Knuckler (30 page)

For many of the Red Sox who preceded the new owners and team administrators, the 2004 season had the feeling of the last roundup.

"They've made it pretty apparent this is probably the last time the four of us [Varitek, Lowe, Martinez, and Garciaparra] will be together," the typically soft-spoken Varitek said late in spring training. "We've got to hold on to that and win."

Amid all of that, Tim Wakefield found himself in a most unusual place.

For one of the first times in his Red Sox career, during a potentially unsettling time, he had stability that others did not.

The Red Sox burst from the starting gate with a vengeance. The team won 15 of its first 21 games, making it clear from the outset that they were a team on a mission. During the first three weeks of the
season, the Red Sox played seven games against the Yankees—four in Boston, three in New York—and won six of them. The first meetings came on April 16–19 at Fenway Park, where the revamped, reinforced teams played for the first meaningful time since Boone's homer the previous October.

As fate would have it, Wakefield pitched the first game, which doubled as his first start of the season. He went seven sterling innings and backboned a resounding 6–2 Boston win. For the knuckleballer, the game brought full closure to his 2003 season and, like the writers' dinner, was impossible to forget. Wakefield was cheered as he walked from the dugout to the bullpen for his warm-up tosses, cheered when he was announced to the home crowd, and cheered when he walked off the mound at the end of the seventh. He felt as if the crowd was speaking directly to him at times, celebrating his career and contributions to the team and vowing to do exactly what Red Sox fans had learned to do each spring.

Let's give it another try together, Tim.

For that matter, Wakefield had long since learned the same lesson.

"To me, I could see it in his face—there was a relief. I think he was waiting for this outing for some time," Mirabelli said of Wakefield. "We were all in shock [last year].... The season was over, and we felt like we had a lot of game left in us. He was the MVP in that series. There was no doubt in my mind about that, and for it to turn that quickly on him ... it was a shame it ended like that. But without him, we wouldn't have been in that situation."

With the page now officially turned on 2003—for the Red Sox and Wakefield both—the team settled into the rhythm of the regular season at a relatively uninspiring pace. After starting the season 15–6, the Red Sox went a positively mediocre 41–39 over the next 80 games, a chunk of the schedule that constituted almost exactly half the season and brought Boston to the brink of the annual July 31 trading deadline. During that stretch, some of the team's internal issues began to eat away at it from the inside. Garciaparra remained unhappy and was playing poor defense in the wake of a heel injury he had suffered during spring training. Matters came to a head during a 5–4 loss to New York in 13
innings on July 1 at Yankee Stadium. Even though Garciaparra did not play in that game because he had been scheduled to have the day off as part of his rehabilitation from the injury, his teammates seemed irked that he did not fight his way into the lineup. The defeat concluded a three-game series sweep by the Yankees that increased New York's lead in the division from 5½ games to a whopping 8½, and many believed that Garciaparra had abandoned his teammates, acting selfishly in the midst of his ongoing issues with club management.

Whatever the case, Epstein had had enough, and by the time July 31 rolled around, he pulled the trigger on a blockbuster deal that sent Garciaparra to the Chicago Cubs in a three-team trade that landed shortstop Orlando Cabrera and first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz in Boston. In a separate deal, the Sox acquired speedy outfielder Dave Roberts from the Los Angeles Dodgers. All of Epstein's moves were designed to improve Boston's defense and athleticism—Cabrera and Mientkiewicz were excellent defense players—while simultaneously ridding the club of a holdover from the previous regime who seemed to be growing increasingly disgruntled.

"I like the club as is. The safe thing to do would have been to play it out. The safe thing to do would have been not to touch it," Epstein said. "But in my mind, we were not going to win the World Series as is."

Wakefield, for his part, had seen this sort of thing before, albeit under different circumstances, with different people. Roger Clemens had departed via free agency after the 1996 season. Mo Vaughn did the same late in 1998. The Red Sox had undergone considerable turnover during Wakefield's time in Boston—players, managers, general managers, owners—and his experience in Pittsburgh had long since hardened him to the realities of the game. People came and people went, and there really wasn't a damned thing that anyone could ever do about it.

