Knuckler (3 page)

As much as baseball is a team sport, after all, the nature and pace of the game spotlight individual responsibilities and talents. The spectator's eye needs only to follow the ball. As analysts scrutinize individual performances after the game, they often lose track of the larger objectives. In baseball, sacrifices are easily overshadowed, particularly in the absence of group success.

"I went through the bad years there. I remember when, on a Friday night, you were lucky to have 10,000 people in the stands," said Hall of Famer and Red Sox great Carl Yastrzemski, who succeeded Williams in left field. "If you didn't go three-for-four or something like that, you could throw meat up into the stands and they would have devoured it. I mean, God, it was tough to play."

Once Williams retired, the Red Sox became Yastrzemski's team,
and then the property of Jim Rice when Yaz left. Like Williams, both Yastrzemski and Rice were left fielders and accomplished hitters whose individual performances would land them in the Hall of Fame; like Williams, each played an entire career without winning a World Series championship. All three players spent their entire careers playing for a Red Sox organization owned by Thomas A. Yawkey, his wife, Jean, or the Yawkey Trust, which endured well beyond the deaths of the Yawkeys. Tom Yawkey drew much criticism for how the Red Sox seemed to coddle their star players. Aside from being the last organization in baseball to integrate, the Red Sox often were accused of operating with a country club mentality, a suggestion that the inmates ran the asylum. The perception that the elite players often had more power than the manager for whom they played created both great instability in the manager's office at Fenway Park and a culture that placed the individual before the team. Beginning in 1948—just short of the midpoint of Williams's career—the Red Sox would not have a single manager last as long as five consecutive full seasons until after the turn of the century, and that was hardly a coincidence. In the Fenway Park clubhouse that served as both a sanctuary and a locker room for Red Sox players, the Red Sox had a clear hierarchy. Williams handed his crown to Yastrzemski, who handed it to Rice, and so forth. The organization was segregated on many levels.

Those policies began to change in the late 1980s, but only because Rice placed the scepter in the hands of a pitcher instead of a positional player. Clemens made his debut for the team as a highly touted rookie in 1984, but he did not fully blossom until 1986, the last productive year of Rice's career. Just as Rice was about to begin fading, Clemens ascended. Triggered by a historic 20-strikeout performance against the Seattle Mariners on April 29, 1986, Clemens raced off to an unforgettable 14–0 start that season and finished the year at a sterling 24–4, winning both the Most Valuable Player Award (his first and only) and the Cy Young Award (his first of seven) while bringing the Red Sox
this close
to a victory over the New York Mets in the 1986 World Series. Though the Sox ultimately failed—again in seven games after a crushing collapse in Game 6—there was nonetheless a sentiment that the
Red Sox had entered a new era in their history built on the young, bullish Clemens, the kind of ace and cornerstone pitcher the Red Sox had so often lacked.

Clemens, in fact, frequently referred to pitching as having been "a second-class citizen" before his rise to power in Boston—and he was right.

Following his breakthrough season of 1986, Clemens spent ten more seasons in Boston and won two more Cy Young Awards (1987, 1991), which only added to the individual awards won by Williams (American League MVP in 1946 and 1949), Yastrzemski (AL MVP in 1967), and Rice (AL MVP in 1978). The Red Sox qualified for the postseason three more times during Clemens's stint with the team—in 1988, 1990, and 1995—but they never again reached the World Series. Clemens left the team via free agency following the 1996 season in what proved to be a landmark change in the club's history—unlike Williams, Yastrzemski, and Rice, Clemens would not play his entire career in Boston. Under a bold and controversial general manager named Dan Duquette, the Red Sox seemed to be intent on reclaiming the rule of their own kingdom after having let their players run roughshod for a good chunk of the century. (For what it's worth, one Boston sports columnist called Duquette "Dictator Dan" throughout his tenure with the team.)

