Knuckler (27 page)

Game 4 was tied entering the sixth inning, when the A's began to rally and Little called down to the bullpen.
Get Wake up.
As was the case when Jimy Williams had unexpectedly asked Wakefield to close for the first time, Wakefield's pace quickened. Again, it was time to go to work. When Burkett allowed a two-run homer to Jermaine Dye, Little yanked his starter and called upon his knuckleballer to do exactly what he had been unable to accomplish during his Game 2 start: stop the bleeding. Wakefield made a final warm-up toss and strolled toward the bullpen door—
Go get 'em, Wake
—then jogged in from right field to the Fenway Park mound, where Little placed the ball in his knuckleballer's glove.

No instructions were necessary.

The game is in my hands.

Making just his third relief appearance of the season, Wakefield coolly closed out the sixth before teammate Walker (him again) hit a solo homer in the bottom of the inning to make the score 4–3.
Now keep the score right there.
Taking the mound in the top of the seventh, Wakefield retained the command that had escaped him only in the second inning of Game 2, pitching a critical inning without allowing a run. His focus was sharp. The deeper the Red Sox went into that postseason, the better his command seemed to get. Wakefield walked off the mound with the Sox still facing a 4–3 deficit but still very much within striking distance given the strength of their offense and their knack for dramatic finishes.

Attaboy, Wake. We can still win this thing.

Answering the bell like Timlin (in Game 3) and Wakefield (in Game 4) before him, Williamson pitched a perfect eighth before Oakland manager Macha summoned his closer, Foulke, with hopes of closing out the series. The move backfired. With the A's still holding a 4–3 ad
vantage, there were two on and two out when David Ortiz awoke from a postseason slumber and belted a two-run double to right field that gave the Sox a 5–4 advantage, a lead Williamson nailed down with a dominating, perfect ninth during which he recorded two strikeouts.

The Boston bullpen was scrambling, to be sure, but the Red Sox were finding ways to win. With the series now tied at two games each, the teams packed their belongings in anticipation of cross-country flights and Game 5, scheduled for the next day.

"They deserve everything they get," Little said of his players. "This ball club, the fans of Boston, they just keep grinding all the way to the last out. And we've had some players come through for us this year, day after day, and they continue to do that. And we feel we have a chance. As long as we have a uniform on and they have a schedule for us telling us there is another game, we feel like we have a chance."

In line with the rest of the series, Game 5 was a classic, further defined by the invaluable versatility of pitchers like Wakefield and, again, Lowe. Pitching on three days of rest, like Hudson, left-hander Zito outdueled Martinez for the first five innings and took a 1–0 advantage into the sixth. With Zito tiring, the Sox erupted for four runs, the last three coming on a home run by cleanup hitter Manny Ramirez. Oakland scored once against Martinez in the sixth to make it 4–2, but the Sox ace made it through the seventh without incident before Little, still shaken by the season-long performance of his bullpen, sent Martinez back out for the eighth. The move proved, yet again, how little trust the Red Sox manager had in virtually anyone specifically assigned to his bullpen, a distrust that had been highlighted by his reliance on starters like Wakefield and Lowe to pitch in relief between scheduled starts.

As a pitcher, Wakefield knew what a manager's distrust could feel like, particularly after having experienced it under Kerrigan. Players almost never look at it the same way a manager does. Wakefield could always believe another pitcher explaining what went wrong in a game for him, if for no other reason than the fact that Wakefield had been in a similar place. Like hitters, pitchers have slumps. The only way they can endure slumps is to continue pitching. If a manager starts changing things, the result can be a chicken-and-egg routine that frustrates players to no end.

How can you expect to have confidence in me if you won't pitch me when it matters?

You're giving up on me.

Wasting no time against Martinez, the A's opened the eighth with a double by Chris Singleton and a run-scoring single by pinch-hitter Billy McMillon, trimming the score to 4–3 and putting the tying run at first base with nobody out. Little then quickly turned to left-hander Embree, who retired the next two batters—lefties Erubiel Durazo and Eric Chavez—before surging right-hander Timlin entered to retire shortstop Miguel Tejada on an inning-ending groundout. The Red Sox had escaped a tie by the skin of their teeth, but with one inning to play, they were operating with no margin for error. The stage was set for the rebuilt but nonetheless rickety Boston bullpen to be tested to the fullest.