Wakefield, in fact, had learned of the Garciaparra deal in unusual fashion. Despite trade rumors that involved the Red Sox shortstop, Wakefield never believed that Garciaparra would be traded, right up until the moments before the annual trading deadline. Garciaparra simply had meant too much to the franchise.

That day, Wakefield had left the team hotel in downtown Minneapolis and taken a taxi to the Metrodome, where he was dropped off in the rear of the building, as usual. He entered the stadium near the loading dock, where he greeted and walked past building security, then walked through the cavernous main hallway that circled the Metrodome and served as the central access point to all the locker rooms in the building—college and pro football, baseball. Finally, he arrived at the door that led to the visitors' clubhouse.

Just as Wakefield was headed in, Garciaparra was headed out.

Where are you going, Nomar?

The answer:
To Chicago.

Indeed, Garciaparra was headed to the Cubs. Wakefield had no idea what to say to his teammate.
Are you kidding? What happened?
The news caught him completely off guard. Garciaparra did not know who the Red Sox were receiving in return. He just knew he was out. Wakefield wished Garciaparra luck and told his former teammate he had enjoyed playing with him. Garciaparra did the same. Then the two shared a quick embrace before Wakefield walked into the Red Sox clubhouse and Garciaparra began the long walk out.

Once in the Boston clubhouse, Wakefield learned that the Red Sox had acquired Cabrera from the Montreal Expos and Mientkiewicz from the Twins, and that Mientkiewicz had been put in a most amusing position. A night earlier, Mientkiewicz had worn the uniform of the Twins and sat in the dugout opposite the Red Sox. Now that the deal had been made, all he had to do was change locker rooms. Mientkiewicz woke up in the same city and went to the same ballpark on consecutive days, but he played for different teams.

The visiting clubhouse at the Metrodome felt like a bus station. Wakefield told reporters that he was "sad" to see Garciaparra leave, but that he also recognized "the business side of this sport." He was still processing the moves himself. The Red Sox had a great deal invested in the 2004 season, and now they were changing course, again.

I wonder how this is going to play out.

More dips and turns.

For all the large-scale changes going on, their starting rotation had
remained remarkably intact, and the Red Sox would play the entire year without a starting pitcher missing so much as one turn on the mound. They treaded water for the next two weeks. When the Sox suffered a 5–4 loss to the Chicago White Sox on Sunday, August 15, they were a season-high 10½ games behind the first-place Yankees with a mere 46 games to play. They had gone a mediocre 8–7 since the changes that cast off Garciaparra and brought Cabrera, Mientkiewicz, and Roberts to Boston. Time was dwindling, and the Red Sox needed to get their act together quickly. While Epstein had expected an acclimation period after the changes, the Red Sox soon might risk missing the playoffs entirely.

If that happened, Wakefield knew that Boston's failure in the 2003 American League Championship Series would take on even greater significance and that the team could face even more dramatic changes.

As if flipping a switch, the Red Sox then morphed into their season-opening form, ripping off a succession of victories that seemed downright effortless. From August 16 through September 8, the Red Sox won six straight, lost one, won 10 straight, lost one, won four straight. Wakefield could not remember a time when the Red Sox ever played better as a team. When the surge was complete, Boston had gone 20–2 over a scintillating 20-game stretch that had brought the club within 2½ games of the first-place Yankees and all but secured a playoff berth as the American League wild-card entry.

During the streak, almost every Boston player contributed in some way, shape, or form—and most of them were playing at a very high level. In his final three starts of August, Wakefield went 3–0 with a 2.57 ERA and limited opponents to a .231 batting average. To that point, the season had been far more of a struggle for him than 2003—Wakefield would finish the 2004 regular season at 12–10 with a 4.87 ERA and pitch 188½ innings in 32 outings (30 starts)—but he made his usual contributions and sacrifices during a campaign in which the Red Sox finished 98–64, posting their highest win total since 1978 and finishing with the third-best record in baseball.

Though the Red Sox failed to catch the Yankees for the division title, that was a failure of relatively little consequence. Boston and New York
were both going back to the playoffs, and the teams seemed to be on a collision course given all the events of the previous 12 months.

