Knuckler (25 page)

Let's look at the numbers: Wakefield's contributions during those seasons was an 8–10 record and a 4.28 ERA over a yearly average of 157⅔ innings pitched. Wakefield did record 21 saves during that span, but the Red Sox cost themselves roughly 50 fewer innings (or 150 outs) per year while stripping Wakefield of a potential 20 to 28 wins—the figure that would have delivered him to the highest total in club history.

"There aren't a lot of people who understand the value of a knuckleballer on your staff," Duquette admitted. "There were people on Tim's [coaching] staff, in our clubhouse [from 1999 to 2002], who didn't understand Tim's value to the team. Those were misconceptions.

"Did Joe Kerrigan fail to understand Tim? Absolutely," Duquette continued. "That's part of the story. It boggles my mind as to why there aren't more knuckleball pitchers in major league baseball. It's a hard pitch to master, but you have more time to master it. Look at the amount of money that major league teams spend on pitching, and look at the amount of money that teams spend on pitchers who are on the disabled list."

Indeed, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, baseball was littered with so many bad pitching contracts that teams became increasingly wary of signing veteran, free-agent pitchers. The Yankees, for example, signed right-hander Carl Pavano (the same man whom the Red Sox traded for Martinez in late 1997) to a guaranteed contract worth $40 million over the 2005–08 seasons. When Pavano made just 26 starts
and pitched only 145⅔ innings during that four-year period, New York ended up paying him slightly more than $91,743
per out.
The Dodgers signed veteran right-hander Jason Schmidt to a three-year contract worth a guaranteed $47 million from 2007 to 2009, a period during which Schmidt made a mere 10 starts and pitched just 43⅓ innings, numbers that translate into a shade more than $361,538
per out.
After experiences like these, teams came to the conclusion that they could pay younger, healthier pitchers far less and get far more, a realization that could dramatically shorten the prime earning years of an established major league pitcher.

And yet, during a period in which the Red Sox had one of the game's most efficient and cost-effective weapons in Wakefield, the team used him improperly. From 1999 to 2002, when used largely as a reliever, Wakefield cost the Red Sox a little more than $7,761 per out, a figure that
still
made him a valuable commodity. But in those seasons between 1995 and 2005 when Wakefield was used as a starter, the Sox got a
better
pitcher for even
less
—approximately $4,546 per out—while teams like the Yankees and Dodgers were spending tens (or hundreds) of thousands per out on damaged, inferior goods.

During that time, Joe Kerrigan did not merely cost Tim Wakefield wins.

He hurt the Red Sox, too.

Fortunately for the knuckleballing Wakefield, the new owners and operators of the Red Sox were not about to make the same mistake.

It's like snowflakes—no two are ever alike.
—Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek describing Tim Wakefield's knuckleball

T
HE
R
ED
S
OX
had far more pressing questions than their veteran knuckleballer entering the 2003 season. Theo Epstein, the team's new and progressive young general manager, was planting the seeds of dramatic change.

Tim Wakefield, for once, was a constant far more than a variable, the Red Sox having signed him to a new three-year contract for slightly more than $13 million almost immediately after the season. During the winter, on numerous occasions, Epstein and Little had made it quite clear that Wakefield would be a starter. The knuckleballer's personal life similarly tumbled into place over the winter when he married his girlfriend, Stacy Stover, a Boston-area native to whom he had been introduced by a friend at a kickoff party for a charity golf tournament.

Finally, I feel like I can stop worrying so much.

Indeed, almost everyone around the Red Sox was focused on other things. Much of the skepticism surrounding the Red Sox concerned the absence of a true closer, a deficit that raised eyebrows around baseball given that an effective closer was now thought to be a fundamental ingredient of any winning team. That was only one of the long-held beliefs that Epstein was willing to challenge. The new general manager had signed a handful of relievers during the off-season—right-handers Mike Timlin, Chad Fox, and Ramiro Mendoza chief among
them—and his idea, shared by manager Little, was to employ them in situations that best suited their specific skill sets. With left-hander Alan Embree and right-hander Bobby Howry in the mix, too, the idea was to give Little as many options as possible on any given night to effectively play a game of musical chairs with both his bullpen and opposing lineups.

