Episode 209: Wake

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Speaker 1 This is The Memory Palace. I'm Nate Tomeo.
A brief note written after reading that former Major League pitcher Tim Wakefield has died at the age of 57.

Speaker 1 At some point, the numbers stop mattering. I don't think much about batting averages anymore.
All-time scoring records.

Speaker 1 I still talk sports a lot with my friends, but I can't remember the last time I got into an argument about which player was the best or even gotten nostalgic about some feat of individual greatness.

Speaker 1 Remember that night when he went off for 40 against the Lakers? I think I'm past that.

Speaker 1 At some point, I guess I just became a man and I didn't need to look up to other men in the same way that I did when I was a kid. I enjoy watching them.

Speaker 1 I like some of them personally so much, despite having never met them before.

Speaker 1 And some of them, gotta hate those guys.

Speaker 1 It's fun. Sports are fun.
But when I was younger, when we're young, a lot of us,

Speaker 1 they were so much more. You fell in love with athletes.

Speaker 1 Tried to move like them, copied their jump shot, how they wore their socks, how they stood in the batter's box, back elbow up, front shoulder a little down, ready to pounce on anything up around the letters.

Speaker 1 You choose your champions like a young prince who wasn't yet ready to fight his own battles.

Speaker 1 Here were men who could rush out onto the field on your behalf, who could do things with their bodies that you couldn't do with yours, though you were still young enough to let in the notion that you just might one day, and it would fill you up, leave you floating a bit after a win, or a great night at the plate, or when they were just unstoppable in the paint.

Speaker 1 But which champion would you choose? Your favorites were a matter of style.

Speaker 1 How something in the way they played, the personality they projected on the court or the field or the pitch, somehow jibed with your emerging sense of self, your emerging sense of the world, who you wanted to be when you got to be part of it.

Speaker 1 There are things they could teach you, these athletes. A lot of it purely practical, when to throw to the cutoff man, how to execute a proper pick and roll.
But there was a moral component too.

Speaker 1 Values being modeled. Was your favorite athlete a fundamentals guy or a swagger guy? Was he team first? Did he play hurt? Did he project joy?

Speaker 1 There were lessons to learn.

Speaker 1 And then you learn them or you don't. And you grow up and you find other things that make more sense to your adult self.

Speaker 1 Tim Wakefield was drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates in the eighth round of the 1988 amateur draft, which is the primary way that American-born baseball players enter the professional ranks and then try to climb a ladder of minor leagues up to the majors.

Speaker 1 Wakefield had broken his school's home run record in college and the Pirates hoped he would develop into a power-hitting first baseman. But a couple of years in and he was struggling.

Speaker 1 And even though this is what happens to literally 90% of all minor league baseball players at some point, only one in ten ever makes it to the bigs.

Speaker 1 I don't know if that makes it any easier when you realize that it's happening to you.

Speaker 1 And Tim Wakefield, knowing that his time was short, spent it learning how to throw a knuckleball.

Speaker 1 If you are not a baseball person, here's what you need to know about the knuckleball.

Speaker 1 No one throws a knuckleball.

Speaker 1 Several thousand men have pitched in the history of the major leagues. Only 34 of them spent their careers as knuckleballers.

Speaker 1 There is no one way to throw this pitch, but the basic idea is that you hold it with your fingertips.

Speaker 1 With every other standard pitcher, fastballs, your curveballs, your change-ups, You wrap your fingers around the ball so you can control the way it spins when it leaves your hand.

Speaker 1 The art of pitching then is about mastering that control while determining the best way to position and push off with your legs and twist your body and whip your arm to get that ball to travel at the optimal speed.

Speaker 1 You don't control a knuckleball. Not really.
You hold it in your fingertips.

Speaker 1 Wakefield would use his middle three fingers on the top of the ball and kind of cradle the bottom with his thumb and hold his pinky out like he was sipping tea.

