Red Sox survive curse of King

Pay attention, class, because today's topic is a somewhat complicated tale, encompassing the worlds of spheroid physics, the development of arcane baseball strategy, and the apparently supernatural powers of Stephen King, the best-selling author of horror novels.

King, who has earned himself about 50 gadzillion dollars scaring the bejeezus out of two generations of readers, also rates himself the Number One Fan of the Boston Red Sox. King makes regular pilgrimages to Fenway Park from his home in Maine, schedules his holidays around the team's spring training regimen in Florida each March and occasionally goes on the road to support his beloved Sox throughout the summer.

And over the past off-season King even managed to combine art and avocation: He spent the winter composing his latest tome, a book entitled The Girl who loved Tom Gordon.

We will hereby stipulate that we have not read The Girl who loved Tom Gordon (or, for that matter, any of King's other books), but from what we have heard, the plot-line can be summarised thusly: A young damsel, lost in the woods and presumably threatened by all manner of slimeoozing and headless woodland creatures, manages to maintain her sanity and outwit her tormentors by listening to Red Sox games on the transistor radio she has thoughtfully brought along for her ordeal. In particular, she apparently becomes enamoured of Gordon, who in his role as the team's Closer is the ace of the Boston bullpen staff.

That in this day and age anyone, even a teenage girl, would be more likely to be in possession of a radio than a mobile phone is a convenience we shall leave to King and his readers, but that the subject matter places the work in the present is inarguable, because 1998 was Gordon's first full season in the Closer's role.

Although for its first century Major League baseball managed to survive without anyone ever having heard of a Closer, it has now become a matter of accepted logic that no team can hope to win without one. In the old days a starting pitcher stayed in the game until he got tired and then another pitcher took his place. A team's best four or five pitchers would start games on a rotating basis, and the others would be relegated to relief roles while the manager hoped for the best.

The specialised role of the Closer is a recent development, but contemporary strategy has now rendered de riguer the possession of a pitcher who can protect a lead in the final inning. And, since the close must by definition be a fearless and nerveless sort of fellow, it helps if he is a fire-balling intimidator.

Closers, however, don't grow on trees, and consequently command extravagant sums on the free agent market. Which is why teams sometimes attempt to develop their own - as in the case of Gordon. Two years ago he was a struggling starting pitcher in his 30th year and 10th big league season who had, since his rookie season, lost more games than he had won when he lost his place in the pitching rotation and was relegated to the bullpen.

Gordon, however, took to closing like a duck to water, and recorded 46 "saves" (basically, games in which he recorded the final out while staring down the potential winning or tying run) and won seven others in 1998. Considering that the Red Sox's best pitcher, Pedro Martinez, won 19, it could be reasonably argued that Gordon's conversion was the biggest single factor in the Boston team's reaching the American League play-offs last year, and while everyone might not agree with this hypothesis, King evidently would.

This spring, as one might have supposed it might with a man who makes his living concocting curses and other demonic coincidences, the inevitable occurred. Almost to the very day The Girl who loved Tom Gordon hit the bookstores, the real Tom Gordon came down with a sore arm. Diagnosed as tendinitis in his right elbow, the ailment sidelined him for the better part of a month, during which time King wisely made himself scarce around Fenway Park.

In Gordon's absence, Sox manager Jimy Williams tried a number of options with no success and the team was tumbling out of contention. Then, a week ago tonight in a game against the Texas Rangers, Williams surprised everyone by summoning his number two starting pitcher, Tim Wakefield, into the final inning of a 3-2 game with one out and the tying run on second base.

Wakefield earns his living by cunning and guile, which is to say, by throwing knuckleballs.

Most pitchers spend a lifetime attempting to find new and devious ways to make a baseball spin out of kilter. Some of these, such as the spit-ball, were for reasons having to do with both safety and hygiene, outlawed long ago. Just last week one pitcher, Brian Moehler of the Tigers, was suspended for 10 days after an umpire caught him with a one-inch square of sandpaper taped to his thumb.

The knuckleball, on the other hand, doesn't spin at all. In its utopian form, the pitch is imparted from the fingertips with a motion not unlike that of a shot-putter's, and will travel the 66 feet, six inches between the pitcher's mound and home plate while turning less than one complete revolution. Its efficiency stems from its very unpredictability.

Even physicists are baffled in attempting to explain why a knuckleball will slowly flutter up to the plate in a most tantalising form, only to dart off like an elusive butterfly just as the batter attempts to lay wood to it.

The knuckleball is not without its inherent perils, a chief one being that it can be as hard to catch as it is to hit, which is why managers have traditionally been loath to risk using a flutter-baller in tight situations with runners on base, where a wild pitch or a passed ball could cost the ball game. Which is why even Wakefield himself was surprised to find himself inheriting the situation he did last Thursday.

Although Williams maintained that he had merely played a hunch that night, Wakefield proceeded to finish three of four games, notching two saves and preserving a 6-0 win for Martinez in the other, as the Sox embarked on a five-game winning streak.

So of course on Tuesday night, Wakefield resumed his place in the regular rotation and was promptly raked for four runs in one inning of an 8-5 loss to the Seattle Mariners. Gordon, pitching in anger for the first time since April 18th, threw to two batters the same night, but with his arm condition still precarious, logic would seem to make the next move obvious. In the meantime, the Red Sox are just hoping that up in the woods of Maine, Stephen King isn't plugging away on a sequel entitled The Girl who loved Tim Wakefield.