Some nights, Mendoza might close. The responsibility might belong to Fox in the next game. Timlin and Howry both had some closing experience to their credit, as did Embree, though none of them had excelled in the role. Regardless, Epstein and Little theorized that, since sometimes the most important outs of a game are recorded not in the ninth inning but in the seventh or eighth, it made little sense to have a closer and to earmark him exclusively for the ninth. They believed that their
closer-by-committee
system, as it came to be called, could work.

Of course, the experiment failed miserably. With no clear responsibilities on a nightly basis, Red Sox relievers struggled mightily. For as much as their theory made perfect sense—it had been promoted by longtime statistical analyst Bill James, whom the Red Sox had hired—it completely disregarded the human element. Relievers, like most baseball players, are accustomed to specific job descriptions and responsibilities. Some pitch in the seventh, some pitch in the eighth, some pitch in the sixth. Some face only left-handers, and others face largely right-handers. The uncertainty that came with the closer-by-committee approach required the Red Sox pitchers to be ready at all times. They were left unsettled, uncertain of when or how they would be used on any given night.

Performing under those kinds of conditions was extremely difficult.

And given his experience as a starter or reliever at a moment's notice, Tim Wakefield could have told them that.

Fittingly, the Sox blew the season opener in the ninth inning of a game at Tampa Bay (then a vastly inferior team) when Fox surrendered a three-run home run to Carl Crawford on the final pitch of the game. For Epstein and Little, the game was their worst nightmare come true. The Red Sox had held a 4–1 lead entering the ninth thanks to the typical brilliance of Martinez, but both Embree and Fox melted in the
heat of a closing situation. Culminating with Crawford's homer, the pair of relievers allowed five runs and dealt the Sox a 6–4 defeat. The bullpen problems continued for much of the first two months of the season, ultimately forcing Epstein to make a trade for a closer. At the end of May, he acquired enigmatic Korean right-hander Byung-Hyun Kim, who also came with question marks. Most recently, he had been starting for the Diamondbacks after a tumultuous experience trying to close for Arizona against the Yankees in the 2001 World Series. He was just 24 years old, however, and possessed dynamic talent, a combination that appealed to someone like Epstein.

"It hasn't been good enough. We've got to be better," Little said of his team's pitching woes. "I don't think very many times in our careers can we look at the stat sheet and see a team ranked in pitching where we are and be in the standings where we are. That speaks a lot for our offense."

While Epstein refused to entirely give up on the closer-by-committee approach, leaving the door open for another attempt sometime during his baseball career—"I still believe it can work," he said—the 2003 Red Sox had too much at stake for the experiment to continue any longer. Wakefield had suspected that the Sox might come to that realization. During his time with the Red Sox, Wakefield had effectively shuttled between the starting rotation and the bullpen, which was difficult enough to manage. But at least on many of those occasions Wakefield had known what his role would be and could mentally prepare himself for it. On the one most obvious occasion when he was caught by surprise—the first time Williams brought him into a game to close in 1999—Wakefield had nearly been overcome with anxiety and was able to calm himself only through the serendipity of a spectator running onto the field and stopping the game. Wakefield did not know Mike Timlin, Alan Embree, and the other new relievers especially well at that point, but he knew that if all players, like most anyone, need time to
prepare,
that was especially true for relievers, who are usually thrust into games under already difficult circumstances.

Adding an additional level of uncertainty to the reliever's role would turn the final innings of a game into a fire drill.

Still, on the more positive side, the events of the first two months had made two other things quite clear. First, Little was right about the prolific Red Sox offense: Boston had an extremely potent lineup that could overcome deficiencies in the pitching staff. Second, the early-season developments proved that Theo Epstein was fearless when it came to challenging the establishment and that the young general manager was, in many ways, a revolutionary thinker open to all kinds of ideas and suggestions. At just 29 years old, Epstein was willing to try things that others were not. A lifetime spent in the game had not tainted him. Epstein believed in performance, for sure, but he also had a more modern, analytical approach to baseball that allowed him to measure things that others could not or would not.

