The Winner Takes it All

Let’s start this look at pitcher wins — yes, pitcher wins — with a year: 1949. Think about that year and how long ago it was. We’ll come back to it.

Pitcher wins! Most of the time, when we talk about pitcher wins here, we talk about how pointless a statistic it is. Wins were always a flawed stat — it always felt silly to give full credit for a win to the pitcher and none to the defense or the offense or whatever — but pitcher wins came to be in a time when starters almost always threw complete games and also when they batted in the lineup. It made some sense then. The starting pitcher was, by far, the most important player entering every game.

Wins make almost no sense now. Starting pitchers don’t hit (except Shohei). Starting pitchers don’t last (except nobody — though Logan Webb is trying his best). Last year, only 59% of all wins even went to starting pitchers. That’s more than 1,000 wins that were doled out to whatever reliever happened to be in the game at the right moment.

To give you an idea of how much this has changed, you don’t have to go back to Koufax and Gibson and Spahn and Mathewson. You can just go back 20 or so years. In 2005, starters won more than 71% of the total games. We really have seen a massive revolution in baseball … and it’s a revolution nobody asked for.

But we’re not here today to gripe about wins because, in the wake of the crummy news that Gerrit Cole is having Tommy John surgery, there’s something else to say about wins.

They’re just so darned easy and satisfying to count.

Remember that year: 1949. We’re getting to it … but first, let’s talk about 300-game winners. Nobody I know in or around the game thinks there will ever be another 300-game winner (even as Justin Verlander valiantly keeps trying).

Three-hundred-game winners as a concept really came to be in my lifetime. If there was a JoeBlogs in 1982 — my 15-year-old self was writing them in pencil when he should have been paying attention in geometry — this definitely would have been the trivia question:

Name the ONLY post-Deadball pitcher to win more than 300 games.

It’s a bit of a trick question, but it’s 100% true: When the 1982 baseball season started, there was only one pitcher who hit every mark. My fellow old-timers know it: The answer was Warren Spahn with his numerically pleasing 363 career victories. The reason it’s a trick question is that there were two other post-Deadball 300-game winners: Lefty Grove and Early Wynn. But they each won EXACTLY 300 games.

“More than” is doing all the work in that question.

That year, 1982, was when 300 wins became a thing … again, if you’re my age, you will vivdly remember this Sports Illustrated cover:

Gaylord Perry was the first of his generation to get to the magic number. How old would you say Gaylord looks in this photo? Sixty? Sixty-five? Pitchers aged differently in those days, particularly spitball-throwing pitchers. One other thing to say about this is that I’m pretty sure Perry was the first Seattle Mariners player to grace the cover of SI, and I’m not sure another one did until Junior came along. Mariners fans, feel free to correct me. I don’t think Julio Cruz or Alvin Davis ever made it.

Steve Carlton was next, the very next year:

Carlton, of course, was famous for not talking to the press. This cover suggests he talked to Sports Illustrated exclusively — he did not. Not only did Carlton not talk, neither did his father, Joseph T. Carlton. When approached for an interview, Joe politely but flatly declined. “Like father, like son,” he said. “End of conversation.”

Now this 300-game winner thing was happening so often that it didn’t merit stopping the presses. In 1985, Tom Seaver won his 300th game on the same day that Rod Carew got his 3,000th hit … and neither one of them made the Sports Illustrated cover. Instead, SI put Tony Dorsett on the cover with the headline “Cowboy in Trouble.” That might have been the week that football surpassed baseball in the American consciousness.

Later that same year, Phil Niekro won his 300th — throwing just two knuckleballs along the way. He did not make the SI cover. Neither did Don Sutton when he won his 300th the next year. Nolan Ryan won his 300th in 1990. Even he didn’t get the cover (though he did get the baseball preview cover in 1991).

Anyway, that’s SIX pitchers winning No. 300 in less than a decade. Then in the 2000s, we got another flood — Clemens in 2003, Maddux in 2003, Glavine in 2007, Big Unit in 2009.

The generation after those guys was filled with pitchers who, in another era, probably would have won 300 games. That math to 300 is pretty simple. To get there, you can:

• Win 25 games 12 times.

• Win 23 games 13 times (plus 1)

• Win 20 games 15 times

• Win 15 games 20 times

You would want some combination of the above … but the generation after Maddux, Unit and the rest grew up in a time where winning 25 games was pretty much impossible, winning 23 games was next to impossible, and winning 20 games would grow increasingly harder.

