Wilbur Wood: Life of a knuckleballer (1941-2026)

Wednesday 1/28/26

Wilbur Wood, who was born in Cambridge, MA and attended Belmont High School, died recently. He was a fascinating player, the kind that used to be somewhat the norm, but that you no longer see in sports.

Things in our society, at every level of society, now trend to blandness. There are fewer quirks, fewer people who stand out, less individuality, and this is how it works everywhere in in a world that keeps getting worse, including in sports.

Take a look around you. A literal look. Remember that cool neighborhood with its own flavor? It's gone now, isn't it? It's just another soulless series of blocks. With the same bland stores, the same bland look, the same gentrification. That's how it works now in everything, and perhaps most of all with people.

And that's one reason why we're so unhappy, unfilled, narcissistic, disconnected, uninteresting. You can scarcely even find anyone who talks (or writes) any differently from anyone else. People just draw from the same set of verbal memes/modules. They lack the ability to say anything in their own words, let alone clearly, let alone well. And so it goes with thinking, too.

Then everything just becomes, as we've seen, about other things, and very rarely--to the point of nearly never--what a person does and who they truly are. Merit, in another word.

The pitcher who was Wilbur Wood (whose quaint name sounded like it could have belonged to a character in Our Town) was always compelling, though. He was a knuckleballer (and a southpaw knuckleballer, no less), and knuckleballers are never boring. Oft-misunderstood, sure, frequently hard to evaluate, and they've always made baseball people leery for various reasons, but they are arresting specimens.

He debuted with the Red Sox in 1961 as a nineteen-year-old. He started a single game, and relieved in five others. Then he appears in just one game the next season. During 1963, the Red Sox moved him to Pirates. Wood appeared in twenty-five games, starting eleven. So he's not pitching much at all, and this continues really up until 1968, when all of a sudden, Wood appears in eighty-games (with two starts) for the Chicago White Sox, the team that is going to ride him hard going forward, posting a 1.87 ERA.

It's a neat but tricky concept, the knuckleballer as relief pitcher. For my money, the best--or the most valuable, anyway--reliever of all-time was a knuckleballer: Hoyt Wilhelm (who also won an ERA title as a starter, intriguingly enough). Arm fatigue isn't an issue usually. You can run your guy out again and again. But you also had the risk of wild pitches and passed balls. Plus, you never knew when the knuckle ball was going to knuckle or if it might flatten out and thus be launched into the outfield bleechers. Well, with some guys were able to keep that flattening in check better than others, and Wood was one of them.

He led the league in games from 1968-1970, with his appearances coming entirely out of the bullpen in 1969 and 1970.

But it's then in 1971 when Wood is in his age twenty-nine season, that the White Sox decide to make him a full-time starter. And boy did they ever, because Wood went out and threw 334 innings in going 22-13 with a 1.91 ERA and...ready for this?...a WAR of 11.7.

Damn. That's riding the horse!

The next year, Wood goes 24-17 with a 2.51 ERA over 376.2 innings. He throws 320.1 innings the next year in winning twenty games again, then 291.1 the year after, with his career coming to a close in 1978 at the age of thirty-six. He placed in the top five for the Cy Young three times, accumulating 52.1 WAR for his career.

Pretty neat, right? Sometimes you'll see someone beat the drum for Wood as a Hall of Famer. His case is a bit like Mickey Lolich's (whose career almost covered the exact same years), I suppose, but not as strong. Lolich reached 200 wins, he had the postseason heroics, whereas Wood, unfortunately, never had a chance to pitch in the postseason. Then again, Wood actually had a higher WAR total than Lolich. (A note about WAR and why it's such a flawed, and commonly misleading stat: It over-rewards walks for batters and innings pitched for starters. It's very hard to have a high WAR as a hitter if you don't walk a fair amount. You'll see all these pitchers, too, in the 1970s with big WAR totals that have much to do with the copious amounts of innings they ate.)

But if you don't know Wilbur Wood, you don't know baseball history. You need to know guys like this, because they're a huge part of that history. Essential to it. And the very spirit of baseball, a sport which used to be full of varied approaches, usages, styles, roles, arcs. That was good for the sport, good for the players, good for the fans, because that's just good for life and good for all of us.