
The Pittsburgh Pirates entered the 1992 season as two-time defending National League East champions. Back then, both the AL and NL had just two divisions, East and West, and the playoffs consisted of a single Championship Series pitting the division winners of each league; the winners of the LCSs would then face off in the World Series. No wild-card teams, no play-in games, no divisional series, just two teams in each league facing each other for the pennant and then the World Series. The Pirates had lost the NLCS in 1990 to the Reds, and then they lost the NLCS again in 1991 to the Atlanta Braves. They lost some talent after 1991–most notably, Bobby Bonilla–and not many people penciled them in for another division crown in 1992.
But somehow, the Pirates managed to surge early to a lead in the division, which they somehow maintained throughout the season, though in the middle of the season, through July and the All-Star break, it looked like their lead was in trouble. The Montreal Expos were breathing down their necks (partly because of the play of Moises Alou, a former top Pirates prospect that the Pirates dealt to the Expos two years earlier for pitching help), the bullpen wasn’t doing terribly well because for all their talent the Pirates never managed to find or develop a true closer, and the rotation was two really good guys (Doug Drabek, Zane Smith) and a few other OK guys.
Meanwhile, down in the minors, there was a first baseman who occupied his downtime by practicing throwing a knuckleball, one of the strangest of all baseball pitches. When this guy was told straight-out that he would, at best, plateau as a position player no higher than AA ball, he decided to try reinventing himself as a pitcher, with the knuckleball as his main pitch. He didn’t have much other than the knuckleball, to be honest; his fastball speed was never above 80mph, so he was never going to overpower hitters at the plate. No, it was knuckleball-to-the-majors or bust. He made the conversion to pitcher and started toiling away in the minors as a full-time pitcher in 1990.
Knuckleball-to-the-majors or bust, indeed.
It worked.
He made it to the majors on July 31, 1992, when the Pirates decided that they needed some help in the rotation. Up came this weird knuckleballer, who proceeded to go 8-1 down the stretch for the Pirates, with a 2.15 ERA; his presence helped fortify the rotation and provided an exciting boost. The Pirates ended up winning the NL East handily, and went on to face the Braves again in the NLCS.
Honestly, it felt like the run was over very quickly; the Braves took a three-games-to-one series lead–but the one game was a complete game thrown by this rookie knuckleballer who managed to out-duel Tom Glavine, one of the game’s best pitchers and a future Hall-of-Famer. Suddenly everybody knew who this kid was.
His name was Tim Wakefield.
The knuckleball, if you’re unfamiliar, is a very strange pitch. Every other pitch–fastball, slider, curveball, you name it–relies on spin to control the ball’s trajectory. The knuckleball, so named because of the weird grip used to throw it, negates all of that. The idea is the throw the ball with no spin, so that the ball might do anything on its trajectory to the plate. If it’s thrown right, it might start off looking like this big fat old baseball moving slowly into the hitter’s zone…and then drop suddenly, one way or the other, as the hitter swings. Or it might look like it’s going to drop and then not drop, so the hitter either doesn’t correct or doesn’t swing at all. Or…you get the idea. The knuckleball is an unpredictable beast, and since most athletes at that level rely on predictable results from muscle memory, nobody wants to work with a pitch that relies on total randomness. In Wakefield’s first game in that NLCS, Braves hitters–a potent lineup including David Justice entering his prime–were made to look like inept Little Leaguers.
The Pirates won Game Five, behind a complete game by pitcher Bob Walk, setting up Tim Wakefield to go again in Game Six, on three days’ rest (the knuckleball’s other main grace is that it puts very little strain on a pitcher’s arm), again facing Tom Glavine. The series was back in Atlanta for the last two games, all Atlanta had to do was win one to return to the World Series. Surely there was no way this rookie knuckleballer was going to beat the future HOFer again.
Tim Wakefield beat Glavine again. He threw another complete game, his second of the NLCS. The Pirates, who had trailed the NLCS 3-1, now tied it up, 3-3, with Game Seven to come.
