SAN DIEGO — Three years ago, inside an apartment in Fort Wayne, Ind., Matt Waldron opened his laptop for a crash course in an endangered art. Tim Wakefield, the most prominent knuckleballer of his generation, was on the other end of a Zoom call that had been arranged by Steve Lyons, then the San Diego Padres’ director of pitching development. Waldron, who grew up a Boston Red Sox fan, remembers feeling nervous. But only at the start.
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“Once I saw just what a nice guy he was,” Waldron said, “it was very enjoyable.”
The call lasted two hours as Wakefield, Waldron and Lyons discussed finger pressure, mechanics and routines. Another video conference followed several weeks later and went roughly as long. Wakefield had watched footage from recent Fort Wayne TinCaps games. He wanted to hear about a little-known minor leaguer’s progress with the knuckleball.
More than 15 years earlier, Waldron and his twin brother, Mike, first toyed with the pitch in their backyard in Omaha, Neb., after playing as Wakefield in a baseball video game — and deciding the knuckleballer’s signature weapon was too unfair to deploy via Nintendo GameCube. They occasionally threw it in actual games, including from their positions as youth infielders.
“We’d do it to mess with people, really,” Waldron said. “It was just fun, and we kind of liked to see those reactions.”
But it wasn’t until early in the 2021 season that the right-hander, after piquing the curiosity of Padres instructors, began to throw the pitch in earnest. A Zoom call with a famous knuckleballer was set up that June.
Three years later, Waldron has emerged as a developmental success and an increasingly recognizable major leaguer. Patrick Mahomes, the best quarterback on the planet, recently joked that he was trying to learn the Padres rookie’s knuckleball. Friday, Waldron will attend his first-ever game at Fenway Park. And this weekend, he will fulfill another dream.
“I’m hoping to feel that presence or whatever you want to say,” Waldron said. “Just how the world goes around, kind of. I want to experience it all.”
He is scheduled to start Sunday on the mound the late Wakefield called home.
Tim Wakefield throws a knuckleball during a 2011 start for the Red Sox. (Nick Laham / Getty Images)
At the 2020 trade deadline, the Padres sent six players to the Cleveland Indians in exchange for Mike Clevinger, Greg Allen and a player to be named later. Ten weeks went by before Waldron, a former 18th-round draft pick from the University of Nebraska, was announced as the final piece in the deal. Waldron made his organizational debut the following May. Members of the Padres’ player development staff found the newcomer coachable but understandably wary of incorporating a unicorn pitch against professional hitters.
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“I felt like the knuckleball for me was a backup plan, even for my career,” Waldron said. “So then whenever that didn’t go well, I felt like the sky was falling for a second.”
Some of his reticence trailed him into the big leagues. Waldron made his Padres debut last June. Across six starts and two relief appearances, he logged a 4.35 ERA and tended to gravitate to his other pitches: a low-90s fastball, a sweeper, a cutter. He threw his knuckleball only 26.7 percent of the time.
“And last year, it was more of, like, at a certain time,” said Xander Bogaerts, a former Red Sox star who played with knuckleballer Steven Wright in Boston. “I remember every time I was at shortstop, it was, ‘Ah, here it comes.’”
This year, Waldron has a 3.43 ERA and a 38.8 percent knuckleball usage rate. A No. 5 starter out of spring training, he has been the steadiest member of a rotation missing veterans Yu Darvish and Joe Musgrove. And in his past eight starts, Waldron has pitched to a 1.80 ERA while averaging more than 40 knuckleballs per outing.
“It’s not as predictable,” Bogaerts said. “Now he has that confidence. It must be a good feeling when you throw it a lot and it’s falling for strikes.”
It’s also less reason for Ruben Niebla to provide frequent reminders. At the beginning of this season, the Padres pitching coach often sat with Waldron between innings and encouraged him to throw more knuckleballs. In recent starts, Niebla says, Waldron has not needed any prodding.
“Pitching is being unpredictable,” said Niebla, who coached Wright in Double A for the Cleveland organization. “And it’s the most unpredictable pitch in baseball because of its movement. It’s beautiful.”
Matt Waldron, Gorgeous 79mph Knuckleball. 🦋 pic.twitter.com/eiPFGWNKW5
— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) May 12, 2024
Waldron, 27, heard a similar message three years ago. In their first Zoom call, Wakefield told Waldron that, throughout a 19-year career, he had relished making opposing hitters “look as stupid as possible.” In their second virtual meeting, Wakefield said he was impressed by Waldron’s recent minor-league outings and his knuckleball velocity. (Waldron typically throws the pitch in the upper 70s. Wakefield relied almost exclusively on sub-70 flutterers.)
