Knuckler (9 page)

Was that thing for real? Could Wakefield throw it consistently? Was he even willing to try?

Casually, as if simply curious to learn the secret behind a card trick, Huyke wandered over to Wakefield and Martin. He watched the knuckler flutter yet again. The wheels in Huyke's mind then began to turn more rapidly, the evaluator intrigued by a discovery that might be worth a try given the player's dwindling prospects as a hitter.

"You think you can throw that for a strike?" Huyke asked nonchalantly.

Wakefield's reply: "Sure. I pitched some in high school. I don't see why not."

Wakefield threw the knuckler. Huyke watched.
Throw it again.
The pitch unsteadily floated toward Martin, the laces entirely visible, almost bouncing through the air as if it had been launched, without the slightest spin, from a slingshot. The young outfielder labored to catch the ball.
Do it again.
Once more, Wakefield threw the knuckler to his teammate, who struggled to catch the ball, and Huyke fixated on the pitch as if he were sitting in a 3-D movie, watching the ball tumble away from him with the kind of unpredictable, confounding movement that could cause a man's eyes to cross and his head to begin aching.

Huyke nodded and walked away, saying nothing more as Wakefield's
mind began to race.
Why did he ask me that? What does he want me to do? Does he want me to throw batting practice? Does he want me to pitch?
The Pirates played their game, as scheduled. Wakefield did not remember the opponent or the outcome. What he did remember was that, after the game, Huyke sent him down to the bullpen to throw for Bruce Kison, a former major league pitcher who had won 115 games during a 15-year career with the Pirates, California Angels, and Red Sox. At the time, Kison was working as Pittsburgh's minor league pitching coordinator, a job he held until later becoming a major league pitching coach with both the Kansas City Royals and the Baltimore Orioles. Kison watched Wakefield throw, said relatively little, and, like Huyke, gave Wakefield absolutely no indication as to whether he had done well or poorly.

I still don't know if these guys like this thing or not.

Roughly a week later, Wakefield was promoted to Class A and joined the Pirates' South Atlantic League affiliate in Augusta, Georgia, which was a step up from the team's short-season affiliate in Watertown. By then, he was regarded as nothing more than a utility player. Wakefield played some at first base, some at third, and warmed up pitchers in the bullpen whenever there was a need. He did not pitch. Wakefield was desperate to remain in professional baseball, and he made it clear to anyone and everyone around the Augusta team that he was open to doing "whatever I could to stay there." No job was too small.

Late in the year, with roughly a month left in the season, the Pirates sent Wakefield back to the New York–Penn League, to the short-season, lower-level Class A team that he had played for only a year earlier. The only difference was that the team had moved from Watertown, New York, to Welland, Ontario, which hardly mattered to Wakefield. He didn't know why the Pirates were sending him there, or what it meant, but he was grateful to still have a job. Wakefield had yet to begin his career as a knuckleballer, but he was already being tugged from one location to the next, from Bradenton to Watertown to Augusta to Welland, a ride that was becoming increasingly bumpy. He was all over the place. Tim Wakefield needed a foundation, needed stability, and he was ready to cling to most anything in order to find it.

Upon reporting to Welland, Wakefield was introduced to manager
U. L. Washington, a former major league shortstop who hit .251 in 907 career games, most of them with the Kansas City Royals, the final 82 with the Pirates. At Welland, Washington used Wakefield exactly the way he had been employed at Augusta—as a utility infielder and bullpen catcher who would do whatever was asked of him. Wakefield was playing the infield one day when Washington came out of the dugout to make a pitching change. The manager summoned Wakefield into the game to pitch. Making no connection to the demonstrations he had given Huyke and Kison months earlier, Wakefield pitched exactly as he had done in high school—throwing fastballs and curveballs. He did not remember the results. After the game was over, Wakefield returned to the Pirates' locker room, where Washington approached him and delivered a very succinct message.