It didn’t escape anyone’s notice that the Pirates’ three wins had all been complete games. Everyone knew that the bullpen was not great and that all bets were off if the starter got knocked out. Doug Drabek, the staff ace who had won the Cy Young Award two years earlier, went out and shut the Braves down for eight innings.
And then, the ninth inning happened.
I’m not going to relate the specifics of that inning; suffice it to say that the Braves managed to get Drabek out of the game, the Pirates’ lack of a closer reared its ugly head in exactly the worst way at exactly the worst time, some backup “whodat” catcher came up with the pinch-hit of his life, Gold-Glover and Best Ever Barry Bonds couldn’t manage to throw out at home a guy who couldn’t outrun a rock…well, that’s a lot of specifics after I said I wasn’t going to relate any, but the bottom of the 9th of Game Seven of the 1992 World Series might well be the most galling memory of my sports-fan life. That one may actually hurt more than “Wide right”. (Google it, if you don’t get the reference.)
After 1992, the Pirates entered a salary purge. Bonds and others were gone, and when 1993 dawned, there were a bunch of rookies up with the club and Wakefield–who had finished third in Rookie-of-the-Year voting just the year before–found himself anointed as Opening Day starter, staff ace, and all of that. It was probably too much for him, and he spent most of the next two years bouncing back down to the minors before the Pirates gave up after the 1994 season. Wakefield ended up with the Boston Red Sox, where he successfully worked his way back into an MLB rotation–and he was a damned good one. He had a couple of really good years, and a whole bunch of solid years, riding that knuckleball all the way to a career that spanned 19 seasons and saw him make crucial contributions to two World Series winning teams.
Tim Wakefield retired after the 2011 season. He’s a fond memory for Pirates fans, but he’s beloved by Red Sox fans, and with good reason. Yes, I wish the Pirates hadn’t screwed up the team when he was there, but getting out of Pittsburgh was the best thing for him as the 1993 Pirates were starting a run of losing baseball that would last more than two decades. Consider: Wakefield came up as a rookie in 1992 during the Pirates’ playoff run that year…and then he played out his entire 19-year career and retired before the Pirates finally made the playoffs again, two years later.
Tim Wakefield died yesterday, aged 57.
Make sure you read Sheila’s post; she comes at it from a Red Sox fan’s vantage point. No doubt more satisfying than a Pirates’ fan’s remembrance, but that’s how baseball goes. Many players start one place and then blossom in another. It happens, a lot. It certainly happened for Tim Wakefield.
It turned out that he had been suffering a very aggressive form of brain cancer. The public wasn’t even supposed to know about this, but his former teammate, Curt Schilling, decided to take it on himself to ignore Wakefield’s and his family’s wishes and reveal Wakefield’s condition on his podcast last week. (Schilling may well have Ty Cobb to thank for keeping him out of first place for Worst Person To Ever Play Major League Baseball.)
Tim Wakefield is not in the Baseball Hall of Fame, and looking at things from a strictly statistical standpoint, I suppose that’s the right decision…but then, I remember what I wrote last year when quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick retired from the NFL:
But I submit that it’s the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Stats. The Hall of Fame does not exist merely to honor numerical excellence. I’m a storyteller, and stories are why I love the Hall of Fame–in fact, stories are what I love most about sports in general. Who doesn’t love sitting with friends around a beer or two, swapping stories about great games and great players or even players who weren’t so great but had some great moments?
We don’t love sports because of stats. Stats help and they’re fun in themselves, but stats aren’t what connect us to sports at the most basic level. Stories are why we connect with sports: stories that we can share, stories that we recall collectively, stories that bind us together in fandom either in love for this team or, yes, hatred for that team or player, the one that always drives in the knife.
