the Red Sox both. After all, the 2003 Red Sox had frequently done their best work at the 11th hour, demonstrating a mental toughness that had made them almost impossible for opponents to knock out. Meanwhile, doctors had stressed to Stacy Wakefield that the absence of a heartbeat was not cause for alarm and that the next visit might very well alleviate the couple's concerns.

In either case, Tim Wakefield was happy to be home, where the 2003 Red Sox had been nearly unbeatable and his wife now needed him. As a team, for the season, the Sox had batted .316 at home and averaged an insane 6.6 runs per game. Almost nobody had been able to shut them down. During one game in June against the Florida Marlins, the Red Sox scored 10 runs in the first inning before an out was recorded and scored 14 runs in the first inning overall. When the first 11 Boston batters of the game reached base—10 on hits that included five singles, three doubles, a triple, and a home run—the baseball world was summarily warned of Boston's potency when all cylinders were firing properly.

Despite his Game 1 relief appearance, Lowe started Game 3 and performed brilliantly, effectively matching Oakland starter Ted Lilly
throughout the first seven innings. Just the same, the game was tied at 1–1 entering the eighth. Wakefield found these kinds of games intoxicating. When he had been asked to work as a reliever between starts, he had learned the routine in the bullpen during the game, how the tension built in the middle and late innings.
Time to get ready for work.
Some relievers, knowing they would not pitch before the late innings, did not even make the trip out to the bullpen until the third or fourth inning. Depending on the specific role each pitcher filled, the preparation was different. But in this game—an
elimination game
—late-inning relievers like Timlin, Williamson, and others were on high alert from the middle innings on. Any joking and banter had faded and finally stopped as the game progressed. They did exercises to get their bodies loose. When the call came from the dugout, they began to warm up until they were, as the relievers like to say,
hot,
which was an indication they were ready to enter the game. Then they had to stay hot by throwing at their own pace, one eye on their warm-up routine, one eye on the game.

Because he had started Game 2, Wakefield was among those pitchers not likely to be used in Game 3. But he knew that he would be on call for Games 4 and 5 if needed, especially because Game 2 projected to be his only start of the series. The Red Sox had planned to use four starters in the first round, with only Martinez scheduled to go twice, and Wakefield understood as well as anyone what that meant for the bullpen.

I know what those guys are going through out there.

Just before Game 3, Wakefield joined his wife for a follow-up ultrasound exam, which produced the sound they longed to hear: a heartbeat. The baby was fine. Doctors quickly determined that they had merely miscalculated the child's due date, news that the Wakefields accepted with both tears and an enormous sigh of relief. Tim could now turn his attention back to the task at hand.

Baseball.

This time, in Game 3, the A's relievers were the ones who cracked. After Timlin and Williamson combined for four scoreless innings, Sox outfielder Trot Nixon, a gritty fan favorite, belted a game-ending, two-
run homer to center field against A's wonder boy Rich Harden that gave the Sox a 3–1 victory and extended the series to a fourth game. The Red Sox, demonstrating to Wakefield and everyone else a familiar toughness and resiliency, particularly at Fenway Park, suddenly had a jolt of momentum. The A's, like many other teams, had been unable to put the Sox away.

We're not dead yet.

With Game 4 set to be played the next day, Sunday, October 5, Wakefield was among those pitchers again being placed on call. Just as Lowe had pitched in relief during Game 1, Wakefield knew a similar responsibility might be thrust upon him in Game 4 or Game 5—or both. While Red Sox fans clamored for Little to bypass John Burkett and start Martinez on short rest in Game 4, Little resisted the idea because he knew the limitations of his ace. Unlike Lowe and Wakefield, Martinez's history of shoulder problems made him unavailable between starts. He could not pitch effectively on short rest. The Red Sox had never asked Martinez to pitch with fewer than four days between starts, and they weren't about to start now, on the brink of elimination.

The A's, by contrast, turned back to Hudson, who took the mound on three days of rest and left the game after one inning with an injury to his oblique muscle. Nothing could have better highlighted the value of resilient pitchers like Lowe and Wakefield, who could pitch frequently and on little or no rest. When other pitchers made such attempts, the quality of their pitches suffered. Or they got hurt. As Martinez watched from the dugout and Hudson left the mound early, Wakefield was in the bullpen, ready to go, sitting alongside Timlin, Williamson, and Embree. Theirs was a perspective that pitchers like Martinez and Hudson had never really been asked to learn.

Unlike the way Kerrigan used him, Wakefield knew that any role he filled out of the bullpen, whether in the regular season or the playoffs, could come at a critical time. Little trusted him. Wakefield enjoyed the camaraderie in the bullpen, a team within the team on which all the relievers seemed to pull for one another. Whether the call from the dugout resulted in work for Wakefield, Timlin, or Embree—or any combination of relievers—the response from the others was almost
always the same.
Go get 'em.
The Red Sox bullpen came with its own support structure. There could be a closeness among relievers in a game, particularly during the postseason, that did not exist on other parts of the club. The relievers were like a relay team, one man handing the ball to the next, the entire group effectively running the anchor leg for the bigger group that was the entire 25-man roster.