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The compliment stuck with Waldron. So did Wakefield’s obvious passion for the near-extinct community of knuckleball pitchers.
“My hardest transition was just learning how to compete with it,” Waldron said. “And I think he obviously understood that really well. … You know, bad s—’s gonna happen sometimes. And just understanding how to get better the next day.”
The two never got to speak again. Last Oct. 1, Wakefield died of brain cancer at age 57. (His wife, Stacy, would succumb to pancreatic cancer a few months later.) The news stunned the baseball world. In Chicago, where the Padres were finishing their 2023 season, Waldron cried.
“You kind of don’t know how much somebody means to you until something like that happens,” Waldron said.
This weekend’s visit to Boston,the first for the Padres since 2013, holds special significance for multiple members of the organization. Bogaerts, who is rehabbing a shoulder fracture, is returning to Fenway Park for the first time since 2022. Meanwhile, San Diego play-by-play man Don Orsillo will be back at the stadium where Wakefield made an early, unforgettable impression on the broadcaster.
In 2001, his first year as the television voice of the Red Sox, Orsillo found himself agonizing through his dream job.
“I was very stiff,” the New Hampshire native recalled. “I was very tight. I was very nervous.”
Then, in a series of casual conversations that summer, Wakefield commended Orsillo for his sense of humor and suggested a potential solution: a New England Sports Network commercial in which the veteran pitcher would work out the rookie announcer. Taken aback by Wakefield’s generosity, Orsillo agreed.
The resulting product helped bring Orsillo out of his shell and remake his image overnight. He went on to a 15-year run as a beloved Red Sox broadcaster, and he still credits Wakefield’s gesture as an unmistakable influence on his career.
I feel like I need to tell the back story to this commercial. My 1st season I struggled and was very tight. Wake came to me and said you need to share your personality with the fans. He offered to do this with me. Changed everything forever. #RIPWake🙏 pic.twitter.com/V00sbMocRb
— Don Orsillo (@DonOrsillo) October 2, 2023
“To me, it’s No. 1 if I had to point to something,” Orsillo said. “I have to say that my (late Red Sox broadcast) partner Jerry Remy helped me a great deal. But he couldn’t bring that side of me out at the time because I wasn’t ready. It took Tim Wakefield. It took a player of his ilk and that status in Boston to say ‘Hey, you can do this’ and believe in me, and I was just so amazed that a player would even care to do that.”
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More than two decades later, Orsillo was less surprised to learn that Wakefield, a Roberto Clemente Award winner, spent four hours speaking with a Padres minor-leaguer he’d never met.
“If he would do that for me as a broadcaster, a knuckleballer? Are you kidding me?” Orsillo said. “I think those guys see themselves as a fraternity.”
Waldron can attest. In the past few years, he has worked with Tom Candiotti in the Arizona Fall League, chatted with R.A. Dickey on a FaceTime call, and experienced Wakefield’s kindness for himself. His success this season has made it easier to embrace being labeled as the latest torch-bearer among a select group of pitchers.
“I think it felt a little dismissive at first,” Waldron said. “It was, like, an asterisk next to it in a major-league player. At the end of the day, no, it doesn’t bother me anymore. I compete with it, and I get that enjoyment out of it. I know I throw the pitch, but I’m a competitor and I love to compete.
“I guess if there’s something I want people to know, it’s that I’m very competitive. It might be harder to compete with (a knuckleball) — I’ve learned in the minors — and it’s working right now, so I’m just grateful for that and staying healthy.”
Waldron is young enough for certain memories to blur. He only recently realized that Orsillo was a frequent narrator of the Red Sox telecasts he and his brothers grew up watching. (He first gravitated to that franchise because his older brother, Mark, was a fan.) He was drawn by such players as Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz and, of course, a long-tenured knuckleballer.
“Fenway and Tim Wakefield,” Waldron said, “it was like they just went together.”
Sunday, with Orsillo on the microphone, Waldron will become the first pitcher to throw a knuckleball at Fenway since Wright last played there in 2019.
“That’s the one I’m really trying to check off my list,” Waldron said this week. “I think it’d be cool to toe that rubber, knowing that Wakefield has been there too. I think it’ll be a surreal moment.”
(Top photo of Matt Waldron: Alex Slitz / Getty Images)