I stand by that. Yes, baseball is about numbers, probably moreso than any other sport; when you play that many games in a season and when there have been that many seasons–more than a hundred of them!–then numbers become part of the way we talk about the game more than for any other games. But still, numbers aren’t everything. Numbers offer a shorthand to talking about the game, a way of quantifying greatness…but they don’t capture the game. As I wrote in another post:
You can’t look at a box score and tell how blue the sky was that day, or what it smelled like in the park because maybe the breeze was coming from the lake or the industrial park the other way (in Buffalo, with the cereal plants downtown, it often smells of Cheerios). A box score won’t tell you how scuffed up the first baseman’s jersey is after several close plays, or how the catcher is still trying to work off the gimpy ankle from that play at the plate last Tuesday night. The box score won’t tell you the crowd’s mood: Are they giddy and jubilant, or are they kind of grumblingly negative because the team’s having a rough season and they’re sarcastically cheering the guy hitting .197 who just managed to leg out a weak grounder safely to first?
The box score won’t tell you if the players are attacking an early season game with vigor, or if they are visibly just playing out the last few weeks of the schedule, mired in fifth place and just wanting nothing more than to go home and rest for about a month. The box score will tell you that a particular player homered in the sixth, but it won’t tell you that he was on a hot streak and he came up against a tiring pitcher who probably should have already been pulled and who had of late been surrendering homers to right-handed hitters at a surprising rate for a guy who, up to a few weeks before, had been almost unhittable.
Numbers are great and important and useful…but they are also a flattening force, a force that tends to flatten out story. A baseball player who collects more than 3000 career hits is almost guaranteed a spot in the Hall of Fame…but is that all that player does? All I really know about Robin Yount is that he hat 3000 hits in his career. That’s numbers: for me they reduce a Hall of Fame player to a guy who had roughly 150 hits a year over his 20-year career.
But, what if I ask a person who has been a Milwaukee Brewers fan their whole life, “Hey! Tell me about Robin Yount?” Then, I’m not going to hear about 3000 hits. Then, I’m going to hear stories.
Sport isn’t just numbers, it’s also stories. I think that’s why we follow sport so adamantly as a species–well, partly, anyway. I don’t want to discount numbers, after all. But numbers aren’t the whole story.
Yes, I stand by all of that, as well. One common thing that I hear often in Hall of Fame discussions when players come up whose statistical accomplishments seem to make them a borderline candidates is, “Can you tell the story of the sport without mentioning this person?” And I suppose, depending on how deep you want to go, maybe you can tell the story of Major League Baseball, or the last thirty years of it, without mentioning the Tim Wakefields of the game…but it’s the Tim Wakefields of the game who flesh out the stories, who make them live. Every sports fan talks about their team’s Hall-of-Famers…but I wonder if it’s the not-quite-HOF guys that sports fans actually prefer to talk about. I wonder if they’re the ones whose stories summon up those knowing smiles and the twinkles in the eyes of the people who know.
I’ll always be a stories-over-stats person. It’s in my nature. And though he may not be in the Hall of Fame, but Tim Wakefield is in mine.
Why write bad reviews?
Roger asked me an interesting question via email:
This was in response to a comment I left on his post in which he talked about “reaction videos”, which he’s not a huge fan of but which I actually enjoy greatly. Here’s an excerpt of what he says:
And here’s part of my comment:
Actually, that is my entire comment. Why excerpt myself? Sheesh!
Anyway, the question led us to discussing bad reviews, when they’re appropriate to write, and so on. Roger noted his own negative experience at a recent concert he attended, and it got me thinking about why I avoid writing bad reviews.
Well, I generally don’t write bad reviews for a number of reasons, so let’s run through them! These are in no particular order.
