"Knuckleballers can never really know where their fluttering pitches will land.

The idea is to get the ball close enough to the strike zone to entice the batter to swing.

Sometimes the best they can do is hope.

That's exactly the situation Brevard County's favorite knuckleballer finds himself in this morning; hoping, waiting. With each day that passes without a concrete offer from a big league club, Tim Wakefield inches closer to a conversation he'd rather not have just yet.

"I just saw that (Jorge) Posada retired, you know it's something that my wife and I need to talk about," Wakefield said this week, taking a short break from organizing a weekend of fundraising events for the Space Coast Early Intervention Center. "I'd probably need to talk about it with my kids, too. Ultimately, I would like to obviously play for the Boston Red Sox for one more year and see where it goes.""