"No," said the skipper, who had long been renowned for chewing on a toothpick during games, even as a player. "We want you to throw
the knuckleball.
"

Not long after, in another minor league game, Washington again brought Wakefield in to pitch, this time from second base. The walk to the mound was short, so Wakefield had little time to think. The series of events seemed so insignificant to him at the time, the games so much like any of the games he had played in high school or summer leagues, that he could not remember later how he performed, how the knuckler responded, what the Pirates were searching for.
Are they serious about this?
The entire event was relatively forgettable. But shortly thereafter, as the minor league season wound down, Wakefield had a conversation with Washington during which the manager told him that the Pirates wanted to make him a full-time pitcher. Wakefield bristled. He wanted to hit. He was drafted to hit. He knew he could hit. He resisted the idea until, like Don Vito Corleone in
The Godfather,
the Pirates made him an offer he could not refuse.

Not if he wanted to continue playing baseball.

"I was a little rebellious at first because I didn't want to give up hitting. I was disappointed they were giving up on me that quick," Wakefield said. "But then, they basically told me, 'You're going to pitch or you're going to go home.' So I said, 'Okay, I'll pitch.'"

That fall the Pirates sent Wakefield back to Bradenton, to the instructional league, which extended into November.

During the organizational meetings the team held near the end of the season—all minor league teams hold these meetings, which are the equivalent of performance or job reviews for the players—the Pirates had decided that Wakefield had no promise as a positional player. They were prepared to release him. Wakefield heard that Huyke had spoken up on his behalf: his manager in extended spring training believed Wakefield might have promise as a knuckleball pitcher. The cost of keeping Wakefield was minimal, so the Pirates rolled the dice. In the worst case, from the team's perspective, the Pirates could release Wakefield later. In the best case, they might hit the jackpot and develop an asset to be used in their own system, in a trade, or in any number of other ways.

During the fall of 1989, granted what many might have deemed a stay of execution, Wakefield made the conversion to full-time pitcher. He all but scrapped hitting. He worked out as a pitcher, trained as a pitcher, developed as a pitcher. Most of all, he tried to familiarize himself with a knuckleball that, to that point in his career, had been nothing more than something he used to amuse—and
be
muse—both himself and others.

"I knew I had a good knuckleball. I just had to learn how to control it," Wakefield said. "Basically, my first year, it was like, 'Go figure it out.'"

And so, with a new vision of what it would take to make it to the major leagues, Tim Wakefield set out to explore and investigate the whims of the knuckleball, regarded by many in baseball as a maddening, unpredictable, and entirely unreliable pitch.

And in this case, it was also the fine thread on which Tim Wakefield's career dangled.

Upon learning of his son's conversion from position player to knuckleballer, Steve Wakefield was, in a word, skeptical. He did not share those concerns with his son. Steve knew that the Pirates would not have asked his son to transform himself completely had he possessed
the necessary skills to succeed as a hitter, and he had little reason to regard the knuckleball as anything but a deterrent for his son.

That was all he knew.

"I said to myself, 'Well, his career's going to be over now for sure,'" Steve Wakefield recalled.

Had Tim Wakefield understood that his odds for success at that stage were akin to the odds of winning the lottery, the young knuckleballer might have harbored similar skepticism. Of course, he did not. Wakefield subsequently reported to spring training as a pitcher for the first time in his career and was assigned to Pittsburgh's affiliate in Salem, Virginia, of the Carolina League, one of the highest levels of Class A baseball and the league that features the Durham Bulls of
Bull Durham
fame. He was 23 now. Managed by Stan Cliburn, a former major league catcher who played all of 54 career games with the California Angels, the Salem Buccaneers were a positively dreadful lot who posted the worst record in the Carolina League that season, going 55–84 over a 139-game schedule.

Heaven knows how poorly the Buccaneers might have done had it not been for the slow and steady development of their experimenting knuckleballer.

By strict baseball standards, Wakefield's first year as a knuckleballer was relatively mediocre. By developmental standards, it was an indisputable success. Wakefield was frustrated at times by his inability to control the pitch consistently. At other times, he was awed by the power of a pitch that seemed near-mystical in nature as it transfixed hitters. When it worked, batters were confounded by it. When it failed, Wakefield issued walks (85) and allowed home runs (24) in bulk. The knuckler tugged him along by the collar, every which way but loose, and he often felt as if he was fighting the knuckleball himself as much as any hitter, catcher, or umpire.