Here is a little chart of how many pitchers in each decade won 23 games in a season:

• 1960s: 24 pitchers won 23 games or more

• 1970s: 21 pitchers won 23 games or more

• 1980s: 10 pitchers won 23 games or more

• 1990s: 3 pitchers won 23 games or more

• 2000s: 3 pitchers won 23 games or more

• 2010s: 1 pitcher won 23 games or more

• 2020s: 0 pitchers won 23 games or more

CC Sabathia made a spirited run at 300 — he had 176 wins through his age 30 season, more than every single 300-game winner since Deadball. But he won just 75 more, and while the meme he posted after the Gerrit Cole news broke is fun, he’s obviously not coming back and he will go into Cooperstown this July, 49 wins shy of 300.

Verlander, as mentioned, is still trying, now with the Giants, but he’s 38 wins shy and he just turned 42 and, sure, I’d love it, we’d all love it, but the odds against him getting those 38 wins are pretty astronomical.

As for the rest, well, Zack Greinke, King Félix Hernández, Tim Lincecum, these guys never even won 20 in a season. Clayton Kershaw hasn’t made 30 starts in a season since he was 27 years old. Max Scherzer has been a bulldog, but the arc of his career just never quite lined up with a run at 300 wins.

But enough about the lost dream of 300-game winners.

I’m not 100% sure we will ever see another two-hundred-game winner.

OK, finally, let’s talk about that year: 1949. That’s the last season when there was not an active 200-game winner in baseball. Two-hundred-game winner Bobo Newsom had been released in ‘48 and would not return to baseball for a couple of years. Bob Feller won his 200th game in 1950. So that leaves one gap year, 1949, when there wasn’t a single 200-game winner in baseball.

That’s about to happen again.

Right now, there are three active 200-game winners — though I should probably put active in quotation marks. Verlander, as we know, is at 262 wins. Scherzer has 216. And Clayton Kershaw has 212. I don’t know how much longer those three will pitch. Maybe they all retire this year. Maybe they stick it out for two or three more.

Whatever they do, when those three finally do walk away, there will definitely not be a 200-game winner in baseball.

Let me tell you a bit about 200-game winners: There are exactly 100 modern pitchers* with 200 victories. Isn’t that fun? I told you that counting wins is fun. I’ll bet you could name a whole bunch of those 200-game winners. I mean, yes, you might get stuck on Hooks Dauss or Charlie Root or Wilbur Cooper (or those might be the first ones you name if you are a SABR member), but I imagine that a bunch of names comes to mind.

In fact, let’s play a quick little trivia game (don’t peek ahead).

Did you get it? Tanana’s the first guy I think of when I think of “200 game winners.” I think of Tanana and Jerry Reuss and Charlie Hough and guys like that. It makes me happy to think of guys like that.

OK, let’s play again:

Huddy won 222 games over his 17-year career.

All right, we’ll play one more time — I don’t think you’ll miss this one. Hint: It’s NOT a trick question:

So what’s the point of all this? Why do I keep bringing up this outdated statistic that doesn’t really serve any purpose in baseball anymore?

Well, I said it at the top: Wins are just so easy and satisfying to count. They stick to the brain. They carry a little bit of magic. There’s a decent chance that somewhere in your brain you have a little room for win numbers, for 511 (Cy Young!), for 373 (Christy Mathewson AND Pete Alexander!), for 355 (Greg Maddux! One more than Roger Clemens!), for 251 (Bob Gibson! CC Sabathia!), for 165 (Koufax!), for 60 (Old Hoss!), for 31 (Denny McLain!), for 27 (Bob Welch! Steve Carlton!) and so on.

Wins may not be much of a way to judge a pitcher’s value, but that’s not everything. I’ve thought a lot about this lately: Baseball is a storyteller’s game, always has been and, I hope, always will be. Football is not a storyteller’s game. Basketball is not a storyteller’s game. Hockey, from what I know, is not a storyteller’s game.

Don’t get me wrong, there are countless awesome football stories (at least 100 of them in a book that recently came out) and the same for basketball, hockey and every other sport on earth. My point is not that baseball has better stories than those other sports (though it might) but that those other sports don’t RELY on the stories to bring the game to life. There’s enough action and violence and thrills and heart-stopping motion to do that.

Baseball needs the stories; the more, the better. Baseball needs a setup. Baseball needs dramatic effect. Baseball needs Roy Hobbs whiffing The Whammer on three pitches, Koufax rearing back against Aaron, Nolan trying to throw a fastball by Bo, Eck losing patience and trying a backdoor slider against Gibson, Walker turning around to face Big Unit right-handed, Maddux and Gwynn playing chess.

The game is at its best when there’s that balance, when the pitcher on the mound is as big a star as the batter at the plate. For every Mays, you need a Gibson. For every Reggie, you need a Tom Terrific. For every Griffey, there should be a Clemens; for every Bonds, a Pedro. This is at the heart of the game, pitcher vs. hitter, someone with a rock and someone with a stick. This is Ali-Frazier. This is Evert-Navratilova. This is Skywalker-Vader. This is Raylan-Boyd.

