Not sure why people are trying to make a story out of Tim Wakefield's performance on Sunday night. 

OK, so a 44-year-old (he'll be 45 in August) doesn't step in and give up a run and four hits in 6.2 innings every day. I'll grant you that.

But how, I wonder, did we all manage to forget the true headline from Sunday?

Tim Wakefield owns the Cubs at home. Undefeated for over 17 years and counting.

Come on, you remember the 1-0 Pirates win over the Cubs at Three Rivers Stadium on September 26, 1993, don't you? 

Nothing registering? Second half of a doubleheader (a Pittsburgh sweep), Al Martin (who is now 43 years old -- about 22 months younger than Wakefield -- and out of baseball since 2003) knocked in Midre Cummings for the game's only run. Mike Morgan was the tough-luck loser, the game played in a black-and-white era time of one hour and forty-nine minutes.

Fine. I get it. You were probably doing something else -- it was the opening weekend of The Program and Dazed and Confused (Mike Morgan would've been a high school junior in the summer of 1976) AND there were  new episodes of seaQuest DSV and Murder, She Wrote (not sure, but I think it was the one with the 26-minute Tom Bosley-Angela Lansbury sex scene).

So maybe -- just maybe -- you glanced at the sports page in the newspaper (remember those?) that next morning and saw that Tim Wakefield pitched a complete-game shutout at home to beat the Cubs. If you were a casual baseball fan you were perhaps surprised to see Wakefield -- 8-1 with a 2.15 ERA and postseason star the year before -- just 5-11 with a 6.03 ERA after the win, and the Pirates -- winners of 95, 98 and 96 games the previous three years -- 72-83 for the season (the day before was a loss that clinched a losing season, haven't had a winning once since).

If you were a more serious follower of the national pastime (it still kind of was then, the NFL was breathing down but we hadn't yet quite reached the  stage where regular season football was beating playoff baseball) you looked at Wakefield and saw what was screamingly obvious: This was a guy who fluked a nice run the year before on a gimmick pitch and was being pounded back into reality. Happened a million times before.

(The Pirates released Wakefield in April 1995 after a 5-15, 5.84 season with Triple-A Buffalo in 1994, further cementing the idea that this was a guy destined to be a nice pregame "Where are they now? spot for the Pirates in 2002, with Wakefield as high school science teacher or owner of his own restaurant.)

Put it another way: If someone had told that Red Sox fan reading his paper on September 27, 1993 -- a magical time when we didn't need to preface that we are talking non-Pink Hat division -- that Tim Wakefield would wait 17 years to pitch another home game vs. the Cubs, but would do so at age 44 for the Sox (oh yeah, you'd have to explain interleague play, started in 1997) and pick up his 180th win with the team as the city's longest-tenured athlete I would have to think said Sox fan would not know the language we were speaking.

I'm aware that we should be getting the rocking chair and ready for Wakefield. I've written the "Is this the end for Wakefield?" column about four times in the last 18 months, forget about the endless ups and downs of Wakefield over his Red Sox tenure. But would it shock anyone if Daisuke spent another, I don't know, two months on the disabled list, or John Lackey came back, struggled some more and was shut down for an even longer stretch?

And this is why Wakefield is here. I enjoy having him around for institutional memory -- this is a guy who pitched in a Sox rotation with Roger Clemens, was here before, during and after the Red Sox careers of Nomar, Pedro and Manny, he's Zelig with a 72 MPH fastball -- but I suspect Theo and Tito keep him around for more practical reasons. And it's not to pitch seventh innings of 14-2 losses to Tampa. He's insurance, plain and simple.

We've seen it enough times to know, even at 44 years old, that it's not impossible to see Wakefield get another shot in the rotation and go on one of those streaks that he seems to put together every year, a five-week burst where he goes 7-1 with a 2.30 ERA.

Could happen. I wouldn't be stunned -- I really wouldn't -- if Wakefield was the American League Pitcher of the Month in June. I wouldn't be stunned if Wakefield had an ERA of 11.50 in June and was yanked from the rotation. More than any other pitcher, that's how it goes with Wakefield.

And that's a risk worth taking for the Sox over the next few weeks (and let's be honest, Wakefield hasn't been Lefty Grove -- who he barnstormed with in 1931 -- the last couple of years, but with his contract he's better value than Lackey, even with a 5.50 ERA). Why not? 

Plus, it doesn't hurt to keep Wakefield happy, if only for this reason: He will be the Game 1 starter when the Sox host the Cubs in the 2028 World Series.