Before There Was R A Dickey There Was Wilbur Wood

Wilbur Wood never looked like a pitcher destined to be remembered. That may be the most fitting place to begin. He did not arrive early, he did not overwhelm hitters with power, and he did not follow a straight path to greatness. Yet when Wood passed away at 84, baseball said goodbye to one of its most unlikely and extraordinary careers, built on reinvention, endurance, and a pitch that defied convention.

Before Mets fans marveled at R A Dickey bending time and logic with a knuckleball in Queens, Wilbur Wood had already proven that the pitch could do more than survive in modern baseball. It could dominate. It could endure. And in the right hands it could shoulder a workload that now feels impossible.

Wood was born in Cambridge Massachusetts, the son of a former semipro shortstop who introduced him to the knuckleball as a curiosity rather than a calling. As a teenager Wood was a conventional pitcher with a fastball and curve and he overwhelmed high school hitters while playing football and hockey with equal enthusiasm. The Boston Red Sox signed him in 1960, envisioning a local success story.

Instead Wood’s professional life became a test of patience. He bounced between the minors and majors with Boston and later Pittsburgh, good enough to be useful but never good enough to stay. Big league hitters timed his fastball and waited out his curve. He was promoted demoted released and re signed. By the mid 1960s his career had reached the familiar crossroads where baseball quietly begins to let go.

It was during this unsettled period that Wilbur Wood crossed paths with the Mets.

On June 3 1965 at Forbes Field, Wood entered the game in relief of Don Schwall with the Mets holding an 8 nothing lead. It was not a moment designed to shape legacies. It was simply an inning to get through. Wood did exactly that. Jim Hickman grounded out. Roy McMillan flew to right. Chris Cannizzaro followed with another fly ball to right. Three batters three outs and a clean introduction.

Wood returned for the sixth and worked around a pair of singles, inducing groundouts from Galen Cisco and Ed Kranepool before yielding another hit to Joe Christopher. He came back out for the seventh and retired Ron Swoboda, struck out Hickman, and coaxed another grounder from McMillan. Three scoreless innings. No runs allowed. No moment that lingered.

At the time it felt insignificant. In hindsight it was perfectly representative of where Wood stood in 1965. Useful. Unremarkable. Still searching.

That search finally found direction in Chicago when Wood encountered Hoyt Wilhelm. The Hall of Fame knuckleballer did not suggest Wood add the pitch. He told him to commit to it completely or walk away. No safety net. No fastball to lean on. The knuckleball would have to be his livelihood.

Wood listened.

The change was neither immediate nor elegant. Learning to live with a pitch that dances unpredictably tests both mechanics and ego. But Wood embraced the discomfort. He refined the pitch. He trusted it. He learned to let hitters defeat themselves. Slowly a reliever who could work often became a pitcher who could work endlessly.

The breakthrough came in 1971 almost by accident. An injury opened a rotation spot and Wood was handed the ball with modest expectations. What followed defied everything baseball thought it knew. Pitching on short rest Wood was sharper not weaker. The knuckleball did not tax his arm the way conventional pitching did. He threw complete games as if they were errands. He worked deep into seasons as if fatigue were optional.

That year Wood won 22 games, posted an earned run average under 2.00, and threw more than 330 innings. He was named an All Star and finished among the league leaders in nearly every meaningful category. What began as an experiment had become a revelation.

Then it escalated.

From 1972 through 1974 Wilbur Wood became the most durable pitcher of the modern era. He started 49 games in 1972 and threw nearly 377 innings, numbers that read like folklore now. He won 24 games that season and followed it by winning 24 more in 1973, a year in which he also lost 20, a statistical oddity that underscored just how often he took the ball. He once earned two wins in a single day, pitching the completion of a suspended game and then shutting out the opponent in the regularly scheduled contest that followed. He later started both ends of a doubleheader. No one has tried since.

The White Sox built their seasons around him. He was their Opening Day starter year after year not because he looked the part but because he was always there. He averaged nearly 350 innings over a four year span and often pitched on two days rest without complaint. Writers marveled at how ordinary he appeared on the mound, how little effort he seemed to expend, how violently the results contradicted the visuals.

Eventually reality intervened. A line drive shattered Wood’s kneecap in 1976, abruptly slowing a career that had operated outside conventional limits. He returned but was never quite the same. The innings caught up. The body insisted on payment.

Still the legacy was already secure.

Wilbur Wood did not merely reinvent himself. He expanded the definition of what was possible. He turned a pitch many viewed as a novelty into the foundation of a historically great run. He became an ace without looking like one, a workhorse without velocity, a star who arrived only after most had stopped watching.

For Mets fans who later watched R A Dickey captivate Citi Field with fluttering knuckleballs and quiet resilience, Wood’s story feels familiar. Different era. Different uniform. Same defiance of expectation.

Before the Mets had a knuckleball renaissance, Wilbur Wood had already shown the way.

Sometimes baseball does not reward the strongest arm or the fastest rise. Sometimes it rewards the pitcher who refuses to disappear.