Born 7/26/1923 Huntersville, North Carolina Debut April 1952 New York Giants Bats Right Throws Right Ht 6' Wt 195 Hoyt Wilhelm, who didn’t make it to the majors until he was almost 29 years old and then pitched until he was almost 49, is the most famous knuckleballer in baseball history. He also happens to be the first relief pitcher to make it into the Hall of Fame. Wilhelm was one of 11 children of an impoverished North Carolina tenant farmer, but he never had to sneak away from his chores to play baseball. His father could see that his son had talent, and encouraged the youngster to perfect his skills. Unlike most knuckleballers, who use the pitch only as a last resort, Wilhelm was always interested in the knuckler, wearing the fuzz off a tennis ball as a kid when he practiced getting the grip just right. “It takes no effort at all to pitch a knuckleball,” Wilhelm said in a 1954 interview. “No windup is necessary. It’s so simple that very little warm-up in the bullpen is required. That’s why I can pitch so often without being overworked. I learned the knuckler myself. Fooled around with it in high school. I used to read about Freddie Fitzsimmons and Dutch Leonard, but nobody showed me anything. I developed it myself.” Ben Brown, his coach at Cornelius High School, allowed him to use the trick pitch and according to Wilhelm, “He did a lot to instill confidence in me. When I pitched I didn’t throw it to the middle of the plate. I picked a zone and tried to throw the ball in there.” After graduating from high school Wilhelm signed with Mooresville in the Class D North Carolina State League. “They cut me,” Wilhelm said. “I went home, got a friend to catch me, kept me throwing the pitch. Two weeks later, they called me back.” Originally a starter, he went 10-3 with a 4.25 ERA before being drafted into the Army following the 1942 season. Missing the next three seasons, Wilhelm fought at the Battle of the Bulge and received a Purple Heart. He returned to Mooresville in 1946 and spent the next two seasons there, going 21-8 and 20-7. Wilhelm later speculated about why he didn’t escape the minors until 1952, “[the] only thing I can say is maybe [it was] because I was a knuckleball pitcher. Nobody thought too much of me.” At age 28 he finally became a major leaguer—and a reliever. Leo Durocher, the Giants manager, thought all knuckleballers should be relievers. “I really liked Durocher,” said Wilhelm decades afterward. “He was the guy who gave me my first chance to play in the big leagues.” But part of the credit for Wilhelm’s success in the bullpen goes to former knuckleballer Fitzsimmons, who was a Giants coach then. He suggested that Wilhelm stop throwing sidearm and adopt a three-quarter delivery. Wilhelm was 15-3 with 11 saves in 1952 and became the first rookie to lead the National League in ERA, with 2.43, and winning percentage, with .833. He pitched in a league-high 71 games, setting a since-broken rookie record, and he worked a whopping 159 1/3 innings. But perhaps the most remarkable event of his season came on April 23, the day he won his first game. In his first major league at bat he homered to the opposite field off Boston’s Dick Hoover. Wilhelm had 431 more at bats in his career and never hit another homer. In fact, his .088 career batting average is one of the worst ever among pitchers with at least 100 at bats. The only disappointment of Wilhelm’s first season came when the Rookie of the Year voting was announced. Wilhelm finished second to Brooklyn reliever Joe Black, who was 15-4 with 15 saves in 142 innings for the pennant-winning Dodgers. Of course Wilhelm’s fluttering deliveries made life difficult for his catchers. With Wilhelm pitching in the eighth inning on September 10, 1954, Ray Katt set a modern record with four passed balls. But the good came with the bad. In the 1954 World Series, Wilhelm did not allow a run in two appearances and retired the last five batters in Game 3 to earn a save as the Giants swept the Indians in four games. But after 1954 Wilhelm slumped. He didn’t save a single game in 1955 and his ERA ballooned to 3.83 in 1956. “Hoyt began to worry and try different things and the more he changed, the worse he got,” said Wes Westrum, the only Giants backstop who could really handle him. On February 26, 1957, the Giants traded Wilhelm to the Cardinals for utility man Whitey Lockman. “At first it shook me a little bit,” Wilhelm said. “Then I figured as long as I was in the big leagues it didn’t really matter, what the heck.” Considering what lay before him, that was an indispensable attitude to have. In September 1957 St. Louis sold him to Cleveland, where Manager Bobby Bragan gave him his first major league start on May 4, 1958. Wilhelm was ineffective and was released that August. He was 35, an age when baseball careers are usually ending. But Wilhelm was just beginning. The American League Orioles were his next stop. Paul Richards was their manager. “If you’ll look at Paul Richards’s record of rejuvenating older players, it was great,” said Wilhelm. “Paul Richards to my mind was one of the best pitching coaches around, the best I ever saw and he helped me over there.” Richards decided to use Wilhelm as both a starter and reliever. In Wilhelm’s third start for the Orioles, on Saturday, September 20, 1958, he no-hit the Yankees. He threw only 99 pitches—87 of them knucklers—as Baltimore defeated New York, 1-0, on catcher Gus Triandos’s homer. In 1959 Wilhelm won his first nine starts, but finished the season at just 15-11. Still, he led the league with a 2.19 ERA and became the first pitcher to have led both leagues in that category. By then Richards had designed a special 41-inch catcher’s mitt for Triandos to handle Wilhelm’s knuckleballs. But Triandos was traded after the 1962 season, and there was no catcher left who could even remotely handle Wilhelm. He was traded to the White Sox in January 1963 in a deal that brought shortstop Luis Aparicio to the Orioles. Wilhelm saved 21 games his first season in Chicago. In 1965, as Wilhelm was saving 20 games and pitching 144 innings as a 42-year-old, J. C. Martin was scrambling after 33 passed balls to set an American League record. “I remember once, when I was with the White Sox riding a bus in spring training, some rookie catcher said he’d catch me without a mask,” said Wilhelm. “Couple of days later, I was warming up to throw batting practice and he was catching me. After about three pitches, I had it warmed up pretty good. [I] threw one that landed in his eye, just like you’d placed it there. By the time I got to him, his eye was swollen shut. After that, he used the mask.” In October 1968 the Kansas City Royals selected Wilhelm in the expansion draft, but that December he was traded to California. In September 1969 he was waived to Atlanta, and with some clutch pitching down the stretch, helped the Braves to an NL West title. Wilhelm moved on to the Cubs in September 1970, and that November he was traded back to Atlanta. But the Braves barely used him and gave him his unconditional release on June 29, 1971. Convinced that he could still pitch, Wilhelm agreed to go to the Dodgers’ Class AAA affiliate in Spokane. He was four weeks shy of his forty-eighth birthday when he made it back to the majors, but he never won a game for Los Angeles. Wilhelm got his final release one month short of his forty-ninth birthday. In 1985 Wilhelm, whose 1,070 game appearances topped all other major league pitchers, was voted into the Hall of Fame by the Baseball Writers Association. “I guess what took Wilhelm so long to make it was because he wasn’t a friendly guy,” Detroit sportswriter Joe Falls wrote. “At least he wasn’t very accommodating to the writers. I tried to interview him just once, and he looked at me as if I were some sort of a creep. I never tried again.” © 1994 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.