Normally, I disregard column ideas from friends and readers, even when they’re both. However, comma…
“I expect to see a Wilbur Wood column next week,” texted one loyal reader.
Wilbur Wood, who died at 84 last Saturday, was a major-league pitcher. He became famous with the Chicago White Sox when – just like now – almost nobody did.
I grew up a ChiSox fan, which was well known to the friend who made the suggestion. I told him that on the fame meter of people surnamed “Wood”, Wilbur ranked only slightly higher than George (a hockey scout I’d once met) and nowhere near Natalie (a movie star I never met).
As you see, I changed my mind.
This forgotten name from baseball history deserves being remembered. As someone who saw him pitch before he was even on the Wood Wall of Fame, I accept that responsibility and I can confidently say nobody will see his kind again.
One reason is that he was a pure knuckleball pitcher who threw, almost without exclusion, the pitch that prompted catcher/comedian Bob Uecker to say the only way to catch a knuckleball was “wait until it stops rolling, then pick it up.”
Wood’s father, Wilbur Wood Sr., taught him to throw it in junior high but Junior didn’t really become a knuckleballer until he joined the White Sox during a season when I spent a week in Chicago watching them play every single day. The most memorable of his six relief appearances, now long forgotten, was his part in allowing seven ninth-inning runs that turned a shutout into a 7-3 loss.
That’s when he was studying for his knuckleball degree, taught by “Professor” Hoyt Wilhelm, revered as the pitch’s master until he threw his last one at 49 years old. Wood succeeded Wilhelm in Chicago’s bullpen before he became a starter…and made his name.
Baseball historians consider Wood to be arguably the best left-handed knuckleball pitcher of all time, and there have been no challengers. Going into this season, there are zero “knuckleball pitchers” with either hand, just a smattering of pitchers who occasionally throw it. The singular exception this century was R. A. Dickey, the only true knuckleballer to win the Cy Young Award, just before the New York Mets traded him to Toronto.
Wood won 20 games in four consecutive seasons. In one of them, he had 44 decisions, and nobody since then has even been close. In another, he pitched 376 and two-thirds innings, a modern-day record that still stands – the most last season was 207. One year, Wood pitched the last five innings of a suspended game, then went right back onto the mound and threw a four-hit shutout. Two months after that, he started both ends in a doubleheader. The year he won a career-high 22 games, Wood started 15 times on just two days rest and 11 of those were complete games. Last season’s major-league leader had two.
Using today’s WAR sabermetrics (Wins After Replacement), Wood’s first and best season as a starter was the fourth best in history behind Roger Clemens, Steve Carlton and Dwight Gooden.
Charley Lau, once the guru of pitching coaches, once said Wood had “as much God-given ability as any man I’ve ever met.”
Guess that’s why I changed my mind on the no-reader-suggestion rule.
