Knuckler by Tim Wakefield Read Free Book Online Page B

New York Yankees on July 20, 1973, Wood accomplished the rare feat of starting both games of a doubleheader, something no pitcher has accomplished since. And while White Sox manager Chuck Tanner remembered starting Wood
in the second game solely because Wood did not record an out among the six batters he faced in the first inning of the first game—as it happened, the White Sox lost both games—no manager today would even consider such a maneuver under similar circumstances for fear of injuring a pitcher in whom his bosses had made a multimillion-dollar investment. The idea of such caution made Wood chuckle.
    "I've said this to enough people, but I don't think they throw enough," Wood said of today's pitchers, be they knuckleballers or conventional pitchers. "I could not pitch every five or six days and have the same command or feel. I'd be lost, to be honest with you."
    Still just 34—prime years for a knuckleballer—Wood was on his way to having another typically productive season in 1976 when he took the mound for his seventh start of the season on May 9 at Tiger Stadium in Detroit. Paired against Detroit Tigers right-hander Joe Coleman, Wood had a 2–0 lead with two outs and the bases empty in the bottom of the sixth inning when outfielder Ron Leflore lined a pitch back to the mound. Unable to prevent the drive from striking his left knee—because he threw left-handed, Wood's glove was on his right hand—Wood suffered a shattered kneecap that ended his season, stripping the White Sox of a man who had recorded 5,214 outs since the start of the 1971 baseball season.
    Though Wood returned to pitch 290⅔ more innings during his career, he was never the same after the injury, and he pitched his last major league game in 1978 as a member of the White Sox. In his career, he pitched a total of 2,684 innings and won 164 games, all but one of them for the White Sox. Wood's success brought him full circle and made him a resource for other budding knuckleballers. He played in an era before baseball salaries exploded to the current, life-altering levels, and so he spent many years outside of the game working conventional jobs to support his family. Nevertheless, Wood remembered discussing by phone the challenge of pitching on two days of rest with a right-hander named Phil Niekro. The two still have never met. Other friends and colleagues have also called Wood from time to time, usually because they need his advice or counseling on a pitch that has perplexed some of baseball's best traditional minds throughout its history.
    In 1994, for example, former teammate Pete Vuckovich called Wood
from Buffalo, where Vuckovich was serving as the pitching coach for the Buffalo Bisons, the Triple A affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Bisons were working with a frustrated young knuckleballer searching to unlock the secrets of the knuckler, and Vuckovich wanted to know if Wood would be willing to visit with the pitcher.
    The young man's name was Tim Wakefield.
    "I was working selling pharmaceuticals at the time, and I only had two weeks of vacation," Wood recalled. "He said, 'I'd like you to come to Buffalo and work with Tim.' I said, 'Pete, that'd be great, but I only get two weeks of vacation, and my wife teaches school. I'm not sure she'd like to come to Buffalo during the summer. If you were in Florida, it would be a different situation.'"
    Alas, following a successful 11-year career as a major league pitcher—albeit a conventional one—Pete Vuckovich was on his own.
    And he had no answers for Wakefield.

    Philip Henry Niekro is that rarest of rare beings, and not solely because Niekro is in the Hall of Fame, or because he won 318 games, or because he threw a knuckleball. What makes Niekro different as much as anything else is that he essentially was a knuckleballer from conception. He did not learn the pitch as a novelty, adopt it as a way to revive a dying career, or reluctantly commit to it