Former big league knuckleballer Wilbur Wood died on Saturday at the age of 84.
Wood led the major leagues in games pitched twice and games started four times during the course of his 17-year MLB career, which included time with the Red Sox, Pirates and a 12-year stint with the White Sox.
Wood had died at a hospital in Burlington, Massachusetts, on Saturday, The New York Times reported.
In 1972, Wood set the record for most innings thrown by a pitcher since 1917, when he threw 376 ⅔ innings that season for the White Sox and made 49 starts that year – the most since 1908 – two marks that have not been matched since.
Wood, who was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had been a star player for Belmont High School growing up.
During his professional career, he was a three-time American League All-Star and recorded four 20-win seasons.
His career spanned from 1961 to 1978, and he finished with a 164-156 record.
Wood made his major league debut at the age of 19 in 1961 with the Red Sox.
“He was a real hot-shot pitcher,” Roland Hemond, the former Sox executive who then was a minor-league director for the Milwaukee Braves, told the Chicago Tribune.
“I first met Wilbur in 1960 when our scout Jeff Jones sent him to Milwaukee for a tryout right after he had graduated from high school. He was a fuzzy-faced, chubby little guy who didn’t throw very hard. I watched him throw batting practice but I couldn’t get very excited about him.
“After his workout, I brought him up to the press room in County Stadium with my wife, and we fed him hot dogs. We did discover he had a good appetite. He was such a likable little guy, it was tough to tell him he didn’t throw hard enough and we weren’t interested.”
Wood had become known for his knuckleball, which he had thrown from time to time early in his career, but he started working on it with Hoyt Wilhelm when Wood arrived in Chicago.
“I was lucky because when I came to the Sox, Hoyt Wilhelm was still with them — probably the greatest knuckleball pitcher of all,” Wood said, per the Tribune. “He told me if I was going to throw the knuckleball, I should junk the rest of my pitches. I wasn’t doing any good with them anyway, so I took his advice. I had nothing to lose.”
Following the end of his baseball career, he went on to work at a pharmaceutical company.
