At age 45, Tim Wakefield is finally retiring, the Boston Red Sox announced today. A formal press conference will come at 5 p.m.
It is probably the right time for Wakefield -- he had become pretty hittable the past couple years. But baseball isn't going to feel the same without him.
Wakefield pitched 17 seasons for the Red Sox. For two years prior to that he pitched for the Pirates. Wakefield was never a dominant pitcher, but he's been a steady fixture in the American League for nearly two decades. When your team faced Wakefield, the feeling was unmistakably different than every other game you watched.
Despite all the pitching maxims, to become a major league pitcher there is a minimum level of requisite velocity. If you don't throw at least 90 mph, you don't have a prayer. Only once you have the ability to throw in the 90s do things like secondary pitches, control and the art of pitching begin to matter. Major League pitchers throw incredibly hard. Every last on of them.
Which is why it was always so amazing to see Wakefield take the mound and confound your team's batting lineup, corkscrewing hitters as they swung and missed at his dancing, elusive, 65 mph funny pitch. There was nothing like it in Major League Baseball.
tim Wakefield's retirement means that the Mets' R.A. Dickey is the lone knuckleballer in the big leagues. Dickey made the transition from a traditional pitcher to a knuckleballer over the past five years. He struggled badly at the outset before settling in as a reliable pitcher the past two seasons.
But the American League is now without a knuckleballer. Typically, over the past decade or two, there has been room for one knuckleballer in each league, and I expect that we'll see another one sprout up in the AL now that Wakefield is gone, but it may take a coupke years. As Dickey proved, you can't become an effective knuckleballer overnight. And it's a bold, risky move -- to become a knuckleballer a pitcher must first admit to himself that he's not good enough to make it with his gas, and that's a big admission for prideful athletes to make. And once you turn to the knuckleball, there's no going back.
To my knowledge, there's no new knuckleball prospects on the horizon, in either league (can anyone correct me there?). But I do hope we'll see another one in the American League soon. Tim Wakefield made the knuckleball -- the presence of it, the the novelty of glimpsing it every so often when it came around -- such an integral part of baseball that I think I'm really going to miss it.
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