ShareThisI've never been much of a Tim Wakefield fan.
Not that it's anything personal.
It's the knuckleball.
Has there ever been more of a freaky pitch --- a fluttering, unpredictable affront to baseball purity -- than the knuckleball, this goofy pitch that no one knows where it's going to end up?
This is major-league baseball?
It sure doesn't seem like it.
The knuckleball seems better suited to some kids' playground game. The essence of baseball is still the confrontation between the pitcher and the batter, the ultimate test.
It's not supposed to be about the vagaries of baseball's mystery pitch -- one that floats up to the plate on a whim of its own.
And what is Wakefield without the knuckleball?
Long retired, that's for sure.
There was even the sense at the end of last year that he had used up his usefulness with the Boston Red Sox. He was 42, seemed to spend too much time every year on the disabled list, and needed to have his own personal catcher.
Remember?
I certainly do. I even wrote it once, suggesting that maybe it was time to bid Wakefield adieu, that maybe it wasn't worth the effort anymore.
Well, here it is nine months later and Wakefield is on the All-Star team, having what is arguably the season of his life.
Good for him.
For I still don't like the knuckleball, but I have come to admire Wakefield.
And maybe that's because it's like he's been around here since the beginning of time, 1995 to be exact. He got here in April of that year, having just been released by the Pirates. He was first sent to Class AAA Pawtucket, so rest assured he didn't come to Boston to the sound of trumpets blaring.
Then again, his entire professional career had been spent swimming against the current. The great story is about the time a scout told him as a young player that he would never get beyond Class AA. He was an infielder then, and as the story goes, he began fooling around with the knuckleball, this exotic pitch that's been around the game since the beginning of the time, or at least since the early days of the 20th century.
Pitchers who throw are often seen as belonging to some secret baseball cult, men who have come to know that their careers belong to the unpredictability of a pitch that no one knows what it's going to do, including them. Almost by definition they are seen as freaks, often misunderstood by managers, not appreciated by other players, often off in their own private Idaho.
So it began for Wakefield, the long journey that Tuesday night took him to his first All-Star Game in St. Louis, the symbolic highpoint of his long career in the game. He began throwing the knuckleball in Class A in 1990, and two years later was called up by the Pirates, striking out 10 Cardinals in his first game.
But it was never an easy road, not even then. Knuckleball pitchers are always suspect, usually either very good or very bad, sometimes in the same inning. By 1993 he was back down in the minors.
He found a home with the Red Sox, certainly, sometimes with success, sometimes with less than success, sometimes as a starter, sometimes in the bullpen.
The one constant?
He was always there.
Pitchers came and went. And still there was Wakefield. Managers came and went, the conga line from Kevin Kennedy to Terry Francona, and still there was Wakefield. Everything seemed to come and go, caught up in the revolving door that's contemporary baseball, and still there is Wakefield.
There's no question he's had his ups and downs with the Red Sox, as if his career is often as up in the air and as uncertain as the knuckleball itself. He's been in the rotation, and out of it, too. Countless talk-show callers say the Red Sox would be better off without him, that he was too much of a one-trick pony.
He gave up the extra-inning home run to the Yankees' Aaron Boone in the ALCS in 2003, one of the most dramatic losses in Sox history. And the knock on him is always that you can't count on him in the playoffs because you never really know what you're going to get.
Still, he's in his 15th summer now with the Red Sox, something no other player on the roster can say.
All this, and he's off to the best start of his career at age 42.
Who would have ever believed it?
Not me, that's for sure.
But here he is now in this season of life, 11-3, the best start in the game. Here he is now with stats that say he is one of the best pitchers in the long history of the Red Sox, third in all-time wins behind only Cy Young and Roger Clemens, second in all-time wins in Fenway Park behind only Clemens. Here he is with a career that no one ever could have envisioned.
Here is Tim Wakefield, the ultimate baseball survivor, one of the very best stories of this season.
Sometimes it's good to be wrong.
(Contact Bill Reynolds at breynold(at)projo.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
columnMust credit The Providence Journal
