A Different Spring Training

Today is the day pitchers and catchers report for the start of Red Sox spring training at their brand new facility in Fort Myers, Jet Blue Park. As a Yankees fan, my concerns are elsewhere but my annual prayer, "Lord, Can't the Sox' Spring Training Equipment Truck Have an Accident?' is a constant. So, too, is my disappointment when it never happens.

But like spring training itself, hope springs eternal. It had better for Red Soxs fan who will have one less familiar face, one fewer gamer, one less guy who plays God's game the way it was designed to be played (and always did) on the roster and on the field. Knuckleball pitcher Tim Wakefield retired earlier this week and this Yankees fan is glad and sad to see him go.

I'm glad because he seemed to have some of his greatest outings against my guys in pinstripes. As a fan, it's uncomfortable to watch your ballclub get mowed down by a fireball hurler but it's downright embarrassing when Tim would send Yankees back to grab some pine after blowing a 68 mile an hour knuckleball by them after they'd contort themselves into terrible shapes not hitting it and not even getting close.

I used to hate humid weather, be it at Fenway Park or Yankee Stadium, with Wakefield on the mound, and I never knew if it was true that humidity was a knuckleballer's best friend (Phil Niekro and I stopped shoe shopping together years ago). I did know that once Wakefield broke a sweat on the mound, the guys in the batter's box needed to jump on his early offerings because once he got into a groove we would be so screwed.

Baseball, like all professional sports, is a business. While the man with the child in his eyes spends thirty bucks on a cap and closer to seventy for a jersey to sit in his living room and watch the millionaires at every position play the same game the kids down the street play for the sheer love of it, I concede it's a billion dollar enterprise within the entertainment monolith. I get it: money fixes everything even the sports we rooted for since childhood.

It doesn't make Wakefield's farewell any less eloquent and elegant and certainly doesn't remove the slightly acrid taste in my mouth over how the Sox's management made a business decision to NOT offer the guy whose efforts had helped the franchise to two World Series rings in the last decade a one year contract so he could go out on his terms. Money doesn't talk, said Dylan, it swears and even if there were no hard times in the land of plenty, nobody gets anything for free anymore.

So Wakefield said goodbye from Fenway Park, but not in the uniform baseball fans had grown accustomed to seeing him in. When he'd stand on the mound during the heat of a pennant race, he was a diamond darling. Friday, in a suit at a microphone, he was Wendy's younger brother, John, all grown up and another reminder that the lights are getting dim in Neverland. Tessie weeps, Tim, and baseball along with her.
-bill kenny