If I could just get a tighter leash on this thing ...

Steve and Judy Wakefield made the trip to Salem on more than one occasion during their son's first full year of minor league play—Salem was not a short-season affiliate, like Watertown or Welland—and they, like their son, did not really know what to think. They had no frame
of reference. Steve Wakefield knew baseball well enough to know what the numbers meant, but what he did not know was that, at that level, the numbers lacked importance. The
experience
was what mattered more. Tim Wakefield needed time to learn the pitch, learn the game, and learn the routine at a new level of play. The knuckleball element complicated the development that any player would undergo, and so Wakefield and his parents had little way of knowing whether he was succeeding, failing, or just muddling along in between.

Salem, like many minor league cities and towns, had a core of season-ticket holders, fans who attended almost every game and had become organizational groupies, like Annie Savoy in
Bull Durham
. Steve and Judy Wakefield were in the stands one night watching their son pitch when they struck up a conversation with a couple of these loyalists. Judy Wakefield's description of them—"Two of the older gentlemen who went to the games"—conjures an image that cannot help but stir up comparisons to Statler and Waldorf, the disagreeable, elderly tandem that relentlessly heckles most everyone from the balcony of
The Muppet Show.
Indeed, the Statler and Waldorf of Salem had plenty to heckle at that summer, but their assessment of Tim Wakefield was beyond benign: the two fans assured the nervous parents that their son was excelling at his new job.

Their assessment?

"That he was going to make it to the big leagues," Judy Wakefield recalled.

Judy and Steve Wakefield still had their doubts as to whether their son had truly stumbled onto something special—with the knuckleball, after all, there are always doubts—but they certainly wanted to believe that he had. His performance only solidified their hopes as he led the team in victories (10), starts (28), and innings pitched (190⅓) during a season in which there had been relatively little else to root for. Tim Wakefield, too, regarded the season as a success, though he admitted later that he had no idea how to measure his own performance at that point.

In reality, of course, particularly given Wakefield's inexperience with the knuckleball, he had been just short of brilliant. Wakefield had
allowed fewer hits (187) than he accumulated innings pitched, a ratio that is a goal for any pitcher, let alone a first-year knuckleballer. And while he had walked an average of four batters per nine innings, that ratio was quite good for a novice who had never pitched consistently at any level beyond high school.

Within the Pirates organization, team officials were thrilled.
We just might have something here.
Nonetheless, the Pirates were eager to see how Wakefield would perform the following year, in 1991, when they sent him to their affiliate in the Southern League, the Carolina Mudcats. The Mudcats were Class AA—more frequently referred to as Double A—a level at which the competition would stiffen considerably.

Double A is regarded as the level where true prospects distinguish themselves from the pretenders, where the weeding-out process intensifies. In the eyes of many scouts and evaluators, Double A is the level where pitchers effectively incorporate sliders into their repertoires, and sliders—let alone knuckleballs—are notoriously hard to hit.

One way or another, at the Double A level, organizational evaluators often get their answers. If a pitcher has an effective slider, he can handle Double A and advance to Triple A, one step below the majors. By contrast, if the hitter wins the battle, it is an indication that he is the one with major league material—not the pitcher.

Wakefield, of course, did not throw a slider—and never really would—though the same theory held true: Double A was his litmus test. He went out and pitched extremely well during the season, going 15–8 with a 2.90 ERA in 183 innings over 26 outings (25 starts). That performance ensured that Wakefield would open the 1992 season at Triple A, a proverbial heartbeat away from fulfilling his dream of playing in the major leagues.

Looking back later, Wakefield knew that he had lacked at least some measure of self-awareness during his minor league years, that he could not—and did not—appreciate or recognize the speed with which things were happening for him. He gripped the knuckler and threw it, and opposing hitters were flummoxed. It often seemed that simple. Opening the 1992 season at Buffalo, as expected, he picked up
exactly where he had left off. In fact, as the competition improved, so did the knuckleballer. Wakefield made 20 starts that season for the Bisons and went 10–3 with a 3.06 ERA in 135⅓ innings—an average of nearly seven innings per start.