ANALYSIS : They’re All Aflutter at Fenway

It is fashionable to pronounce baseball dead. Pollsters and pundits insist baseball is less popular than basketball, football and Vietnamese noodle soup. Allegedly it is too long for the attention-challenged MTV generation and too conflicted for feel-good Baby Boomers. Senior citizens are too busy cashing Social Security checks to care.

Excuse me while I chuckle. Baseball can’t die. It’s got too many boobs and fools destined for immortality. You can’t kill it. Nobody should want to, even though temporary insanity might get you off. But patience is a virtue in baseball. Just when the sport gets you mad enough to wring its neck, it does the darndest thing. It works magic. You are hypnotized. You are seduced.

You also are laughing your guts out. Because in baseball, a lovable sucker is born every minute. As you read, thousands are being born in Red Sox Nation, a smoke-free country that exists as a state of mind. At its capital, Fenway Park, strange and wonderful events are transpiring. The Red Sox are leading the American League East. They look better than good. They look runaway-with-the-division good. They look first-world-championship-since-1918 good.

Of course, they are not that good. But in Red Sox Nation, gullibility is a genetic warp. It may have something to do with the traffic rotaries in Boston, which leave motorists craving an escape from reality.

One of the new citizens of Red Sox Nation is Tim Wakefield, a right-hander living a second major league incarnation. In his first life, Wakefield almost carried the Pittsburgh Pirates into the World Series. He was 8-1 down the stretch as a rookie for the ’92 Bucs and beat the Atlanta Braves twice in the playoffs. He was acclaimed and celebrated.

But the fate of a knuckleballer is dust -- or horsehide -- in the wind. In the summer of ‘93, alas, Wakefield’s knuckler stopped knuckling, and he went 6-11 (5.61). In 1994, Wakefield was one of the worst pitchers in Triple A. When a stripper loses her wiggle, she gets fired; same thing with a knuckleballer. This spring the Pirates cut him loose. He could almost smell the fast-food hamburgers he was about to be flipping.

This, though, is the more matured Tim Wakefield who devotes so much of his life to his kids at the Space Coast Early Intervention Center back home in Melbourne, Fla. The same Wakefield who was quoted last fall: “(In 1992), I got caught up in the personal part of being a big leaguer.” He got the second chance he wanted when the Nation’s Minister of Immigration, General Manager Dan Duquette, offered Wakefield a green card, albeit a temporary one. Wakefield had to prove himself at Triple-A Pawtucket first. He talked with a couple of retired knuckleballers, Phil and Joe Niekro, and adjusted his mechanics. Shazam. The wiggle returned, earning him citizenship, a place on the major league roster.

That is when life began anew for Tim Wakefield. Because in winning his first four starts, he displayed a knuckleball that danced and fluttered and inspired so many tired cliches about butterflies that the Audubon Society came with nets. But cliches are swallowed whole in Red Sox Nation. That may be because it is a cliche. Or it simply may be that its citizens are starving.

In order, Wakefield beat the Oakland A’s (12-1), California Angels (1-0), Seattle Mariners (2-1) and A’s again (4-1). His first victory came after the Red Sox lost five of seven to the Indians and Mariners, and after two starters, Aaron Sele and Vaughn Eshelman, woke up with sore arms. Wakefield won his second game on two days’ rest. He went 10 innings against the Mariners and carried a no-hitter into the eighth inning of his second victory over the A’s. When he lost it on a looping single by Stan Javier, he received his first standing O at Fenway.

Wakefield is the new Merlin in Camelot. The knuckler is alchemy, pure and simple. “It’s a magical pitch,” says the Pirates’ Jim Leyland, his former manager. “He’s just got it on a roll again.”

Citizens of the Nation fully expect that opposing hitters will flail and the breeze from their bats will propel sailboats on the Charles River. Everything else will be under Merlin’s spell.

The Bosox’s big hitters -- Mo Vaughn, John Valentin, Tim Naehring, Mike Greenwell, Mike Macfarlane -- will continue to pound away. The little hitters -- Lee Tinsley, Troy O’Leary, Terry Shumpert, Luis Alicea -- will continue to chip.

Other starters -- Erik Hanson, Roger Clemens, Zane Smith -- will match Merlin’s sleight of hand.

The injured -- Jose Canseco, Sele and Eshelman -- will return to health. A bona fide closer will emerge. Nobody doubts it.

“This is a team of believers,” Manager Kevin Kennedy says. “We believe.”