Speaker 1 And then you throw the ball slowly, like 20 or 30 miles an hour slower than Major League Fastball, in such a way that it doesn't spin, and instead flies flat-faced through the air, which plays on its surface in unpredictable ways, and causes the ball to flutter.

Speaker 1 Some guys call it a butterfly pitch. So a great knuckleball comes at the batter dancing.
It might suddenly plunge, it might break left or wobble right.

Speaker 1 And here you are, a professional batter who has spent years learning to hit balls that never do that. And it is incredibly hard to hit a knuckleball squarely when it has been thrown well.

Speaker 1 Yet there have only been 34 people to specialize in that pitch. And there are any number of reasons why that I could talk about all day, but the one that I want to talk about right now is this.

Speaker 1 Because it is a brave thing to do.

Speaker 1 To stand up there, game on the line, career on the line, and put your faith in something that only works because you are not in control of it.

Speaker 1 Tim Wakefield was going to get cut.

Speaker 1 So he gave bravery a shot.

Speaker 1 A couple of years later, he was in the major leagues, got called up in the middle of the 1992 season and rattled off win after win for the Pirates and helped lead them to the National League Championship Series where he won two games, though his team ultimately lost.

Speaker 1 But the next year, things kind of stopped working.

Speaker 1 And that happens with knuckleballers. They go through stretches when their pitches just will not dance.

Speaker 1 And they are left with two choices. They can turn to other pitches, which, honestly, if they were good at throwing them, they would have been doing that the whole time.

Speaker 1 Or they just keep throwing knuckleballs and hope they go somewhere good before they lose their job.

Speaker 1 When Tim Wakefield came to the Boston Red Sox in 1995 and came into my life as a Red Sox fan, it was a bit of a reclamation project.

Speaker 1 After those brief, glorious months in 92 when he had somehow mastered the dark arts of the knuckleball, he struggled throughout 1993.

Speaker 1 So much so that he spent the next season back down in the miners in Buffalo.

Speaker 1 So the Red Sox got him on the cheap and gave him a shot. Maybe the magic would come back.

Speaker 1 And if not, a knuckleballer can be useful to a team. They throw the ball so slowly that they can do it all night.
There's no tiring, twisting exertion.

Speaker 1 Wakefield would just kind of stand there and step forward, almost gingerly, like he was getting onto an escalator, and then toss it in.

Speaker 1 His career was reborn in Boston.

Speaker 1 His pitches were dancing again. The fans loved him, even the adults.
Maybe even especially the adults.

Speaker 1 Because if a point guard with the gifts of a Greek god lets a kid dream of whom they might be someday, Tim Wakefield let a grown man dream that he could be that right now.

Speaker 1 Wake was just a guy. He had a paunch, he had a dumb-goatee.
He threw 65 miles an hour. You could do that.
Put in a little practice if you didn't have to work so much.

Speaker 1 Other pitchers had this look, like squint-eyed killers staring down from the mound.

Speaker 1 Wake always looked a little bit concerned, like a dad watching his kid at the playground wondering if he was going to have to climb up to the top of the jungle gym to get her down.

Speaker 1 And who could blame him? Each knuckleball he threw was an act of faith. He put it out there and who knew where it was going to go.

Speaker 1 He pitched for the Boston Red Sox for 17 years. That is extraordinary longevity.
It certainly helped that he didn't move a lot.

Speaker 1 He retired as the third winningest pitcher in the team's 122-year history. But he might be most remembered for people outside of Boston for a game he didn't win.

Speaker 1 In 2003, the Red Sox faced off in a series against the New York Yankees.

Speaker 1 At the time, it was the most historic and one-sided of rivalries, because the Yankees had up to that point won 27 World Series pennants.

Speaker 1 The Red Sox had won five, but the most recent one had been in 1918.

Speaker 1 What was worse, they had lost just about every key game game they'd ever played against the Yankees since then in ways that were somehow both consistently novel and humiliating.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 in 2003, the Red Sox are very good.

