Tim Wakefield, Noted Author, Gets 197th Win

Yesterday, Tim Wakefield notched his 197th career win with an 8 inning outing in which he surrendered 3 runs.  I also finished his book, Knuckler: My Life with Baseball's Most Confounding Pitch. 

The book was kind of interesting to me as a knuckleball enthusiast, but it wasn't a work of tremendous literary achievement.  It was a reminder of Wakefield's brilliant appearance with the Pirates in 1992, his great season with the Red Sox in 1995, when he finished 3rd in Cy Young ballotting, his strong 1998, 2005 and 2007 seasons, and his all-star appearance in 2009.  The knuckleball is an amazing pitch, and as Dan Duquette mentions in the book, teams should start trying to train more knuckleball pitchers, because their versatility and longevity are tremendous assets to a team:

If you've thrown as many innings as Wakefield has (3,135) over the course of 19 big-league seasons, you're entitled to forget a few. And when you can still pitch the way Wakefield does at age 44, limiting the Brewers to three runs Sunday in a 12-3 win in the rubber game of a three-game set with Milwaukee, any discussion of age seems superfluous.

"He's pretty young for a knuckleballer," said Boston Red Sox first baseman Adrian Gonzalez, reflecting a knowledge of a knuckleballing fraternity that over the years has included Hall of Famers Hoyt Wilhelm (49) and Phil Niekro (46) as well as Charlie Hough (46).

On June 5, 1997, Wakefield lasted 8 2/3 innings against the Brewers in Milwaukee, striking out a career-high 10 batters while walking seven, before he was lifted with one out to go in a 2-1 win.

Newspaper reports the next day noted he threw 168 pitches, but evidently the official tally added one more pitch, as 169 is the number listed by baseball-reference.com.

Wakefield told reporters afterward that he didn't have his best knuckleball that day so he threw more curves and (ahem) fastballs than usual, throwing the knuckler only 75 percent of the time. According to the accounts of the game, Wakefield made little mention of his pitch count.

Jimy Williams, who was managing the Sox at the time, said, "I never asked what the pitch count was.''

That was only the second-most pitches Wakefield has thrown in an outing. On April 27, 1993, while with Pittsburgh, he threw 172 in 10 innings in a 6-2 win over the Braves. Those two games rank as most pitches thrown by any pitcher in a game since 1989, when Orel Hershiser threw 169 in 11 innings.

They have issues with consistency, but when they are hot, they are awesome.  In 2011, Wakefield and R.A. Dickey, starter for the Mets, are the only knuckleballers in the major leagues, although Charlie Haeger is currently struggling through pitching difficulties with the Tacoma Rainiers, the AAA affiliate of the Seattle Mariners.