In keeping with a Red Sox tradition established prior to World War II, however, the Red Sox continued to operate more like an aristocracy, the regal Clemens starting his own line of kings. This time the royal bloodline of the Boston clubhouse ran not to left field but rather to the pitcher's mound. One year to the day after Clemens snubbed the Red Sox to sign with the Toronto Blue Jays, Duquette acquired Pedro Martinez from the Montreal Expos in a blockbuster trade. Just as Williams begot Yastrzemski, who begot Rice, Clemens begot Martinez, who begot Curt Schilling, who begot Josh Beckett, who begot Jon Lester. Along the way, the Red Sox finally changed owners and, thankfully, cultures, transitioning from a team that overvalued its superstars to one that preached the team concept and togetherness, commitment and dedication.

Having arrived during the final days of the Clemens years, Tim
Wakefield was the only member of the Boston organization who had been there to see it all. And only people like Duquette saw Wakefield for what he was: "the glue that's held that pitching staff together for a long time."

Truth be told, Tim Wakefield already could have been, should have been, and would have been the winningest pitcher in Red Sox history were it not for the simple fact that he was asked, along the way, to serve as the club's emergency response unit. For the bulk of Wakefield's career in Boston, he often was asked to pitch on short rest, to pitch out of the bullpen between starts, to fill gaps, to plug holes. Whether in the regular season or the postseason, Wakefield almost always was the man on the other end of the line when a Red Sox manager—particularly when he had just decided it was time to dial 9-1-1—picked up his dugout phone and called the bullpen.

For that, Wakefield had his knuckleball to thank.

Or perhaps blame.

Knuckleball pitchers are regarded by most baseball historians as nothing more than .500 pitchers, which is to say, they lose as frequently as they win. In fact, given the difficulty of harnessing the pitch and the disproportionate number of those who have failed trying to do so, many knuckleballers have lost
more
than they won, and many never reached the major leagues at all. Only the good ones have been fortunate enough to tread water and spend some time at the highest level of baseball played in the world. Only the great ones have endured and won more than they lost to become members of one of the more exclusive fraternities in sports.

In 2010, at the end of his 18th major league season and his 16th with the Red Sox, Wakefield owned a career record of 193–172, a winning percentage of .529 that most teams would have eagerly embraced. (In baseball a .529 winning percentage translates into an 85–77 season, a record that most teams would consider a success.) And yet, even that simplest of truths, a .529 winning percentage, could not quantify Wakefield's contributions to the Red Sox, especially in a baseball world where managers, coaches, fans, and teammates had learned to become as wary of the knuckleball's whims as Wakefield himself.

In baseball more than any other sport, the games are connected, which is to say that one can affect the next. On June 10, 1996, for example, the struggling Red Sox were in the midst of a bad losing streak that had required manager Kevin Kennedy to rely heavily on his relief pitchers, who had been worked to the bone. He sent Wakefield out to the mound with a very unappealing and demanding task—to remain in the game come hell or high water. Wakefield subsequently allowed 16 hits and eight runs while issuing three walks and throwing a whopping 158 pitches in an 8–2 Red Sox defeat that was not nearly that competitive, all because the Red Sox quite simply needed someone to take a bullet so that they could get their house in order.

Having had the opportunity to catch their breath, the Red Sox came out to win four straight and five of their next six games, a winning streak for which Wakefield was largely responsible but for which he received almost no credit. His individual statistics suffered. The team benefited.

That was just one of many such instances in which Wakefield made similar sacrifices.

Since statisticians in baseball officially began counting pitches in 1988, Wakefield and his knuckleball have produced the two highest single-game pitch totals in any major league game. On April 27, 1993, as a member of the Pirates, Wakefield threw an astonishing 172 pitches in 10 innings of a 6–2 win over the Atlanta Braves; on June 5, 1997, he threw 169 pitches in 8⅔ innings of a 2–1 win for the Red Sox over the Milwaukee Brewers. Wakefield remained the only pitcher to appear twice among those named in the top ten pitch counts since 1988—again, he owned numbers one and two—and the ninth performance on the list belonged to longtime knuckleballer Charlie Hough, who threw 163 pitches in 11 innings of a 1–0 win for the Texas Rangers over the Seattle Mariners on June 29, 1988.

