Knuckler (19 page)

Like most every player in the Boston clubhouse, Wakefield took great interest in the Avery case, which was a classic struggle between an employee and his employer. Wakefield believed that Avery was in the right, and that Williams was caught in the middle. He believed that the Red Sox should allow Avery to pitch and honor the
spirit
of the agreement, which rewarded Avery if he stayed healthy. Avery had done everything the team asked to the best of his ability, and Wakefield already had experienced enough in his young career to feel that players in Avery's kind of situation deserved fair treatment.

Williams, for his part, stewed over the matter, and not solely because he had been a coach in Atlanta when Avery was there, nor because he had lobbied for the pitcher. Earlier in his career, as the manager of the Toronto Blue Jays, Williams had been involved in a similar incident involving pitcher Dennis Lamp, who had a similar incentive in his contract. Following the advice of Blue Jays upper management, Williams had refrained from using Lamp in games. The pitcher subsequently
failed to qualify for bonuses that would have paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he filed a grievance against the team through the Major League Baseball Players Association.

Lamp lost the grievance, but the matter never sat well with Williams, who felt that upper management was both telling him how to do his job
and
undermining his credibility with his players. The entire matter struck a very sensitive nerve with the manager and revealed a defiant streak that was both a strength and a weakness. As the manager of the club, Williams didn't like to be told what to do. If management hired him to run the team, management should let him do so. While every major league manager worked at the uncomfortable junction between players and upper management, Williams always regarded himself more as field personnel and less as an executive. Like his players, he wore a
uniform.
And in the case of Lamp, Williams knew that any future decisions he made would be looked upon with suspicion by the same players whom he would ask for sacrifices for the good of the
team.

Years after the Lamp incident, Williams still regretted how he had handled the matter.

He believed that Dennis Lamp deserved to pitch.

And now he believed that Steve Avery did, too.

On September 25, 1997, with just four games remaining in a regular season during which the Red Sox had long since been eliminated from playoff contention, Jimy Williams named Steve Avery as his starting pitcher for a game at Detroit, all but spitting in the face of team management and stepping over a line drawn in the sand. Williams would stand side by side with his players. Wakefield was among the many Red Sox inspired by Williams's decision. One year after firing Kevin Kennedy, Duquette was in no position to fire another manager for insubordination, particularly after an off-season during which Clemens (who was en route to the Cy Young Award with the Toronto Blue Jays by that point) had left the club via free agency. Duquette had no leverage, and he knew it. Williams, by contrast, was trying to instill some trust in the Boston organization, which had been known throughout all of baseball as terribly dysfunctional. If the Red Sox ever were going
to win, Williams reasoned, they needed to change the way they did things.

As it turned out, in his 18th start of the season—an outing that guaranteed his return to the Red Sox in 1998 at a salary of $3.9 million—Steve Avery shut out the Tigers for five innings of an eventual 3–1 Red Sox win. The game meant nothing in the standings, but it meant everything to a Red Sox clubhouse that was bonding with its new manager. And it meant everything to Wakefield, who had come to the conclusion that Jimy Williams was a man worth giving his best for, who respected his manager's knowledge and guts, who believed that Williams would help make him a better pitcher and player.

What Wakefield did not know at the time was that Jimy Williams would lead him to do things he had never envisioned and that no knuckleballer had been asked to do in decades.

Under the terms of the collective bargaining agreement between baseball players and owners, a player must qualify for salary arbitration for as many as three or four years before he can become a free agent. Tim Wakefield entered the off-season of 1997–98 eligible a second time for arbitration, which would allow him to continue increasing his salary as long as he pitched reasonably well.

But this time Wakefield never made it that far.

Facing the prospect of significant annual pay raises for a pitcher who was giving them an average of 200 innings per season—from 1995 to 1997, only 17 other pitchers in baseball won as many games as Wakefield (42) while pitching 600 or more innings—the Red Sox made the obvious and more prudent financial decision: they signed Wakefield to a long-term contract. Talks between the player and the club began on the final weekend of the regular season and concluded about a month later, the team getting a discounted rate for buying in bulk (three years) and Wakefield getting the kind of financial security (a guaranteed $12 million, an average of $4 million per season) that he never dreamed of while laboring for the Buffalo Bisons in Triple A during the summer of 1994.

