Wakefield still gettin’ it done

MLB. Like Old Man River, Sox’ veteran Tim Wakefield just keeps rolling along.

As with venerable knuckleballers Charlie Hough and Phil Niekro before him, Wake’s dancing knuckleball keeps improving with age, and his seasonal output simply comes down to keeping an aging 41-year-old body healthy over a 162-game, 31-start season.

The longest-tenured Sox player matched a career-high with 17 wins last season and logged an amazing 29 decisions in his 31 mound appearances but fell short of his most treasured goal when injuries limited him to 189
innings pitched.

“Obviously, I keep saying 200 innings [is my goal],” said Wakefield. “If I can give the club 200 innings and even half as many decisions as I had last year, then I should be right back where I was.”

With a pair of young pitchers favored to man the back end of Boston’s starting rotation, Wake is once again expected to step into the third slot in the starting quintet and ease the burden placed on 24-year-old Jon Lester and 23-year-old Clay Buchholz. Off the field, the 15-year veteran — a man clearly at the far end of his playing career — serves as a valuable, reachable resource on both pitching and big-league life to his anxious-to-learn apprentices.

“I’ve been working  out a lot with Tim [Wakefield] and hanging around with him a lot, and he’s been around this game a long time,” Buchholz said. “It’s nice to have someone show me the ropes [who] knows what [he’s] doing.”