He is as close as the Red Sox come now to having an old pair of slippers. Everybody else is gone. Mo is playing for the Mets, Tim Naehring is farm director for the Reds, Val is out of a job after being waived by the Orioles, and the Rocket is bidding for his 300th win in another uniform. Tim Wakefield has outlasted them all, this 36-year-old knuckleballer who wondered whether he would ever have another job in baseball until Dan Duquette picked up the phone in 1995, after Wakefield was released by the Pirates. He signed the biggest contract of his life this winter -- three years at $13.02 million -- he is newly married to Stacey, who has Boston roots, he has supplanted John Valentin as the most visible Sox connection to the Jimmy Fund, and as he begins his ninth season in a Red Sox uniform, he is at home.

''I consider myself a New Englander now,'' said this son of the Space Coast (Melbourne, Fla., is close enough to Cape Canaveral that he could watch the rocket launches from the backyard of his parents' home).

''I don't know how much longer I'm going to play,'' said Wakefield, who has ascended to the No. 2 spot in the Sox rotation and will face the Devil Rays here tonight. ''But the easy part to swallow is that I will be with the Red Sox for the rest of my career. Now ownership has made that public knowledge to everybody. The Red Sox name means a lot to me now. I've been with the team so long, and I take a lot of pride in that.''

It is easy to forget, with Wakefield coming off a terrific spring and projecting to a 200-inning, 15-18 win season, that there have been times when his Sox career hung by the edge of one of the fake fingernails he occasionally pastes on to throw his knuckler.

''My career,'' he said, ''has always been a battle for survival. It's still a battle for survival.''

For Wakefield, the failures have been as spectacular as the successes. He did not become what he is until he'd failed miserably at what he was, a first baseman for his first two seasons in pro ball before the Pirates asked him to start throwing his funny pitch full time.

He was a sensation in 1992, a midseason arrival in Pittsburgh who pitched the Pirates to the National League East title, then he endured two seasons of misery -- which included a one-way ticket back to the minors -- before the Pirates released him in the spring of '95.

''For two years, I didn't have a clue,'' he said. ''I remember thinking, `How could you be so good one year, so bad the next year?' I beat myself up big-time over it. Being away from home, I didn't have a wife or a family, I was by myself. It was a great learning experience.''

The lesson has held fast for the better part of a decade.

''This game will humble you very quickly,'' he said. ''As soon as you feel like you're bigger than the game, that you've established yourself, something humbling is always waiting around the corner.''

Wakefield said it was almost a relief when the Pirates let him go, ''like a huge weight off my shoulders. I think the Pirates felt that I'd be better off someplace else, and so did I.

''What I went through is something I wouldn't wish on anybody else, but I'm glad I went through it, because it made me stronger. The big key in this game is learning how to deal with failure. You're dealing with failure every day in this game.''

Sox fans know the high points -- how Wakefield resuscitated his career in 1995 when he went 14-1 with a league-leading 1.65 ERA in his first 17 starts and pitched the Sox to a division title, then gave them at least 200 innings in the next three seasons, going 17-8 in 1998 as the Sox reached the playoffs again.

But a year later, at a stage in his career when Wakefield should have enjoyed a measure of security, came one of those soul-stripping moments that can take a man's breath away. With the Sox one step away from going to the World Series after beating the Indians in the Division Series, Wakefield was told by manager Jimy Williams that he would not be on the ALCS roster against the Yankees.

Wakefield is a guy who never lets his spikes out of his sights, even after a day he has pitched nine innings, in case his manager needs him to throw an inning out of the bullpen. That summer, he had started and relieved for the Sox, stepping into the bullpen breach when closer Tom Gordon was hurt, returning to the rotation when Williams had nowhere else to turn.

And here it was October, and Williams was telling Wakefield to grab his spikes and glove and go home.

''Before he called me into his office,'' Wakefield said, ''I saw him pacing around all day. He told me to sit down. He looked at me, shook his head, and said, `I don't know how to tell you this. I've been walking around for two hours trying to tell you we're not putting you on the playoff roster.

'' `How can I tell a guy who saved 15 games for us and helped us out and filled in everywhere we needed him, he can't help us now? How do you tell a guy that?' ''

To this day, Wakefield believes the decision wasn't made by the manager. He thinks it was Duquette's call, or maybe that of Joe Kerrigan, the pitching coach with whom he had his differences.

''I think Jimy wanted to use me,'' Wakefield said. ''But he never came out and said it. Jimy wouldn't blame anybody else. He'd take the blame.''

Wakefield remained a hybrid pitcher for two seasons, and after 2000, when he was a free agent, he seriously entertained the thought of leaving. The Twins had shown some interest, but it never materialized into an offer, and Wakefield swallowed some pride and came back.

With his career resuscitated under Grady Little, he is glad he did. And given the track record of knuckleballers -- Phil Niekro and Hoyt Wilhelm pitched well into their 40s -- he may be here for some time to come.

Who throws away their old slippers?

''Whether you call it serenity or security,'' he said, ''I know I'm going to be here a while. I vividly remember going through the '93 season and reading in the paper that if I didn't pitch well I was going back to the minor leagues. That's how one bad outing turns into another and another. It's real hard to perform under that pressure. It becomes a type of quicksand.

''For me, even now, it's still about survival. I still go about it as an everyday job. That may have to do with my upbringing. My parents were both blue-collar people who never earned more than $30,000 a year. They were always striving to put food on the table, living paycheck to paycheck.

''To be doing the job I do, playing the game I love, I know I'm lucky to put on this uniform every day.''