Much to the dismay of Red Sox fans watching back in Boston in the late hours—the game had started at 5:18 PM Pacific Standard Time, so it was now approaching midnight on the East Coast—Williamson followed his sterling Game 4 performance by walking the first two batters of the inning, Scott Hatteberg and José Guillén. The Red Sox and their fans started to fret. By that point, Little had completely eliminated the self-doubting Kim as an option, and Embree and Timlin already had pitched. His options were limited. Once again, the manager's only option was a starter, Lowe, who entered the game with nobody out and runners at both first base and second—the potential tying and winning runs.

Wakefield took particular note of all of this, recognizing that Lowe was being asked to do precisely what he himself had done the day before, to bounce between the starting rotation and bullpen at a time when the Red Sox could not afford even a hiccup.

C'mon, D-Lowe. You can do this.

After catcher Ramon Hernandez sacrifice-bunted the runners to second and third—in Game 1, remember, it was Hernandez who bunted for a hit against Lowe to win the game in extra innings—Lowe faced three consecutive left-handed batters: pinch hitter Adam Melhuse, outfielder Singleton, and pinch hitter Terrence Long. Lowe struck out Melhuse, walked Singleton to load the bases, and then whiffed Long
on a banana-bending two-seam fastball (or sinker) that started at Long's right hip and darted over the inside corner. Long froze, the bat remaining on his shoulder. Lowe squared his hips and thrust his fist downward—over his right hip and between his legs—touching off a Red Sox celebration that ended the game, 4–3, and the series, 3–2, and sending Boston back to the American League Championship Series for the second time in five seasons.

In the series, Lowe threw the final pitches of Games 1 and 5 and the first pitch of Game 3. Wakefield had started Game 2 and relieved in Game 4. The two most versatile members of the Boston staff accounted for 52 of the 146 outs recorded by Red Sox pitchers during the series, including at least one out in every game.

Boston's two most valuable performers in the series were easily its most pliable pitchers.

"If you had any doubts about his heart, there are absolutely no doubts now," Epstein said of Lowe after Game 5. "That was as clutch as you can possibly be. I don't know how many pitchers in the game have the guts to make those pitches."

Given the results of Game 5, the Red Sox were not about to change their strategy entering Game 1 of the ALCS, where they would face their longtime rivals, the New York Yankees, in a series that was expected to be downright apocalyptic. If relievers like Williamson and Timlin showed the first signs of cracking, Little was likely to call starters like Wakefield and Lowe out of the bullpen between starts. The Red Sox couldn't sacrifice games during the playoffs the way they could during the regular season, when every team managed for the long haul. The playoffs were a sprint, and every loss moved a team one step closer to winter.

Even though the Yankees finished 2003 with the best record in baseball, even the most level-headed baseball observers acknowledged that the Red Sox had a certain spunk that was impossible to ignore. For all of the pain the Yankees had inflicted on the Red Sox over the course of their history, there was a sentiment throughout New England that these Red Sox were different, that Boston now had a team capable of rising to any challenge, which spoke to the competitiveness and professionalism of the Boston roster.

From Wakefield and Lowe and on through the roster, the Red Sox had a team of players willing and able to do whatever was
necessary.

To that end, Little named Wakefield his starter for Game 1, calling for the knuckleballer to appear a third time in seven days since the start of the postseason. While Little's decision again highlighted his dependence on Wakefield and Lowe—slated to start Games 1 and 5, Wakefield could pitch out of the bullpen in between—it also had great meaning to the knuckleballer, for obvious reasons. The last time the Red Sox faced the Yankees in the postseason, during the 1999 American League Championship Series, Wakefield had been unceremoniously left off the roster. That decision as much as any other made by any manager, coach, or executive during Wakefield's career had stung him deeply and reflected how uneasily traditional baseball observers regarded the knuckleball when the stakes were high and the pressure intense.

We just can't trust that thing.

Now here was Wakefield, four years later, assigned the responsibility of leading the Red Sox into Yankee Stadium to face an awesome Yankees team, with a trip to the World Series at stake. This time, while someone else had to suffer the indignity of being omitted from the active roster at the most critical time of year—the psychologically brittle Kim—the Red Sox were confidently standing behind Wakefield. His days as a full-time reliever were but a distant memory, and his philosophical differences with pitching coach Joe Kerrigan were long gone. Finally, he had bosses and teammates who regarded him as an invaluable multipurpose tool, an asset. By contrast, Kim had proven incapable of handling the pressure and constant shuttling from the starting rotation to the bullpen. That instability had left his career in a state of upheaval from which he would never really recover.