Wakefield wasn't just a long shot anymore.

He was a bona fide success story.

On a broader scale, the timing of the deal was significant for other reasons. The winter of 1997–98 was expected to be a relatively volatile off-season, though nothing quite like the labor-dispute winter of 1994–95. Major League Baseball was inducting two new teams into the major leagues, the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, which were set to begin play in 1998 after filling their rosters through the
expansion draft.
To prevent their core players from being available to either of the new teams, existing teams had to identify those players and, in some cases, secure them to contracts. The moment the Red Sox signed Wakefield, they effectively warded off any interested parties by identifying him as their sole property.

Keep off.

That winter, after a long, losing season, public confidence in the Red Sox was sorely lacking. As a result, Duquette was looking to reconstruct the franchise in history-making ways. In the days leading up to the expansion draft, Duquette put in place the pieces of a blockbuster deal that would bring pitcher Pedro Martinez to Boston. A 26-year-old Dominican right-hander who had been named that year's National League Cy Young Award winner, Martinez had just completed a season during which he went 17–8 with a microscopic 1.90 ERA and an eye-popping 305 strikeouts, numbers that bordered on the superhuman. Originally the property of the Los Angeles Dodgers, the 5-foot-11, 185-pound Martinez had been labeled early in his career by Dodgers ambassador Tommy Lasorda as someone who lacked the physical size to succeed in the major leagues as a starting pitcher; the Dodgers had promptly traded him to Montreal for a second baseman named Delino DeShields. At the time, Martinez was a young and especially raw talent whose natural ability piqued the interest of Montreal's general manager, then a young, budding executive who already had a knack for finding diamonds in the rough.

The executive's name?

Dan Duquette.

Now with the Red Sox, Duquette had the chance to acquire Martinez a
second
time, this time under far different circumstances. The Expos
knew how good Martinez was, but the team could no longer afford him. Martinez was due for a considerable pay raise through arbitration and would be eligible for free agency following the 1998 season, so Montreal general manager Jim Beattie had little choice but to trade him. And because Duquette had drafted shrewdly through the first four years of his tenure as Red Sox GM, Boston was in a position to offer the Expos cheap, young pitching talent (right-handers Carl Pavano and Tony Armas Jr.) in exchange for Martinez, whom Duquette secured to a six-year, $75 million contract that included an option for a seventh season, bringing the value of the deal to $90 million over seven seasons.

For Wakefield, the impact of the Martinez deal was enormous—and he knew it. Martinez was a true ace among aces, someone whose ability would allow the other pitchers on the Boston staff to settle more comfortably into their roles. The idea of pitching on the same staff as people like Martinez and Saberhagen (who had two career Cy Young Awards to his credit) was beyond appealing. Suddenly, Wakefield found himself with a long-term contract to go along with ample help on the pitching staff and an offense built around affable slugger Mo Vaughn and dynamic young shortstop Garciaparra, all forming the nucleus of a team that could contend for a championship.

This is the best situation I've ever been in,
Wakefield thought.

He was right.

And it showed.

"He's a lot more comfortable and a lot more relaxed," Red Sox pitching coach Joe Kerrigan noted of Wakefield at the start of spring training. "He's established himself now. He's a proven multi-game winner. He doesn't have too many ups and downs with the knuckleball anymore."

