Knuckler by Tim Wakefield Read Free Book Online Page A

Wilhelm] to talk to. A lot of pitching coaches and managers, they don't know a lot about the knuckleball. It's not like they can talk to you about it like it's a curveball or a slider. They don't know that much about it. Johnny Sain [the team pitching coach who won 20 games in a season four times as a pitcher with the Boston Braves] was one of the best pitching coaches around. He came right out and said, 'I can't help you with the knuckleball.' Especially in the beginning, it really helped [having Wilhelm as an adviser] because I had someone to talk to when things were going wrong."
    In 1967, during his first season with the White Sox, and pitching largely as a relief pitcher, Wood appeared in 51 games and had by far his best major league season, going 4–2 with a 2.45 ERA and four saves. A year later, with Wilhelm still watching closely—Chicago had the most unusual potential to summon knuckleballers out of its bullpen from both the left
and
right sides—Wood pitched in a major league–leading 88 games while going 13–12 with a 1.87 ERA and 16 saves. Following that season, the White Sox lost the then-46-year-old Wilhelm to the Kansas City Royals via the major league expansion draft, though by then the student had learned enough from the teacher to have become equipped with his own diagnostics program.
    From 1968 to 1970, during a span covering three full major league seasons, nobody pitched in more major league games than Wilbur Wood—and the competition wasn't even close. While going 32–36 ("Basically, the game of baseball is a .500 game"), Wood made an impressive 241 appearances, 33 more than his next-closest peer. While posting a 2.50 ERA and amassing 52 saves, Wood pitched precisely 400⅓ innings—also the highest total in baseball among all relief pitchers. Wood had developed into such a force that, following the 1970 campaign, the White Sox did a very logical thing.
    They increased his workload.
    And they made him a starter.
    Over the next five seasons, from 1971 to 1975, Wood started 224 games, more than any pitcher in baseball, and won 106, more than any pitcher in the game except eventual Hall of Famer Jim "Catfish" Hunter. Of his 224 starts, an incredible 199 came on fewer than four days of rest. (The next-closest man on the list, power left-hander Mickey Lolich, made 140 starts on fewer than four days.) During those five seasons, Wood ranked among the major league leaders with a 3.08 ERA. He recalled regularly pitching two games a
week
—the first in a weekly Sunday doubleheader and then, on just two days of rest, another on the following Wednesday. For a salary that ended up in the range of $125,000 per season during the most productive years of his career, Wood essentially did the work of two modern pitchers, who might earn somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million—or more—
each.
    "I went through a period where I pitched on Sunday and Wednesday for about two and a half years," Wood recalled. "I was filling two spots because of the doubleheader. The team didn't have to find another starter," he explained, and at a time when three days of rest was customary for pitchers, "that kept everybody else on a four-day rotation."
    Indeed, for as much as Wood gave the White Sox, the benefit to the team was even greater. Because Wood was taking up so much of the workload as well as pitching on short rest, the White Sox could handle everyone else on the pitching staff with greater care and boost their productivity.
    Along the way, Wood's durability became the stuff of legend, particularly during a 1973 season in which he led the league with 359⅓ innings pitched, a total of 17⅓ innings
fewer
than the mind-numbing 376⅔ innings he pitched in 1972 and the highest total in baseball history since World War I. (Of the five highest single-season innings totals posted since 1919, Wood's 1972 and 1973 seasons rank as numbers 1 and 5.) During a doubleheader against the