Tim Wakefield, the major leaguer for 19 seasons with his 68 mph dancing knuckleball, an asymmetrical warfare pitch in the age of 95 mph fastballs that helped the Boston Red Sox end their 86-year championship drought in 2004 end, caused excitement, died on Sunday. He was 57.
The Red Sox announced his death, saying 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 about the same unpredictability as a mosquito. Outfielder Bobby Murcer once compared hitting to “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 has one major disadvantage: Sometimes the pitch lands directly over the middle of the plate and the batter hits the ball into a different zip code.
That’s what happened to Mr. Wakefield in the 2003 American League Championship Series when, in one of the game’s most memorable postseason moments, Aaron Boone hit a game-winning home run against him in extra innings of Game 7, sending the New York Yankees – Boston’s longtime nemesis – into 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 rallied, thanks in part to Mr. Wakefield’s three scoreless innings in the extra innings of Game 5. After defeating the Yankees, the Red Sox defeated the St. Louis Cardinals to win the World Series for the first time since 1918.
Mr. Wakefield played 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. To go with the knuckleball, he also holds the team records for walks and wild pitches.
Mr. Wakefield wasn’t even a pitcher when the Pittsburgh Pirates selected him in the eighth round of the 1988 draft.
He was a first baseman — and, as it turned out, not one good enough to make it to the big leagues. After batting just .189 in his first minor league season, Mr. Wakefield was on his way to being fired when one of his managers saw him throw a knuckleball during warmups. The other player struggled to catch it.
The Pirates converted Mr. Wakefield into a pitcher. At first he was cautious.
“When they put an infielder on the mound, it’s like they’re putting you out to pasture,” he told the Buffalo News. “They say you don’t have what it takes to get to the big leagues.”
He was called up by the Pirates in the middle of the 1992 season.
In his first appearance, he played a complete game against the St. Louis Cardinals, allowing just six hits and scoring ten hits to secure the victory. Mr. Wakefield went 8-1 on 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.
Sportswriters raved about Mr. Wakefield’s knuckleball, but his second season in the majors was disappointing. After walking nine batters on Opening Day, he continued to struggle to throw strikes and he was sent to the minor leagues. The Pirates released him in 1995 and Boston signed him a week later.
Shortly after he joined the team, Red Sox general manager Dan Duquette paired Mr. Wakefield with Phil Niekro, the retired knuckleball champion 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’s death. “He helped me revive my career.”
Timothy Stephen Wakefield was born on August 2, 1966 in Melbourne, Florida. His father designed circuits for Harris Corp. and his mother worked for the company as a buyer.
He learned to throw a knuckleball — and how hard it was to catch — while tossing the ball around with his father after he got home from work.
“He was tired and wanted to go in,” Wakefield told the New Yorker magazine. “So the knuckleball was his way of tiring me out because I didn’t want to have to catch it – it went past me and I had to pick it up.” It was a subtle way of Dad saying, “Time to go, let’s go.” stop us.” ”
Mr. Wakefield studied business administration and played baseball at the Florida Institute of Technology, graduating in 1989. He was an outstanding hitter and set the record for home runs in a season with 22.
Throughout his career, Mr. Wakefield was also known for his charitable work, particularly in Boston.
In 2010, Major League Baseball honored him with the Roberto Clemente Award, named after the Pittsburgh Pirates star who died in a plane crash in 1972 while delivering relief supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua.
Mr. Wakefield married Stacy Stover in 2002. She survives him and their children, Trevor and Brianna. A full list of survivors was not immediately available.
Given the mystery of the knuckleball, some physicists have invested a lot of time in research to understand how it moves.
“The knuckleball is thrown so that the mesh on one side traps the air,” Yale physicist Robert Adair, author of “The Physics of Baseball,” told the New York Times in 1992. “On the other hand, it is slippery and that creates an imbalance. By disrupting the air, there is less air resistance and the ball moves in that direction.”
As for the result, he said: “It’s a tough shot.”