The 1998 Red Sox also enjoyed a relatively stable, solid ride, winning 17 of their first 23 games and rumbling to a 92–70 finish that earned them a return trip to the playoffs for the first time since 1995. Wakefield played an enormous role. Early in the season, he ripped off a stretch of eight consecutive starts during which he went 6–0 with a 3.20 ERA. Shortly thereafter, he went 4–1 with a 4.08 ERA over six
consecutive outings. Suddenly, the good stretches were lasting longer and the bad outings were limited to isolated performances now and then, the kind of ebb and flow that was far more customary for reliable, traditional pitchers than it was for knuckleballers (at least in the eyes of the traditional baseball world). The Red Sox were rolling along, and Wakefield suddenly was blessed with the best of both worlds—the durability and resiliency of a knuckleballer and the consistency and reliability of a traditional starter—a blend that indisputably made him one of the very best pitchers in baseball on one of the best teams in baseball.

In fact, as Wakefield approached the end of the season, he had a chance at one of pitching's truly timeless accomplishments: a 20-win season. Superstitious as ever—and unforgettably battle-scarred—Wakefield dismissed that kind of talk out of hand, saying that such an achievement would be "nice," but that he was "not really thinking about that." Of course, the number was a clear and obvious goal. The tandem of Martinez and Wakefield in particular created quite the contrast: each was within range of 20 victories, the knuckleballer baffling hitters while the fireballing right-hander simply blew them away.

Two completely different pitching strategies, but with remarkably similar results.

Said Williams of his tandem, which was more like a trio when Saberhagen was thrown into the mix: "It's like, one day, you're on one of those really fast trains and you go where you're going. The next day, you go back to where you started and get on a stagecoach."

Whatever the analogy, the Red Sox were enjoying the ride.

Wakefield finished with a 17–8 record, a 4.58 ERA—the league average was 4.66—and precisely 216 innings pitched, the last statistic ranking second only to Martinez, who faded down the stretch and finished with 19 wins. (No one attributed Martinez's slump to the unpredictable nature of the knuckleball.) The Red Sox faced the Cleveland Indians in the first round of the playoffs and were ousted in four games in the best-of-five affair—Wakefield pitched poorly—but there was nonetheless a feeling in Boston that the Red Sox were building again, primar
ily on a foundation that included Martinez, Garciaparra, Wakefield, and Tom Gordon, who turned in a spectacular season after being converted into a reliever.

In any given game, the Red Sox were good at the beginning, good in the middle, and good at the end.

For Wakefield, the 17 victories established a career best and gave him 59 wins in 824⅓ innings during his Red Sox career, numbers that translated into 15 victories and 206 innings per season. While those totals underscored Wakefield's value to the club, they also made him one of the best bargains in baseball. Martinez, for instance, had signed a six-year, $75 million contract that guaranteed him $12.5 million a year during the life of the deal, more than three times the average annual value of what the Red Sox were paying Wakefield in his three-year, $12 million deal. And while Martinez was a better pitcher, his bottom-line contributions (63 wins, 886⅓ innings) were not three times as great as those of Wakefield, offering even more evidence that baseball people were willing to spend for fastballs, but the knuckler still made them nervous.

And then there was this: while someone like Martinez had pitched exclusively as a starter during the span—all of his 127 outings were starts—Wakefield had also pitched out of the bullpen, filling gaps when the Red Sox needed him to. His individual statistics suffered as a result, and as he would be reminded throughout his career, his versatility and sacrifices earned him relatively little when it came time to sit down at the negotiating table.

Still, if they asked, he delivered.

To Tim Wakefield, the rise of Tom Gordon was, at the very least, instructive.

Though the Red Sox had signed Tom Gordon as a starter prior to the 1997 season, Gordon had spent his career shuttling to and from the bullpen, a pattern that continued during the 1997 season, his first in Boston. Out of the bullpen, Gordon had been used as a long reliever: he would pitch for two to three innings per appearance, but his outings were limited to roughly two a week. In 1998, in the kind of radical move that Jimy Williams was most unafraid to try, the Red Sox made
Gordon their closer, pitching him for one or two innings at a time at the end of games but increasing the frequency of his appearances to three or four a week. The change produced stunning results: Gordon secured a Red Sox record 46 saves in 46 opportunities during a total of 73 appearances, the highest total of his career.

But in 1999 the predictable happened.