Project ShaqBox: Tim Wakefield

Plus, Project 84: Phil Niekro (650)

Another project? Yes, Project ShaqBox pre-dates Project 84, and while I’m opening packs, I’ve also been sending some of my old cards to folks, for them to get a nice batch of baseball in the mail and have some fun writing. That’s the other impetus for starting Project 84: paid content here, like our store, will help pay for others to write here, and our podcasts, and whatever other creative stuff we can cook up. Today, it’s a pleasure to have Jordan Hass here from South Side Sox, and can’t wait for more!

Where do you start when you get a random assortment of baseball cards in the mail and an open-ended request to write something? Do you seek out the most significant players, or the most interesting, or find some connection between all of them? Maybe all of the above, something in between, or something completely out of left field? Driving this car without a map, the best way to go might be to see where the road leads. Like they say, sometimes it’s about the journey and not the destination.

There are six cards that I was immediately drawn to: Joe Carter, Joe Morgan, Nolan Ryan, Tony Gwynn, Edgar Martinez, and Tim Wakefield. What company these specific cards are of little interest to me – these are guys who played long enough to have dozens, if not hundreds of different versions of cards made of them, and thousands if not millions of those cards were picked from packs by people around the world. In essence these specific cards of them are unimportant. I’m drawn to the baseball they played and not marketing details.

Carter has one of the greatest moments in baseball history with his 1993 World Series-winning home run. Morgan is a Hall of Famer, one I don’t know as much about as I truthfully should. Ryan is the strikeout king, pitched seven no-hitters, and to me is in the top-5 all time conversation. Tony Gwynn is the greatest contact hitter of a generation and then some and was considered the nicest guy in baseball. Martinez helped keep the Mariners in Seattle and is literally the person on the name of the award for the best DH in the league. These are guys who, you say the name and everyone at least has heard of them. They’re important to the history of baseball in major ways.  

And then there’s Wakefield. While he nearly pitched the 1992 Pirates to the World Series as a rookie, and was on the 2004 Red Sox team that broke the curse, he’s not a Hall of Famer. In fact, Wakefield only made one All-Star team – in 2009, when he was 42, and he did not appear in that game.

He did have one thing, however, that is extremely important to me and that is that he threw the knuckleball. The knuckleball is my favorite pitch. So few pitchers have ever mastered it, and even fewer have been legitimately good with it, and a select group of pitchers who mastered it despite its inherent randomness. I know of and like Tim Wakefield because he threw it. He’s not even my favorite knuckleballer (R.A. Dickey and it’s not even close), just the fact that he threw this very obscure pitch endears him to me in a way that other pitchers have to actually earn through being good pitchers. Wakefield is important to baseball in a way that seems so unimportant but ties back to the earliest days of the sport, as now there’s almost a direct lineage of people who threw the knuckleball that has run nearly dry.

The rarity of the pitch and the chaotic nature of it that make it so hard to hit for literally everyone who sees it, and that makes me love it. It's hilarious to see the best hitters in the world swing at something with such a ridiculous concept, a pitch that does not spin but has the most unpredictable movement possible. It's a humbling pitch and the guys who threw it (especially in the last 30 years) were all underdogs who started throwing it because the only other option was to stop playing baseball. It's kind of beautiful, in a feel-good sports movie kind of way. 

The egalitarianism of the knuckleball is honestly extremely attractive to me as someone who is constantly struggling with a world that does not want me, as a trans person, to exist. The knuckleball isn't just a pitch, it's a symbol of justice. It sounds stupid, but it feels right. It can take down the biggest and best hitters in the world and it takes such skill to make it work. It's a pitch that seems lucky but takes so much prowess to actually harness. 

So much of pitching is about being overpowering or deceptive, yet a pitch that you know is coming, but don't know what it's going to do, is just so fucking satisfying. Hitters knew Tim Wakefield and R.A. Dickey were just going to pound you with that pitch, and on a good day, it was better than any 100mph fastball or 80-grade movement breaking ball.

The knuckleball, though, is a pitch that gives and takes. It has bad days. It's sometimes an easy-to-hit pitch, just floating up to home plate. It has high highs and low lows. It is chaos. It's a reflection of the world, and what I wish the world had, at the same time. Something that can take down the people causing so much suffering, and make it seem for one moment that the little guy can win and overcome all of the terrible shit that life throws at us. A skill someone like me, or you, or Wade Boggs, could learn to do and make the world a better and brighter place for everyone. The knuckleball is just a pitch, it can't fix the world or its injustices, but it can at least make you laugh watching someone trying and failing to swing at it.

Project 84: Phil Niekro (650)

By Jesse Spector

The back of Phil Niekro’s 1984 Topps card, like the front, only offers evidence of the past, and for a non-knuckleballer, it already would’ve been time for a Turn Back The Clock card. The 1983 season was Niekro’s 21st in the major leagues, and he was 44 years old, having started his professional career in 1959 between the McCook Braves in the Nebraska State League — a team that also included teenage Elrod Hendricks and Ron Hunt — and the Wellsville Braves in the New York-Penn League. The following year, Niekro was with the Jacksonville Braves in the South Atlantic League and the Louisville Colonels in the American Association. Niekro was an Austin Senator in the Texas League in 1961, a Louisville Colonel again in 1962… missed all of 1963 in the military… and then finally made his major league debut on April 15, 1964, getting Jim Davenport to ground out and end the third inning of a 10-0 game. Len Gabrielson pinch-hit for him in the bottom of the fourth and Niekro spent most of 1964 as a Denver Bear.