When Wood arrived at spring training with Chicago in 1967, manager Eddie Stanky immediately informed him he would be the ballclub's mop-up man. Wood realized he needed to make a change to prolong his career. Since high school, he had experimented with a knuckleball, and one of Chicago's relief pitchers was knuckleball specialist Hoyt Wilhelm, who would later be elected to the Hall of Fame. "I went to him right away and asked him if he would explain more to me about the knuckler," Wood said. Wilhelm showed the pitcher how to throw good knuckleballs consistently. "You either throw the knuckleball all of the time or not at all. It’s not an extra pitch," he said. Taking Wilhelm's advice, Wood's career took off, first as a relief pitcher, and then as a starting pitcher. With the White Sox, Wood became well known as a durable workhorse, and one of the last pitchers to consistently throw well over 300 innings in a season.