Tim Wakefield Was Once The Best Pitcher On The Planet

Photo by Jim Davis/The Boston Globe via Getty ImagesI came of age as a baseball fan knowing with absolute certainty that the Red Sox would never win the World Series. While I was too young to actually have witnessed the atrocity of Game Six in 1986 myself, the toxic miasma of the game still hung over the fanbase as I awakened to baseball consciousness a few years later. We still loved the Sox — we watched them all summer, talked about them all winter, and counted on them to create community in lower middle class exurban New England — but we didn’t believe in them. They were bums, every last one of them, up to and including (especially including, actually) the Texas fireballer who would one day retire as the most accomplished pitcher of all-time.

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