Speaker 1 The team is so likable, and they are in a great position to beat the Yankees, but they do not.

Speaker 1 Tim Wakefield is on the mound.

Speaker 1 He throws a knuckleball to Aaron Boone,

Speaker 1 and it does not dance.

Speaker 1 It does not dip or suddenly swerve. It just goes straight and slow.

Speaker 1 And out it goes.

Speaker 1 It was brutal.

Speaker 1 Fans were devastated, reliving past trauma, questioning life choices.

Speaker 1 But we didn't blame Wake.

Speaker 1 You couldn't.

Speaker 1 He wasn't just some pitcher. He was a conjurer.

Speaker 1 He was out there trying to harness some power he couldn't control.

Speaker 1 He wasn't throwing baseballs, he was throwing dice.

Speaker 1 The Red Sox went up against the Yankees the very next year.

Speaker 1 They lost three games in a row and then won the next four games in ways that were so perfectly dramatic that it still fills me with wonder if I stop to think about it now.

Speaker 1 So many improbable acts of heroism, incredible feats of athleticism, walk-off home runs, clutch pitching performances.

Speaker 1 Dave Roberts needs to steal a base and everyone knows he needs to steal a base and the Yankees entirely focused on making sure he does not steal that base and yet he does.

Speaker 1 But the one thing I will always treasure, and I never use that word but it is the right one,

Speaker 1 the thing I still think about and find such beauty in and to kind of grown up moral clarity happened in game three. Tim Wakefield was slotted to start game four.

Speaker 1 And that is the spot you earn over your career and over a long season.

Speaker 1 It is what you work for, to be called on and counted on to lead your team in the biggest moments on the biggest stage. But then the Red Sox get wrecked in game one and game two.

Speaker 1 So for game three, the Red Sox need their starting pitcher to go deep into the game. Their relief staff has already been called on too often and they are spent.
Game three begins.

Speaker 1 And the Yankees just keep doing it.

Speaker 1 Just a few innings in, the Red Sox starter is is out.

Speaker 1 The game has barely begun and it is already lost.

Speaker 1 And knowing that this was an unwinnable game, and knowing that the only shot his team has to run off four improbable wins after that night, is if there are pitchers who are fresh enough to throw strikes,

Speaker 1 Tim Wakefield volunteers to go in.

Speaker 1 He sacrifices his chance to start in the American League Championship Series,

Speaker 1 takes the mound and starts throwing knuckleballs.

Speaker 1 And the Yankees keep hitting.

Speaker 1 And he keeps tossing them in.

Speaker 1 Some of them dance.

Speaker 1 Most of them do not.

Speaker 1 His career statistics as a pitcher in the playoffs get worse and worse with every hit and every run.

Speaker 1 And he keeps going out there. He can throw all night.

Speaker 1 As he does as his team loses 19-8 through most of that long and miserable night, having given up his shot at glory so his teammates could be ready when they took throne.

Speaker 1 Tim Wakefield retired after the 2011 season. He liked to fish and hunt and play golf.

Speaker 1 He was married and had a daughter and a son, raised a lot of money for children's charities, particularly an early intervention program for kids with special needs in Florida.

Speaker 1 He should have lived another 40 years, but he got cancer and it killed him.

Speaker 1 You throw ball.

Speaker 1 You hope for the best.

Speaker 1 You don't control where it goes.

Speaker 1 I am better off for having watched him throw.

Speaker 1 This episode of The Memory Palace was written and produced by me, Nate DeMayo, in October of 2023. I get research assistance from Eliza McGraw.

Speaker 1 The show is a proud member of Radiotopia, a network of independently owned and operated podcasts from PRX, a not-for-profit public media company, which is hands down the place you want to be if you are an audio maker who values creative freedom and owning what you make as I do.

Speaker 1 If you want to drop me a line, you can do that at nate at thememorypalace.us.

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Speaker 1 Be well,

Speaker 1 and I'll talk to you again.

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