Image credit: Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Translated by Marco Gámez
It is the spring of 1972; You can tell because there are men in the background, wearing high-waisted red pants. Wilbur Wood he is frozen in action, despite containing the least potential energy of any man ever. The expected iconography is that of the pitcher, after the delivery, with his glove raised, ready to defend his position. Instead, his left arm, encased in a crumpled warm-up jacket beneath his uniform, hangs limply from his shoulder. His cheeks are swollen, but it’s impossible to tell if it’s from the tobacco or the debauchery of the night before. His eyes are tired and bored at the same time, a level of sun-marked tiredness that is only possible in an older generation of baseball players, the kind who spent their childhood scrubbing cast iron ladles, smoking entire packs of cigarettes at a time. journal, or both. This is not a man who is playing a child’s game. This is a man who is working and would prefer to be away from work.
Wood played and pitched as if he came from the 19th century. A baby, with a bonus, who reached the Majors as a teenager and was never able to establish himself with his hometown Red Sox, or later with the Pirates. It wasn’t until a trade with the White Sox and together with his greatest mentor and fire extinguisher Hoyt Wilhelmthat Wilbur Wood became Wilbur Wood. The young man had practiced the knuckle throw for years, so Wilhelm sat down with him and helped him with some of his most important points: an exaggerated movement, to give more drop to the throw and to lock the wrist in a quick thrust, a follow-through that prevented any spin that could make the ball spin. For two years, Wood teamed with Wilhelm to provide the slowest and one of the most effective relief tandem in baseball. When the Hall of Famer left, Wood took over as a firefighter, saving 52 games from 1968-70.
The knuckleball has always carried not only a mystique, but also a sense of brotherhood. Unlike triple-digit speed cutters and flying saucer sweepers, the product of genetic rewards and endless training, the knuckleball seems like something anyone should be able to do. And when it becomes obvious that it’s not something everyone can do, inclusivity is replaced by an invisible exclusivity: that these men gifted with this talent are different, but in a way that cannot be characterized or predicted.
We have come to accept the death of the knuckleball, its spirit, without really understanding why it is dying. It’s a sense of lost upward mobility, the fading idea that we, too, might have something hidden within us, within arm’s reach. Our celebrities and our athletes are no longer children of merchants, but millionaires. The amount of time and money it takes to be special is so great that it is already too late for many of us, and even for our children; You have to look forward to future generations to see opportunities.
Even in Wood’s time, it was often too late. In 2019, Mark Liptak interviewed Woodwho explained what he said to so many pitchers who approached him in their moments of trouble:
Look, if you’re trying to learn that delivery because you’ve had an injury, it’s too late. When I was still active I used to get a lot of calls from pitchers who got hurt and asked me about how to pitch it. The knuckle is not something you learn overnight. I threw it away for years, ever since I was in high school. It takes a long time to get used to it. What major league organization is going to give a pitcher three or four years to master that type of delivery?
The knuckleball is not a type of pitch for someone who is experimenting. As Wilhelm told Wood in 1966, when the young Wood was struggling to gain confidence with throwing, he either threw it all the time or didn’t throw it at all. It was necessary to specialize, but that specialization was not like that which characterizes modern training. It is not about demanding a fraction more, a bit extra. You have to isolate yourself from all other futures, long before you can know what they have in store for you and decide on this one. Nowadays you can’t always expect a 25-year-old to decide on a profession.
This is why the knuckleball is so romantic: it is always seen as a last resort, all chips in, ignoring the fact that the real successful knuckleballers had this escape plan mapped out well in advance. For Wood, after five failed seasons in the Major Leagues, it was the only option and the correct one. He was, in those invisible italics, a knuckleballer. But even among them he was special. He threw slower than the brothers Niekro and Hough and even the forty-year-old Wilhelm. He threw it to get strikes; His 2.4 walks per nine innings was the best average of any modern butterfly flyer. He needed fewer throws and could throw more. And it had, locked in that same code, a particular resilience that made it not only great, but unique.
Occasionally a player shocks baseball. They show some talent, reaching incredible numbers like a solar eclipse or a rain of frogs. They disorient, they bother. Sometimes these outbursts are simple and direct, like the record-breaking home run run in 1998 or the destruction wrought by Ohtani thanks to the unattainable 50/50 season. Sometimes it’s more subtle: Four times, a pitcher has posted an above-average ERA after age 45; Wilhelm initialed three of these records and Satchel Paige the fourth Wood’s superpower was even more imperceptible than that. In 1971, a spring injury (and Wood’s resistance, which prevented him from being traded) moved him to the starting rotation. Wood said he preferred to be a reliever; He liked to come to the stadium believing he could pitch in every game. He also did everything he could to succeed as a starter.
Over the next five seasons, he averaged 45 starts and 336 innings a year. He won 106 games (only 12 active starters have more than that number in their careers) and pitched more innings than Jacob deGrom in his 11 seasons in the Major Leagues. He accumulated more rWAR (39.1) than Fernando Valenzuela, Jake Peavy o Catfish Hunter in their lives. Just being there and throwing strike after strike, every four days and sometimes every three if the situation called for it.
They are ridiculous numbers, numbers from the dead-ball era, to such an extent that it is easy to dismiss them as some kind of anachronism, teleported to the present day. There is no video of him pitching online, and if there was, it would have been destroyed. He doesn’t fit into baseball. He was the last pitcher to work 345 innings in a season, to start 45 games, to start both games of a doubleheader. He was the last of his kind, in the sense that he was the only one of his kind.
If he had enjoyed the smooth path of the aging knuckleball pitcher, he would probably be in the Hall of Fame today, the same way Wilhelm got there. But as soon as he turned into Wilbur Wood, he stopped again. He took a bounce on his knee and fractured it; Weeks before the end of the season, he slipped on a patch of wet grass and broke it again. When he returned to action the following year, he admitted that he was not himself. He continued to prepare for the next hard uncatchable hit, lifting the glove too quickly and releasing it a moment too soon. His knuckleball suffered and, before long, it was all over. He was one of the best pitchers in the Major Leagues for nine years, four of them in relief. It didn’t last long enough to dive into the stories.
Thank you for reading
This is a free article. If you enjoyed it, consider subscribing to Baseball Prospectus. Subscriptions support ongoing public baseball research and analysis in an increasingly proprietary environment.
Subscribe now