Knuckler Read Online Free Page B

allowed 16 hits and eight runs while issuing three walks and throwing a whopping 158 pitches in an 8–2 Red Sox defeat that was not nearly that competitive, all because the Red Sox quite simply needed someone to take a bullet so that they could get their house in order.
    Having had the opportunity to catch their breath, the Red Sox came out to win four straight and five of their next six games, a winning streak for which Wakefield was largely responsible but for which he received almost no credit. His individual statistics suffered. The team benefited.
    That was just one of many such instances in which Wakefield made similar sacrifices.
    Since statisticians in baseball officially began counting pitches in 1988, Wakefield and his knuckleball have produced the two highest single-game pitch totals in any major league game. On April 27, 1993, as a member of the Pirates, Wakefield threw an astonishing 172 pitches in 10 innings of a 6–2 win over the Atlanta Braves; on June 5, 1997, he threw 169 pitches in 8⅔ innings of a 2–1 win for the Red Sox over the Milwaukee Brewers. Wakefield remained the only pitcher to appear twice among those named in the top ten pitch counts since 1988—again, he owned numbers one and two—and the ninth performance on the list belonged to longtime knuckleballer Charlie Hough, who threw 163 pitches in 11 innings of a 1–0 win for the Texas Rangers over the Seattle Mariners on June 29, 1988.
    And then there was this: during Wakefield's career in the major leagues, he had made 37 regular-season or postseason starts on short rest (three days or fewer)—more than any other pitcher in baseball. During that same period of time, no other Red Sox pitcher had started more than six games on short rest, all while Sox aces Clemens, Martinez, Schilling, and Beckett combined for three such starts (all
by Clemens). That statistic offers great evidence for those who believe that Wakefield often was made into a sacrificial lamb, particularly during an age when pitchers were treated more and more like delicate crystal than strong, young, full-blooded American farm boys.
    In the modern baseball era, much to the chagrin of veteran pitchers who played prior to, say, 1985, major league pitchers generally are regarded as valuable assets and treated accordingly. Where teams once operated with four-man pitching rotations to negotiate the season—a starter would work every fourth day with three days of rest in between—the schedule has now been adjusted to incorporate a fifth starter, providing every pitcher with an extra day of rest. With costs escalating rapidly, especially for pitching—in 2009 the going rate for pitching was somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 million
per win
—teams have begun to protect their arms and, more specifically, their investments. By reducing the number of starts per pitcher per season from 40 or 41 to 32 or 33, teams can get more out of their pitchers over the long run—or so they believe. (This point is still contested by some.) The end result has been a culture in which pitchers are handled with great care. The resulting reduction in the number of starts per season
and
the number of pitches per start has created a rather peculiar business model in which pitchers are asked to do less while being paid more.
    Unless, of course, you happen to be a knuckleballer. Faced with a knuckler, teams generally throw caution to the wind and operate as if from another era.
    If this suggests a certain willingness among conventional baseball decision-makers to abuse knuckleballers in some form—and it does—then it also suggests a willingness on the part of the pitchers to do whatever is necessary to contribute, to endure, to succeed. As hypnotizing as the knuckleball can be to hitters, the pitch fosters humility in those who have dared to befriend it. As surely as Wakefield survived the ups and downs of a relationship with the pitch, the same has been