Tim Wakefield Marquee

Pittsburgh brought him up in 1992 as a knuckleball pitcher who had been a first baseman, and he went 8-1 with a 2.15 earned run average and won two games in the Championship Series. Two years later he was in the minor leagues, and in April 1995 he was released. Boston signed him within a week and he went 16-8 with a 2.95 earned run average.

He stayed seventeen seasons and won 186 games for the Red Sox, behind only Roger Clemens and Cy Young, with 2,046 strikeouts and 3,006 innings in their uniform. He finished with exactly 200 wins against 180 across nineteen years, starting and relieving as required, in a role no club would design and every club was glad to have.

He gave up the home run to Aaron Boone that ended the 2003 Championship Series, and the following October he took the beating in the third game of the next one so the bullpen could be saved, and Boston won the next four. He won the Roberto Clemente Award in 2010 for work in the city's hospitals. He died of brain cancer in October 2023, at fifty-seven.