To almost anyone who had followed Wakefield's career, in fact, it was clear that the knuckleballer had become
stronger
as a result of his travails. He spoke openly and unemotionally about the past and embraced his versatility as a strength. In the days before Game 1, he spoke of his versatility as "a weapon," noting that he and Lowe "just did whatever we had to do to try to win games." Four years after being snubbed, Wakefield saw the 2003 ALCS as "a totally different story." He spoke of
the chemistry the Red Sox possessed as a team, using words like
fun
and
exciting.
Wakefield's manner suggested a supreme confidence in his organization and his teammates, and his unspoken message was equally as apparent.

I'm confident in myself, too. I'm as ready as I have ever been for this.

Maybe it was no surprise, then, that he made the most of the opportunity.

In the bullpen before Game 1, Wakefield's pregame routine was systematic and precise, his mind free of any of the clutter that had weighed him down in previous years.
Grip, kick, throw.
Throwing knuckleballs for strikes had rarely seemed so simple. Yankee Stadium fans were renowned for razzing opposing pitchers before, during, and after their warm-up sessions, but Wakefield heard relatively little of the taunting. When he did hear it, he just chuckled to himself at the creativity of New York hecklers. He could not be derailed. During any warm-up session—or for that matter, during games—Wakefield's target behind home plate was the mask and chest protector worn by his catcher (in this case Doug Mirabelli), with the idea that the ball would dip just before reaching the hitter, the pitch all but landing in the catcher's lap.
Plop.
When Wakefield found his rhythm, as he had done in all but the second inning of Game 2 of the series against Oakland, he could effortlessly drop knuckleballs in Mirabelli's lap as if he were Michael Jordan shooting free throws.

Dribble,
swish,
dribble,
swish,
dribble,
swish.

Matched against the crafty and talented Mike Mussina—a traditional pitcher in the truest sense of the word, Mussina could throw hard and change speeds effortlessly—Wakefield took his brilliance from the bullpen and transferred it to the mound. While Red Sox batters stung Mussina for three homers—a two-run drive by the awakening Ramirez and solo shots by the sizzling Walker and Ortiz—Wakefield shut out the Yankees for the first six innings. He allowed just two singles and did not walk a batter. The Red Sox held a 5–0 edge when Wakefield opened the seventh by walking both Jason Giambi and Bernie Williams, at which point Little wisely decided that he had asked enough of his knuckleballer, who had thrown 91 pitches in
the game, 220 during the first week of the playoffs. Yankees catcher Jorge Posada promptly greeted Embree with a double that made the score 4–1, but Embree retired the next three batters—one on a sacrifice fly—to allow the Red Sox a 5–2 advantage entering the eighth. Timlin and Williamson each followed Embree with 1-2-3 innings, closing out a 5–2 Red Sox victory in which unpredictable Sox relievers retired the final nine Yankees of the game. Adding in Wakefield's mastery, Red Sox pitchers retired 27 of New York's 32 batters on the night, allowing New York just three hits in 29 official at-bats.

The Red Sox concluded the victory 48 hours after the win over the A's, a period of time during which the Sox made a cross-country flight and endured a light off-day workout, leaving little time for rest.

Said a matter-of-fact Little when asked about Wakefield's performance: "We saw the same thing with Tim tonight that we've seen most of the season."

As it turned out, Wakefield's performance only grew in magnitude over the coming days. Asked to start Game 2 and make his fourth appearance of the postseason in eight days, Lowe struggled, allowing seven hits, six runs, and a pair of walks in a game the Red Sox led only briefly, 1–0. The workload seemed to be catching up with him. The series subsequently shifted to Boston for a highly billed matchup featuring Martinez and Roger Clemens, the erstwhile Sox ace whom the Sox had ravaged in Game 3 of an identical matchup during the 1999 American League Championship Series. This time, however, Martinez was the one who had nothing on his pitches from the very start. Staked to a 2–0 lead in the first inning, Martinez allowed one run in the second, another in the third, and two more in the fourth. Before that inning was over, however, with his pitch count escalating, Martinez's patience wore thin: he cracked and buzzed Yankees outfielder Karim Garcia with a pitch, igniting the ever-present tensions between the teams. Two innings later, Sox slugger Ramirez overreacted when the intimidating Clemens fired a fastball up and in, triggering a bench-clearing scrum during which 72-year-old Yankees bench coach Don Zimmer charged at Martinez, who, while defending himself, pushed Zimmer to the ground. The enraged Yankees held on to a 4–3 vic
tory that left the Red Sox to deal with both a 2–1 series deficit and the shameful behavior of their ace.