He is the perfect man for the job, the acting senior statesman of the Red Sox who has endured the worst and prayed for the best. Tim Wakefield has been released by the Pittsburgh Pirates and has slumped off the mound at Yankee Stadium. And always, unfailingly, he has come back.

Tonight, three days after the Red Sox completed the most extraordinary comeback in baseball history, Wakefield will throw the first pitch in the first World Series game played in Boston in 18 years. More than any other member of the Red Sox, Wakefield knows what that means to the city of Boston and the entire six-state region of New England. He knows because he has been here.

"It really means a lot to me," Wakefield said yesterday at Fenway Park, where the Sox and St. Louis Cardinals went through preparations for Game 1 of the World Series.

"Doug (Mirabelli) and I have talked about this. Even last year, I was (the scheduled) Game 1 starter of the World Series, so it's kind of nice that we've run into this situation again. I'm going to try to do my best to take full advantage of the opportunity and try to bring this city a world championship."

The Red Sox long resisted the economic changes in baseball, but even they no longer possess the tradition they once did. Players are changing teams more rapidly than ever before and terms like loyalty and allegiance have become four-letter words in the world of professional sports. Where the Red Sox once had a lineage of lifelong players that ran from Ted Williams to Carl Yastrzemski to Jim Rice, they finished the American League Championship Series this year with only one homegrown player on the 25-man roster: Trot Nixon.

Wakefield was not born into the Red Sox organization, but he was reincarnated here. In 1995, when the Sox signed Wakefield to a minor league contract, the knuckleballer was coming off a season in which he led the minor leagues in virtually every negative pitching statistic. Ten years later, he ranks eighth on the Red Sox' all-time list for victories, just three wins behind Pedro Martinez (117).

Now he gets to pitch Game 1, just one year and one week after giving up a decisive home run to the forgettable Aaron Boone in Game 7 of the ALCS in New York.

Consider it retribution.

"When we got that final out (at Yankee Stadium), I wanted to stand on that mound as long as I could and relish the fact that I got to walk off that field a winner this time," Wakefield said during the Red Sox' postgame celebration in New York on Wednesday night.

Last year, of course, Wakefield was not so fortunate. Following the Boone homer, Wakefield lowered his head and briskly strode off the Stadium mound, returning to a visiting clubhouse where he broke down. He told clubhouse manager Joe Cochran that he feared he would be remembered as the next Bill Buckner. He believed that he had forever tainted his memory in the eyes of the baseball world.

Before his final pitch to Boone, Wakefield stood as the probable Most Valuable Player of the ALCS. And when he returned to Boston last winter for the Boston Baseball Writers' dinner - his first public appearance in Boston since Boone's homer - Wakefield received a thunderous ovation from more than 1,000 assembled guests, a reminder that they had not forgotten how far he had come.

"You don't go from MVP to Buckner in one pitch," said Mirabelli, who, as usual, will serve as Wakefield's catcher tonight. "We all thought he was a hero on our team. He couldn't get it out of his head though."

Tonight, it's out of his head.

And the Red Sox will put the ball in his hand when they return to the World Series.