September 10, 1964: At 42, Wilhelm just warming up

Hoyt Wilhelm was the first to pitch in 1,000 major-league games, retiring having appeared in 1,070. He’s now sixth in games pitched, passed by, in order, Jesse Orosco, Mike Stanton, John Franco, Mariano Rivera and Dennis Eckersley. Though Wilhelm pitched 1,018 of those games as a reliever, his 52 starts hint he would have been just as much a Hall of Famer had he made a career of it. In his ninth start, for the Orioles in 1958, he no-hit the Yankees, 1-0. With two outs in the ninth, the Yankees’ Hank Bauer tried to bunt his way on but fouled it off. From baseballhall.org: “‘If he’s going to get a no-hitter, let him earn it,’ Bauer said to the Chicago Tribune. ‘I was trying to get a hit. That’s baseball. I’m sorry it rolled foul.’” No word on what Curt Schilling thought of Bauer’s attempted bunt. Foiled in his attempt to bunt, Bauer popped to second for the final out. From baseballhall.org: “’It was the cleanest no-hitter I’ve seen in a long while,’ Yankees manager Casey Stengel said to UPI. ‘No fluke bounces, no scoring decisions which helped him. He earned it.’” Wilhelm made one more start in 1958, throwing nine innings against the Yankees again, allowing six hits and six walks and fanning 10. The Orioles won, 3-2, in 12. Buoyed by Wilhelm’s starts against the ’58 world champions, the Orioles used him primarily as a starter in 1959. Wilhelm started 27 times in 32 appearances and was as good as he ever was out of the bullpen. He won 15 games and completed 13, had an MLB-best 2.19 ERA and a .606 OPS against. Early Wynn (22-10, 3.17) won 22 games and the Cy Young Award, but Wilhelm was probably better, and also better than Sam Jones (21-15, 2.83) and Bob Shaw, (18-6, 2.69), the only other players to get votes. Wilhelm won his first nine decisions of 1959, but over the 11 losses in the last three-and-a-half months, the Orioles scored 16 runs in the nine games Wilhelm started. He got no decisions in a game he started against the White Sox and threw 10 two-hit shutout innings, when he three-hit the Yankees over seven innings and when he allowed the Indians one earned run over six innings. With better luck, Wilhelm could have won 20 games, and the Cy Young.

Editor’s note: This is one in a series of articles retelling the 1964 season. Stay for the end.

Jim Bouton once said, “You need the fingers of a safecracker and the mind of a Zen Buddhist to throw (the knuckleball),” which makes you wonder what other careers Hoyt Wilhelm, who threw it better than anyone, might have succeeded at.

It’s hard to imagine any as successful as major league pitcher. Wilhelm gripped the baseball with the fingers of a safecracker, looked in at the batter with the mind of a Zen Buddhist and threw primarily the knuckleball for a career that spanned 30 years and ended days shy of his 50th birthday.

Who knew that on this night in 1964, when Wilhelm, at age 42, threw two shutout innings in relief of Joel Horlen, his career had eight more seasons to go.

The White Sox’s 2-1, 10-inning victory over Minnesota was Wilhelm’s 11th of the season and the White Sox’s 85th — keeping them a game behind the first-place Orioles and a half-game ahead of the third-place Yankees.

Wilhelm enterted a 1-1 tie in the ninth inning, and retired the most dangerous part of the Twins lineup — Tony Oliva, Harmon Killebrew and Jimmie Hall, who combined for 106 home runs in 1964 — in order. When shortstop Ron Hansen hit his 17th home run in the top of the 10th, the White Sox led, 2-1, and Wilhelm got a double-play grounder from Earl Battey after a one-out walk to finish it.

The White Sox fell a game short in 1964, and Wilhelm never returned to the World Series he pitched in in his third season with the New York Giants a decade earlier.

That was due to no shortcoming of Wilhelm’s, who had one of the most remarkable careers in major league history. In the 10-and-a-half seasons after Wilhelm turned 40 on July 26, 1962, he won 54 games, saved 133, pitched 782.2 innings, fanned 712 batters and had a 2.46 ERA. That’s a pretty good career for a lot of pitchers, and Wilhelm did it from ages 40-49 — when most pitchers started selling insurance.

(There are some discrepancies in the numbers, because saves weren’t an official statistic until 1969 and because after Wilhelm died in 2002, according to his bio at sabr.org, his death certificate revealed he was a year older than the age he had used while pitching. The numbers above, if there are no errors for math, are from his stats at baseball-reference.com)

“He’s building a team for the future,” Steve Hovely told Bouton when the two Pilots discussed the latter’s 1969 trade to the Astros, “and how long can a knuckleball pitcher last?”

Wilhelm was 47 when Hovely asked, putting up a 2.19 ERA and saving 14 games. It was Wilhelm being traded by the Angels to the Atlanta Braves (for outfielder Mickey Rivers of future Yankee fame) in September that helped the latter win the NL West. Wilhelm pitched in eight games in 1969’s final month for Atlanta, winning two, saving four and putting up an 0.73 ERA in 12.1 innings.

Wilhelm was ineligible, having been acquired after September 1, for the first National League Championship Series, which not coincidentally, the Braves lost in three straight games to the Miracle Mets.