For Wakefield in particular, this was an important development. Epstein might have looked like a prep school student, but he was smart enough to know the value of a knuckleballer who was being used properly.

While the Red Sox continued to pound away at opponents—over the winter Epstein had reinforced the lineup, too, with the acquisitions of Todd Walker, Kevin Millar, Bill Mueller, and David Ortiz—Wakefield took his turn every five days and gave the Red Sox exactly what he was supposed to: innings. For his fourth consecutive season as a Red Sox starter—omitting the bullpen years from 1999 to 2002—Wakefield recorded at least 600 outs. Only Lowe (203⅓ innings) had pitched more than Wakefield (202⅓). On August 3, with a victory at Baltimore, Wakefield became just the ninth pitcher in Red Sox history to win at least 100 games for the franchise. A month later, Wakefield reached a milestone that meant as much to him at the time as any other; he had accrued a full 10 seasons of major league service time, no small feat for a man who had been tossed to the scrap heap by the Pittsburgh Pirates during the spring of 1995.

His 10 years of service afforded Wakefield certain privileges, the most significant of which was spelled out in the terms of the collective bargaining agreement between owners and players. Because he now had 10 years of service in the major leagues, and because at least the last five were with the same team (the Red Sox), Wakefield
not only qualified for a full pension from the Major League Baseball Players Association but was also a
10-5 player,
which gave him one enormous power: the right to veto any trade. The Red Sox could not ship Wakefield elsewhere unless he agreed to the deal. He alone got to choose where he would play. And so, when the clock struck midnight on September 11, 2003, Tim Wakefield knew from that moment that, so long as he had a contract, the Red Sox could not part ways with him without his consent—another bargaining chip that brought him great comfort.

They can't get rid of me now even if they want to.

Nonetheless, by the time the regular season ended, Wakefield and the Red Sox had other things on their minds. Despite the acquisition of Kim and Epstein's continued efforts, the bullpen problems persisted. Epstein acquired another potential closer, Scott Williamson, via trade on July 30, and the results of that deal, too, were mixed. No matter which pitcher Grady Little tried in the ninth inning, the Red Sox seemed to remain vulnerable late in the game, and the entire bullpen situation grew more unstable. In Williamson and Kim, Little had inconsistent pitchers who alternated between dominance and vulnerability. Their performance was impossible to predict. Since the start of the season, the Red Sox had gone from no closers to
two,
further complicating what had been a muddled situation to begin with.

Grady Little had become the managerial equivalent of a knuckleballer—unsure of how his offerings would turn out no matter how consistent he tried to be.

Tim Wakefield understood that feeling.

Welcome to my world.

And yet the Sox still won, thanks largely to the strength of their starting rotation and an offense that set a major league record for slugging percentage while leading all of baseball in runs scored, securing Boston a place in the postseason for the fourth time during Wakefield's nine years with the team.

At this stage of his career, Wakefield knew what the opportunity for a championship meant, especially in Boston. During the season, he had celebrated his 37th birthday. Eleven years had passed since
he broke in with the Pirates in 1992. Boston had made three trips to the playoffs during his time with the team, but never advanced past Game 5 of the American League Championship Series. Wakefield had never played in a World Series game, not with Pittsburgh and not with Boston. The new owners of the Red Sox had put a great deal of emphasis on character and on chemistry, and there was now a sense of camaraderie not only in the Red Sox clubhouse but in the entire Boston organization. For the first time in a long time, particularly in contrast to the 2001 Red Sox team that represented the end of the previous ownership, Wakefield felt that Red Sox players and executives were in it
together,
that the lines of communication were more open than they ever had been before, that any tension or friction between the clubhouse and front office was gone. There was an inarguable sense of harmony. Everyone was focused on the same thing.