And then there was this: during Wakefield's career in the major leagues, he had made 37 regular-season or postseason starts on short rest (three days or fewer)—more than any other pitcher in baseball. During that same period of time, no other Red Sox pitcher had started more than six games on short rest, all while Sox aces Clemens, Martinez, Schilling, and Beckett combined for three such starts (all
by Clemens). That statistic offers great evidence for those who believe that Wakefield often was made into a sacrificial lamb, particularly during an age when pitchers were treated more and more like delicate crystal than strong, young, full-blooded American farm boys.

In the modern baseball era, much to the chagrin of veteran pitchers who played prior to, say, 1985, major league pitchers generally are regarded as valuable assets and treated accordingly. Where teams once operated with four-man pitching rotations to negotiate the season—a starter would work every fourth day with three days of rest in between—the schedule has now been adjusted to incorporate a fifth starter, providing every pitcher with an extra day of rest. With costs escalating rapidly, especially for pitching—in 2009 the going rate for pitching was somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 million
per win
—teams have begun to protect their arms and, more specifically, their investments. By reducing the number of starts per pitcher per season from 40 or 41 to 32 or 33, teams can get more out of their pitchers over the long run—or so they believe. (This point is still contested by some.) The end result has been a culture in which pitchers are handled with great care. The resulting reduction in the number of starts per season
and
the number of pitches per start has created a rather peculiar business model in which pitchers are asked to do less while being paid more.

Unless, of course, you happen to be a knuckleballer. Faced with a knuckler, teams generally throw caution to the wind and operate as if from another era.

If this suggests a certain willingness among conventional baseball decision-makers to abuse knuckleballers in some form—and it does—then it also suggests a willingness on the part of the pitchers to do whatever is necessary to contribute, to endure, to succeed. As hypnotizing as the knuckleball can be to hitters, the pitch fosters humility in those who have dared to befriend it. As surely as Wakefield survived the ups and downs of a relationship with the pitch, the same has been true of Hough, Phil Niekro, and fellow knuckleballers like Wilbur Wood and Hoyt Wilhelm, among others. To a man, knuckleballers have never wanted anything more than to be treated like any
other player, which has almost universally resulted in a willingness to sacrifice themselves for the greater good.

"He's not really any different than any other pitcher in the major leagues," said Wakefield's father, Steve, who taught his son the pitch. "He's going to have his good days and he's going to have his bad days."

Countered Phil Niekro, who is in the Hall of Fame: "Most knuckleball pitchers, if you go back and look—and Tim's very good at this—they can start for you, they can be a long man, they can be a middle man, and they can close for you. Tim's done all of that. I don't know if there's another pitcher that's done what he's done for one organization."

For Tim Wakefield in particular, that willingness helped change the culture in a Red Sox organization that had long since gone astray.

And along the way it made him one of the most unique and extraordinary success stories in team history. If his ability to harness the knuckler made him, in some ways, like any other successful pitcher in the major leagues, his commitment to the pitch made him a most unusual exception.

Like some cult religion that barely survives, there has always been at least one but rarely more than five or six devotees throwing the knuckleball in the big leagues.... Not only can't pitchers control it, hitters can't hit it, catchers can't catch it, coaches can't coach it, and most pitchers can't learn it. The perfect pitch.

—Ron Luciano, American League umpire from 1969 to 1979

W
ITH THE KNUCKLEBALL
, the debate between perception and reality begins at its core: the grip. In most cases, the pitch has little to do with the knuckles at all. Far more often than not, baseball's most complex pitch is thrown from the fingertips, positioned between the thumb, index, and middle fingers as if it were a credit card being held up for display. The knuckles are what people
see,
but they are, like many things associated with the pitch, an illusion.

Just the same, the term
knuckleball
has become an accepted part of the American lexicon, synonymous with almost anything that lacks spin and moves in an unpredictable, unsettling fashion. In football, for example, a punt or kick returner might speak of handling a
knuckleball
kicked by a cleated punter or kicker; the poorest free-throw shooters in the National Basketball Association are usually those who put decidedly little backspin on the ball and shoot, as their coaches will tell you,
knuckleballs.
In soccer, a goaltender might face the unenviable task of saving a ball redirected with just the right amount of touch that the ball stops spinning altogether,
knuckling
its way toward the goal.