Guess I'm getting to be an old guy now, or at least if feels that way at times like this.
Wilbur Wood was my favorite White Sox player as a kid, along with Dick Allen who sadly also passed away in 2020. Wood was a crafty knuckleballer with a rubber arm who averaged more than 40 starts and 336 innings pitched per season for the White Sox over a 5-year period from 1971-75. He once famously was a 20 game winner and a 20 game loser in the same season and almost did it a couple of other times.
I can still hear Harry Carey saying his name as he trotted out to the mound to start yet another game. "Hey, didn't he pitch just the other day?" he would joke. Wood once started both games of a double header in 1973 and lost both of them!! But he played for the White Sox and that's what they did.
I didn't realize until a couple of years a ago when I Googled him that he was from the Boston area and had a thick New Englander accent. By all accounts a good guy, just an every day ordinary modest guy who happened to play baseball at one point in his life. They didn't make a lot of money in those days, so he wasn't wealthy. Just gave a wealth of memories to sports minded kids like me.
Pictured is the Strat-O-Matic card from his best year, which was also the year that Dick Allen won and MVP in the American League. I was 10 and will never forget either of them. RIP Woody, my fellow chubby lefty who made me think anything was possible, even if I knew I'd never be a major leaguer. Hell, I wasn't even that good in Little League!
He was 84.