Remembering Wilbur Wood: The Knuckleballer Who Carried the Load Like No One Else
In a sport built on power arms and wipeout sliders, Wilbur Wood stood out by floating something entirely different to the plate - a pitch that danced, dipped, and defied convention. The knuckleball.
It wasn’t flashy, and it didn’t light up radar guns. But in Wood’s hands, it became a weapon that allowed him to do something modern pitchers can hardly imagine: take the ball every few days and never flinch.
Wood passed away Saturday at the age of 84 in Burlington, Massachusetts. His wife, Janet, confirmed his death. And while baseball has seen its fair share of workhorses, it’s hard to argue we’ll ever see another quite like him.
From 1971 to 1975, Wood was a one-man innings-eating machine for the Chicago White Sox. He averaged 336 innings and nearly 45 starts per year - numbers that feel almost mythological in today’s game.
In 1972, he threw a staggering 376 2/3 innings, the most in a single season since Grover Cleveland Alexander all the way back in 1917. To put that into perspective, no pitcher has come within 30 innings of that total since, and last season, only three pitchers even hit the 200-inning mark.
There are no full-time knuckleballers left in the majors. But there was a time when Wood and his fluttering pitch were the backbone of a rotation.
“Between the two of us, we started half our games,” Hall of Famer Jim Kaat recalled, speaking about their time together on the White Sox in 1974 and 1975. “With that knuckleball, why, he could pitch every second or third day if they needed him to.
He really didn’t have a lengthy career, but for that short period of time, he was very, very dependable. A good guy and a great teammate.”
Wood’s path to that remarkable stretch wasn’t linear. He debuted with the Boston Red Sox at just 19 years old in 1961, a local kid with promise.
But the team didn’t use him much, and he was sold to the Pirates three years later. After bouncing between the majors and minors, he landed with the White Sox - and that’s when everything changed.
“I came up as a fastball/curveball pitcher,” Wood said in a 2016 interview. “I had a knuckleball, but I never used it as a pitch to speak of until (my) career wasn’t going too far.”
The fastball lacked bite. The curveball was solid, but predictable.
So Wood pivoted. He leaned into the knuckleball - a pitch his father had once taught him as a no-spin palmball when he was a kid - and it saved his career.
With the help of legendary knuckleballer Hoyt Wilhelm, who was still baffling hitters into his 40s, Wood refined the pitch. Wilhelm advised him to throw it exclusively and helped him develop the stiff wrist needed to minimize spin.
It worked. After four years as a tireless reliever - including three seasons leading the American League in appearances - Wood moved into the rotation in 1971.
He didn’t just survive. He thrived.
He became an All-Star. He became a curiosity.
And he became a workhorse in an era filled with them - guys like Steve Carlton, Gaylord Perry, and Phil Niekro were all logging 300-inning seasons. But even among that group, Wood stood apart.
On July 20, 1973, at Yankee Stadium, he did something that feels almost unthinkable now: he started both games of a doubleheader. He lost both, but the sheer durability to even attempt such a feat speaks volumes.
“You’d get stiff and sore like everyone else,” Wood said. “But not using that added pressure with the slider or a lot of breaking balls, that saved a lot of wear and tear on your arm.”
There was a simplicity to his mechanics - a natural, low-stress motion that allowed him to take the ball again and again. And while the pitch itself wasn’t as dramatic as Wilhelm’s, it was effective. Very effective.
From 1971 through 1974, Wood posted four straight 20-win seasons. Twice in that span, he racked up more than 10 Wins Above Replacement - a threshold only four other pitchers have hit multiple times in the division-play era: Steve Carlton, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, and Tom Seaver. That’s elite company.
But Wood wasn’t just a stat line. He was memorable.
The kind of player who made fans smile just watching him. In 1977, writer Roger Angell described him as resembling “a left-handed accountant or pastry chef on a Sunday outing,” a nod to Wood’s roundish build and unassuming presence on the mound.
But that modest exterior masked a relentless competitor.
Then came the moment that changed everything.
In May 1976, a line drive off the bat of Detroit’s Ron LeFlore struck Wood in the kneecap. It shattered.
Just like that, his season was over. And so, effectively, was his run as one of the game’s most reliable arms.
Before the injury, Wood had a 3.05 ERA as a starter. After it, that number ballooned to 5.11 over his final two seasons. He admitted to pitching differently, trying to jam hitters inside, afraid they’d drive another one right back at him.
He threw his final pitch in 1978 at age 36. That’s the age when other knuckleballers - Wilhelm, Niekro, Charlie Hough - were just getting started on their second acts. Wood, instead, stepped away from baseball entirely and moved into the pharmaceutical business in Massachusetts.
He finished with a 164-158 record and a 3.24 ERA. But the numbers only tell part of the story. For a few glorious seasons, Wood was the guy who never said no to the ball, who gave his team a chance every time out, and who did it all with a pitch that most had written off as a novelty.
“I probably would have got several more years in had I not got whacked in the knee,” he once said. “But I was fortunate to get what I got.”
And what he got - and gave - was something rare: a stretch of pitching durability and excellence that feels almost impossible today. Wilbur Wood didn’t just throw the knuckleball. He lived it.