Tim Wakefield, knuckleballer who made his pitches dance, dies at 57
Tim Wakefield, who flustered big league hitters for 19 seasons with his 68-mph dancing knuckleball, an asymmetric warfare pitch in the era of 95-mph fastballs that helped the Boston Red Sox end their 86-year championship drought in 2004, died Sunday. He was 57.
The Red Sox announced his death, and said the cause was brain cancer.
Mr. Wakefield was one of the few Major League pitchers to master the knuckleball, a pitch that has almost no rotation, causing it to move with roughly the same unpredictability as a mosquito. Outfielder Bobby Murcer once compared hitting it with “trying to eat Jell-O with chopsticks.”
“I have no idea where it’s going, the hitter doesn’t know where it’s going, and the catcher doesn’t know where it’s going,” Mr. Wakefield once said.
The knuckleball comes with one significant drawback: Sometimes the pitch lands right over the middle of the plate, and the batter hits the ball to another Zip code.
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That happened to Mr. Wakefield in the 2003 American League Championship Series, when Aaron Boone, in one of the game’s most memorable postseason moments, hit a game-winning home run off him in extra innings of Game 7 to send the New York Yankees — Boston’s longtime nemesis — to the World Series.
The following season, the Red Sox and Yankees met again in the ALCS, with New York taking a decisive 3-0 series lead. But the Red Sox bounced back, in part because of Mr. Wakefield’s three scoreless innings in extra innings of Game 5. After dispatching the Yankees, the Red Sox swept the St. Louis Cardinals to win their first World Series since 1918.
Mr. Wakefield pitched 17 of his 19 big league seasons for Boston. His 186 career wins are the third-most in Red Sox history, behind Roger Clemens and Cy Young. He holds team records for innings pitched and games started. Befitting the knuckleball’s path, he also holds the team records for walks and wild pitches.
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Mr. Wakefield wasn’t even a pitcher when the Pittsburgh Pirates drafted him in the eighth round of the 1988 draft.
He was a first baseman — and not, it turned out, one good enough to make it to the big leagues. After hitting only .189 in his first minor league season, Mr. Wakefield was on a path to get released when one of his managers saw him throwing a knuckleball in warm-ups. The other player struggled to catch it.
The Pirates turned Mr. Wakefield into a pitcher. At first, he was wary.
“When they put an infielder on the mound, it’s like they’re putting you out to pasture,” he told the Buffalo News. “They’re saying you don’t have what it takes to get to the big leagues.”
Halfway through the 1992 season, the Pirates called him up.
In his first appearance, he pitched a complete game against the St. Louis Cardinals, giving up only six hits and striking out 10 to earn the win. Mr. Wakefield went 8-1 for the season and finished third in the Rookie of the Year voting. He won two games in the National League Championship Series against the Braves.
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Sportswriters waxed poetic about Mr. Wakefield’s knuckleball, but his second season in the majors was disappointing. After walking nine batters on Opening Day, his struggle to throw strikes continued and he was sent down to the minor leagues. The Pirates released him in 1995, and Boston signed him a week later.
Soon after he joined the team, Red Sox general manager Dan Duquette connected Mr. Wakefield with Phil Niekro, the retired knuckleball master who won 318 games during his career. Niekro worked with Mr. Wakefield on changing the speed of his knuckleball and also encouraged him to learn to throw a fastball to surprise hitters.
“Phil Niekro is the reason I did what I did in Boston,” Mr. Wakefield said in 2020 after his mentor died. “He helped resurrect my career.”
Timothy Stephen Wakefield was born in Melbourne, Fla., on Aug. 2, 1966. His father designed circuits for Harris Corp., and his mother worked at the company as a purchaser.
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He learned to throw a knuckleball — and how hard it was to catch — while tossing the ball around with his father after he came home from work.
“He was tired, and he wanted to go inside,” Mr. Wakefield told the New Yorker magazine. “So the knuckleball was his way of trying to tire me out, ’cause I didn’t want to have to catch it — it’d go by me and I’d have to go pick it up. It was kind of a subtle way of Dad saying, ‘Time to go, let’s quit.’ ”
Mr. Wakefield studied business and played baseball at the Florida Institute of Technology, graduating in 1989. He was a standout hitter, setting the single-season record for home runs with 22.
Throughout his career, Mr. Wakefield was also known for his charitable work, especially in Boston.
In 2010, Major League Baseball honored him with the Roberto Clemente Award, named after the Pittsburgh Pirates star who died in a 1972 plane crash while delivering supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua.
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Mr. Wakefield married Stacy Stover in 2002. She survives him, along with their children, Trevor and Brianna. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.
Given the mystery of the knuckleball, some physicists have devoted considerable research time to understanding how it moves.
“The knuckleball is thrown so that the stitches on one side catch the air,” Yale physicist Robert Adair, the author of “The Physics of Baseball,” told the New York Times in 1992. “It is smooth on the other side, and that gives an imbalance. The disruption of the air gives you less air resistance, and the ball moves in that direction.”
The result, he said: “It’s a tough pitch to hit.”
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