And you want both the pitcher and hitter to shine brightly. We talk about this all the time, but baseball loses so much of its dramatic power when the hitter is someone titanic — Judge or Shohei or Mookie or Soto or someone — and the pitcher is one of five Tampa Bay Rays who can throw 100 mph for an inning. So what?

Storytelling. That’s where pitcher wins come in. Maybe it’s a dumb stat. But we all know what a 20-game winner is. We all know what a 200-game winner is. We all know what a 300-game winner is. You can tell people Tarik Skubal’s 2024 FIP again and again, and some will get it, but many will not get it, and many will not care, and many will wonder why the guy didn’t win 20 games.

And here’s the thing: There was no way he even COULD have won 20 games, not the way baseball is today. It’s easy enough to do the math. Skubal made 31 starts. He averaged a little more than six innings per start and only pitched into the eighth inning once (he obviously did not have a complete game; he’s never had one of those and probably won’t unless he’s got a no-hitter or perfect game going).

When you look at those numbers — 31 starts, 192 innings — you realize that Skubal had to be INCREDIBLE just to go 18-4. And he was incredible. But it’s still just 18 wins.

I’m just not sure how Tarik Skubal becomes a crossover superstar with 18 wins.

I’ve been saying for years now that I think the starting pitcher should ALWAYS be credited with the win or loss. Nobody agrees with me, and I get that, but Skubal’s starter record was 21-10. That LOOKS more like what a Cy Young pitcher’s record should look like.

The blowback to my starter record suggestion usually comes in one of three varieties:

1. THAT’S STUPID!

2. NO, REALLY THAT’S SO STUPID!

3. You’re telling me if a pitcher goes one inning and gives up four runs and his team comes back to win, you want to give that pitcher credit for winning the game? ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?

4. If you do this for modern pitchers, what are you going to do about all the historic win totals you just babbled about?

All fair points. As for it being stupid, sure, it’s that, but I think the current win statistic is at least as stupid, and it doesn’t serve any purpose I can come up with. At least this would serve a purpose: You would actually know what the team’s record was when a pitcher started a game.

As for the worst-case scenarios for my idea, sure, you can come up with lots of them. There’s not really a way, with statistics, to change the frustrating fact that some teams use openers who only pitch an inning. There’s also no reasonable way to give full credit to a pitcher for a team’s success or failure. My point here is not to invent the perfect statistic. My point is not to look at this in the micro. I’m hoping to give the game but to give baseball a storytelling hook. Everybody understands wins.

As for history … that’s the whole point here. The history of the win as we know it is ending. With 20-game winners almost extinct, with 300-game winners definitely extinct, with us about to enter an era without even a 200-game winner, what’s the point of comparing the history? Let me show you the most wins for pitchers by birth year:

• 1989: Chris Sale, 138

• 1990: Gerrit Cole, 153; Zack Wheeler, 103

• 1991: Kevin Gausman, 102; Michael Wacha, 101

• 1992: Sean Manaea, 77

• 1993: Aaron Nola, 104

• 1994: José Berrios, 99

• 1995: Germán Marquez, 65

• 1996: Logan Webb, 55

• 1997: Logan Gilbert, 41

• 1998: George Kirby, 35

• 1999: Brayan Bello, 28

You tell me: What can you do with that? Cole is out for the next 18 months. Sale is having a miraculous renaissance after five injury-plagued years but who knows what happens next. Wheeler and Nola are terrific, but they’re both in their 30s and barely even halfway to 200. How does this connect today’s game to baseball history?

Look: I would love to find a way to make starting pitchers matter again. I know that folks at MLB are working hard at this, devising rules to make starters go deeper into games, coming up with plans to limit the number of relief pitchers who can enter a game, etc. Maybe those things will happen. Maybe they won’t. In the meantime, baseball needs pitching stars to give the game color and spark and life. And there are some wonderful possibilities among young pitchers — Paul Skenes, obviously, Cole Ragans, Skubal, Hunter Greene, Jared Jones, Rōki Sasaki, Jackson Jobe, Andrew Painter, on and on.

None of them will likely win 200 games in their careers, not in this era of Tommy John surgeries and six-inning starts and 30-start seasons. I think we should come up with an easy-to-count and easy-to-follow statistic that allows everybody to appreciate them. I’ve thrown out starter records here. A few weeks ago, I wrote about what I think is an even better idea: Using Game Scores to determine pitcher excellence.

But the point is, I’d love for someone to come up with something better. I want starting pitchers to matter again. Maybe there’s no way to make that happen with simple storytelling. But, hey, I’m a big believer in the power of storytelling.

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