Said a succinct Francona, capturing the essence of the moment: "This is the beginning."

Or more appropriately, another
new
beginning.

As had happened with great regularity over a two-year span, the Red Sox once again found themselves starting anew. They had changed owners. They had changed general managers. They had changed managers. They had made the playoffs and lost to the Yankees, revamped their roster, and started anew. They had traded Garciaparra and started over yet again. Then they had made the playoffs and recalibrated once more.

Quite accustomed to new beginnings, Wakefield was earmarked to start Game 4 of the playoffs. The addition of Schilling had reordered the starting rotation, with Martinez slipping into an uncharacteristic number-two spot. The stringy Bronson Arroyo was third. Squeezed out of the rotation, for a handful of reasons, was Lowe. First, because the postseason typically included an abundance of travel days on which no games would be played, teams generally operated with a maximum of four starters, not five. And second, among a deep group that included Schilling, Martinez, Arroyo, and Wakefield, Lowe had been the least effective down the stretch, and that performance had now left him on the outside looking in.

And then there was this: because Wakefield threw the knuckleball, he was almost always paired with catcher Doug Mirabelli, who was more adept at handling the knuckler than the customary starting catcher, Jason Varitek. Pitching Wakefield in relief during the postseason might require two substitutions in the middle of the game—the pitcher
and
the catcher—and the Red Sox believed they were better off using the knuckler early in the game as a result.

In that way, the knuckler was now working
for
Wakefield, not against him.

As it turned out, Wakefield never pitched in the best-of-five, first-round series against the Anaheim Angels. The Red Sox didn't need him to. Behind Schilling, Martinez, and Arroyo, the Red Sox wiped
out the Angels in three straight games, winning by scores of 9–3, 8–3, and 8–6. The Angels simply had no answers. Boston batted a whopping .302 as a team and dominated the series on both sides, save for a hiccup in Game 3 when reliever Timlin allowed a game-tying grand slam to outfielder Vladimir Guerrero. The Red Sox closed out the series when they won in the 10th inning on a two-run homer by Ortiz, a decisive blow that made a winner of Lowe, who had emerged from the bullpen to pitch the final inning.

While the Red Sox celebrated in typical rowdy fashion, the focus immediately shifted to the upcoming American League Championship Series, where the Red Sox would face either the Yankees or the Minnesota Twins. At that moment, New York led the series by a 2–1 count. To a man, Red Sox players said all the right things and insisted that they had no preference with regard to their next opponent, but the sentiment in the clubhouse was unanimous. Boston wanted to face the Yankees again, and no member of the Red Sox wanted another crack at New York more than Wakefield, who had been on the verge of being named the ALCS Most Valuable Player in 2003 when it all went
poof.

One night later, Wakefield and the Red Sox got their wish when the Yankees defeated the Twins in Game 4 for a 3–1 series win. Just like that, Boston and New York were slated to meet in a rematch that had all the makings of a
Rocky
sequel, but with one significant distinction.

The second version would prove even more riveting than the original.

We're going to get another crack at these guys, and nobody wants that more than me.

Because things went so swimmingly against the Angels, Francona had the luxury of lining up his pitching precisely as he wanted it again, which meant a Game 4 start for Wakefield. The knuckleballer was fine with that. As badly as Wakefield wanted another chance at the Yankees, he also knew that the Red Sox rotation was set in a way that would give him the best position to succeed.
I'll get my chance.
For as much as Curt Schilling helped the Red Sox during the regular season—he finished 21–6 and would finish second in the American League Cy Young Award balloting—the Red Sox had acquired Schilling for October, for
moments like this. Wakefield knew that and welcomed it.
The more good pitchers we have, the better we all can be.
In 2001, as a member of the Arizona Diamondbacks, Schilling had started three games against the Yankees, the last two on three days of rest, posting a 1.69 ERA. He was the starting pitcher when the Diamondbacks toppled the Yankees and Mariano Rivera in a decisive Game 7. For all of the criticism Schilling historically had taken for being outspoken and opinionated, he was a winner and a fierce competitor. Wakefield had come to respect Schilling greatly during his first season with the Sox.