Read Online Knuckler by Tim Wakefield - Free Book Online Page A

With baseball in particular, there was no such thing as too much. By the time he reached his midteens, Wakefield was one of the better players at Eau Gallie High School in Melbourne, the same high school that major leaguer Prince Fielder would later attend. His previous coaches had utilized his advanced skills at two of the more important positions on the diamond: like most major leaguers in their youth, Wakefield had pitched and played shortstop. That changed some at Eau Gallie, where coach Ken Campbell started playing Wakefield at first base because the team had a better shortstop. Wakefield also continued to pitch, albeit without really using the knuckleball. He would throw the pitch while playing catch with his teammates and sometimes dared to unveil it in a game "if we were winning like 10–0 or something." The pitch was not seen by anyone, however, as something
serious
and was regarded more as a novelty.
    By the time he graduated from high school, Wakefield was slotted as a Division 2–caliber college talent; he had the skill, but lacked some of the size, that would have made him an elite Division 1 college player. His options were relatively limited, particularly when Brevard Community College was the only program to offer him a baseball scholarship. BCC was an established junior college baseball program in Melbourne, and enrolling there allowed Wakefield to remain close to home. The idea was that he would distinguish himself at BCC, continue to develop, and maybe transfer to a bigger college program like Miami or Tampa or Florida after his sophomore year. In the short term, the comfort of being close to home could help him, something that would prove to be true over the course of his career.
    It means something to me to be here.
    Of course, as is usually true with most anything involving the knuckleball and those with the skill to unleash it, things did not go entirely according to plan.
    For Tim Wakefield, the dips and turns were about to begin.

    In Florida—or more accurately, throughout the warm-weather regions of the United States—college baseball is a year-round sport. There is
no real off-season. Teams work out and practice during the fall semester, making preparations for the start of the official season in spring. Baseball is serious business in Florida. Practice time is seen as instrumental in the development and success of a player, and so baseball was immediately part of Wakefield's curriculum at BCC.
    At the time, the coach at Brevard Community College was a man named Ernie Rosseau, a native of Nyack, New York, who had attended Satellite High School in Satellite Beach, Florida, and played college baseball years earlier at Florida Tech, located in Melbourne. Rosseau had spent four seasons as an outfielder in the minor league system of the St. Louis Cardinals, where he climbed as high as Double A. Rosseau's college coach, Les Hall, remembered Rosseau as tough, hard-nosed, and "demanding," the kind of player who almost certainly would go on to become a coach if and when his playing career ended.
    As a coach, unsurprisingly, Rosseau took the same aggressive approach he had brought to the game as a player, a philosophy that generally worked for him and produced a long, accomplished career, including a pair of junior college national championships and job opportunities with an assortment of major league organizations.
    In Wakefield's case, however, the coach and the player disagreed from the start. Wakefield thought that his scholarship meant something, that having been recruited entitled him to a spot on the team. In Rosseau's eyes, that was the furthest thing from the truth. Wakefield remembered showing up at the first day of team workouts in the fall and recognizing that most every other player at BCC was just as good as he was—if not better—and that a starting position on the team was not a given. The change made him uneasy. He suddenly had the feeling that he was not wanted. The