1. I avoid writing bad reviews because I can avoid writing bad reviews.
I’m not a professional, or even an amateur, critic; I have no real obligation to review anything that I don’t want to review, and usually I’m much more motivated to write a positive piece about something I loved than a negative one about something I didn’t. Now, I wasn’t always this way, and if you really want to, you can find a lot more negativity from me probably in the ancient archives of this site, or if you really want, you can track down my Usenet postings, though I have no idea how you’d go about doing that. But why do I mostly choose not to write bad reviews? Well:
2. Writing bad reviews doesn’t make me feel good.
There are some critics, pro and amateur and self-appointed, who obviously get a visceral thrill out of being negative. And yes, there are times when negativity helps produce some good writing! But generally, I don’t get a good feeling from having ripped some work, no matter what it is, to shreds. And I am a firm believer in “Do what makes you feel good and don’t do what doesn’t.” If you’re a pro or if you can write negatively without feeling bad about it, fine! I’m not in either of those camps, though.
Now, reading bad reviews by professionals is something I’ll enjoy doing, sometimes especially if they’re negatively reviewing something I think is terrific. It’s fun to challenge my own thoughts or analyze theirs, sometimes. And sometimes the bad reviews are a delight, such as those by Roger Ebert, who really had a special way with movies he didn’t like. But there are other critics out there whose negative reviews have a mean and sadistic feel to them; those critics I tend to ignore completely. (John Simon is a good example here.)
3. There are enough people writing negative reviews in the world already.
Sometimes the chorus really doesn’t need another voice.
4. Bad reviews require you to know your shit.
Yes, all reviews require this, but it seems to me that bed reviews require it more, if you want to be taken seriously. You have to know the history of the genre of the thing you’re reviewing, you have to know what context it is aimed for, you have to know what the artist is trying to achieve, and so on. It’s not enough to be able to artfully say that a thing is bad; you have to be able to describe and illustrate why the thing is bad. Again, if you want to be taken seriously in your positive writings you have to do this stuff too, but it’s easier to be motivated to really plumb the depths of why I love a thing than why I do not. In terms of James Bond movies: I would be much happier to prattle on for an hour about why I love On Her Majesty’s Secret Service than to talk for sixty seconds about why I dislike Live and Let Die.
5. If I don’t like something, I don’t finish it. And fairness dictates that I don’t review something without having experienced all of it.
This is mainly about books and music. If a book or an album or a classical work or whatever isn’t doing it for me, I put it away and don’t write about it. I think it’s wildly unfair to assign a star rating on Goodreads to a book I didn’t finish, which is why I don’t do that. Many folks over there would disagree with me on this; I know quite a few who rank “DNF” books (Did Not Finish) with one star, which then gets added into that book’s rating average. I have a real problem with assigning a rating of any kind to a book I did not finish (or an album I stopped listening to, or a movie I turned off, or whatever). What I might do is note why I put something aside, if there is a specific reason (I once started a graphic novel that opened with a dog being killed, and that was it for me), but more often than not, I can’t put my finger on something specific that turned me off and it’s more of a “mood” thing.
And that’s not even taking into account the fact that many books that have become beloved to me over the years were books I laid aside the first time I tried reading them. Bad reviews feel “permanent” in a way that I don’t like.
So, back to Roger’s question: How do I decide to actually write a bad review? It comes down to completeness and conviction, I guess. If I grapple with an entire work or something and I don’t like it and I’m pretty sure of why, then yes, I might very well give my thoughts. If it’s something I’m known to generally know well and have opinions of, then the chances might go up…say, a new Star Wars or James Bond movie comes out that I end up disliking. Or I may attend a concert that doesn’t work for me…or a particularly favorite author has a book that I think is a clunker. But honestly, these days? More often than not I might just note “This didn’t do it for me,” and move on.
I’m currently working on a book of essays about Star Wars, much of which is culled from the many years’ worth of posts I’ve written on this site and its predecessor. But I’m about to run into a problem when I have to write about The Rise of Skywalker…which is a movie I seriously disliked. The problem? I never wrote about it here. A Star Wars movie that so frustrated me that I never blogged about it. So I’m going to have to watch the damned thing again and come up with new thoughts…
…but…
…what if I end up liking it?
(I won’t.)