Wilhelm was still effective the next year, putting up a 3.40 ERA and saving 13 games as he turned 48 in midseason. His last two seasons were limited to 45.1 innings, mostly for the Dodgers, but he still saved four games.

Wilhelm began pitching at age 19 in the minors in 1942, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. He was still at it 30 years and five presidents later.

Wilhelm missed three seasons during World War II, when he served in the army. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge and received the Purple Heart, and according to baseballhall.org, Wilhelm was wounded in his pitching hand and his back, and pitched “his entire career with that piece of metal still lodged in his back.”

The war was one reason, and the knuckleball may have been another, Wilhelm was old for a rookie when he made his debut — age 29, and three months shy of 30 — in 1952 for the Giants. He was atypical, and made his first 363 appearances as a reliever, though he pitched frequently enough (159.1 innings) to lead the NL in ERA (2.43) as a rookie.

Wilhelm was second in the Rookie of the Year voting and fourth in MVP, behind Dodgers pitcher Joe Black (who had a 2.15 ERA, but not enough innings to qualify to be the league leader) in both votes. Black, who like Wilhelm was old for a rookie at age 28, pitched his last major league game in 1957, 15 years before Wilhelm was done. Wilhelm hadn’t even entered the starting pitching phase of his career.

That happened after the Cardinals waived him in 1957, not so much because of his 4.25 ERA, but according to Wilhelm’s bio at sabr.org, because nobody could catch his knuckleball. Not to mention that Wilhelm was 35 and the Cardinals probably wondered how much longer could he go on?

The Indians claimed Wilhelm, and tinkered with making him a starter. He was successful in 32 games and 6 starts, as a 2.49 ERA would attest, but he was 36 and the Indians waived him, too. How much longer could he go on?

If they only knew Wilhelm was just getting started. The Orioles claimed him and committed to Wilhelm the starter. He threw a no-hitter at the end of 1958 against the Yankees, and the next year as he turned 37, he excelled as a mostly full-time starter, too. Wilhelm won 15 games in 1959, and led the AL in ERA as he had the NL in 1952, at 2.19.

But the Orioles had abundant young starters. Steve Barber, Milt Pappas, Jack Fisher, Chuck Estrada and Jerry Walker, all 22 or younger, started 117 of the Orioles’ 154 games in 1960, and it was back to the bullpen for Wilhelm, who won 11 games, saved seven and made 11 starts, completing three. He was 38. How much longer could he go on?

He had ERAs of 2.20 and 1.94 in 1961 and 1962, saved 33 games and won 16 as he turned 40. The Orioles traded him to the White Sox in a five-player deal that brought shortstop Luis Aparicio. How much longer, etc., etc.?

It was with the White Sox that Wilhelm had his best years. His ERAs, from 1963-68, were 2.64, 1.99, 1.81, 1.66, 1.31 and 1.73. When MLB lowered the mound to encourage offense after 1968, Wilhelm’s ERA rose. Now with the Angels, who traded him to the Braves, it spiked at 2.19 as he turned 47.

For his last five seasons with the White Sox, starting 1964 at age 41 and finishing 1968 at age 46, Wilhelm’s ERA was 1.73. He pitched 539.1 innings, or almost 108 per season, all in relief. He saved 78 games and won 36 and the White Sox almost won pennants in 1964 and 1967.

Wilhelm was so good he roused others to try the knuckleball. If pitchers couldn’t throw 93, they might have the fingers of a safecracker and the mind of a Zen Buddhist. And the knuckleball offered a job benefit hard throwers didn’t have — it had longevity, too.

The ’60s and ’70s were as much of a golden era as knuckleballers ever had. Phil Niekro won 318 games, brother Joe 221. Wilbur Wood won 20 games four years in a row, even one year when he lost 20. Eddie Fisher gave the White Sox a second knuckleball option in the bullpen. Charlie Hough won 216 games. Bob Purkey won 129 games. Jim Bouton learned to throw one and wrote a famous book about it.

According to a 2019 Washington Post story, the knuckleball’s “peak came in the 1970 season, when seven major league practitioners of the floating, fluttering, slow ball combined to earn 47 wins and 44 saves.”

With the retirement of R.A. Dickey and Steven Wright, the knuckleball is largely absent from MLB today.

Sometimes when the old fans and ex-players grouse that things were better back in their days, they’re not always wrong.

• Phillies 5, Cardinals 1: Chris Short pitched a six-hitter and hit a two-run triple in a five-run second inning as the Phillies rebounded from an extra-inning loss to build their lead back to six games over the Cardinals, Reds and Giants, all tied for second. Short allowed an early run in the second on Bill White’s RBI double but no more with runners on second and third and none out. In the bottom half of the inning, errors by the left side of the Cardinals infield — first third baseman Ken Boyer and then shortstop Dick Groat — fueled the Phillies’ five-run rally. Short’s triple and Johnny Callison’s 26th homer were the big hits. Short took it from there, fanning Bob Uecker with two on and two out in the fourth and allowing just a Carl Warwick pinch-single over the final five innings. He fanned 12 and earned his 16th win.