Wilbur Wood, a knuckleball pitcher who won 20 games for four consecutive seasons as the workhorse of the Chicago White Sox staff during the 1970s, died on Jan. 17. He was 84.
Wood spent 17 seasons in the majors from 1961 to 1978, including 12 seasons in Chicago, four with the Boston Red Sox and two with the Pittsburgh Pirates.
The three-time American League All-Star had a 164-156 career record. The left-hander completed 114 games and had 24 shutouts. Originally a reliever, Wood saved 57 games.
Wood’s All-Star selections came during a span in 1971 to 1974, when he won at least 20 games. He won 22 games in 1971, then had back-to-back 24-win seasons; he won 20 games in 1974.
The White Sox send our condolences to the family, friends and fans of 3x All-Star Wilbur Wood, who has passed away at the age of 84.
— Chicago White Sox (@whitesox) January 19, 2026
Wood appeared in 578 games (286 starts) over 12 seasons with the White Sox from 1967-1978. pic.twitter.com/cFU4IZlohI
Wood started 224 games during those four years and led the league in starts four times (1972-1975). He finished third in the A.L. Cy Young Award race in 1971 and was second in 1972.
Innings pitched were Wood’s forte, as he hurled more than 300 innings for four consecutive seasons (1971-74) and tossed 291 innings in 1975.
Born on Oct. 22, 1941, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Wood was a pitcher for the Belmont High School team to back-to-back state championships in 1959 and 1960.
“He was a real hot-shot pitcher,” the late Roland Hemond told the Chicago Tribune, recalling his days as a minor-league director for the Milwaukee Braves in the 1960s. “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 made his major-league debut in 1961 with the Red Sox when he was 19. He earned brief promotions to Boston in each season through 1964 before being traded to the Pirates.
He would be traded to the White Sox on Oct. 12, 1966, and would save 57 games as a reliever before he was converted to a starter in 1971.
“I was lucky because when I came to the Sox, Hoyt Wilhelm was still with them — probably the greatest knuckleball pitcher of all,” Wood told 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.”
In 1973, Wood started both games of a scheduled doubleheader against the New York Yankees in New York, the first pitcher to do so since 1918. He was the losing pitcher in both games.
In a 2005 interview with the Tribune, Wood scoffed at the idea of pitch counts and “quality starts.”
“When I see guys come out after five or six innings and hear someone say, ‘He had a hell of a game and gave it all he had,’ I get a little tired of that,” Wood said. “When I played, pitchers who went five and six innings were afraid of getting cut at the end of the year.”
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