Tom Seaver’s Passing Begs Question: Is Baseball’s 25-Game Winning Pitcher As Elusive as the 30-Game Winner?
A Mr. Baseball Memorial Article Honoring John Weekes
The late Tom Seaver won 20 games or more five times, topped by his total of 25 victories in the 1969. Coming after “The Year of the Pitcher,” when Denny McLain won 31 games and his Detroit Tigers beat Bob Gibson’s defending Champs in the World Series, 25 wins wasn’t all that spectacular, but it was good enough to win Tom Terrific the first of his three Cy Young Awards.
Seaver was the Roger Clemens of his time, minus the steroids, a right-handed power pitcher who was the best righty if his generation. His only true peer was Steve Carlton. “Lefty” Carlton, whose relationship to Seaver was akin to Clemens to Randy Johnson, achieved 27 wins in 1972.
Clemens never won 25 games, and neither did Johnson. The Rocket’s best showing was 254 victories racked up in 1986, when he led his Boston Red Sox (on which Tom Seaver ended his career) into the World Series, winning the first of his seven Cy Young Awards and was named MVP.
Randy Johnson, who vies with Roger Clemens for recognition as the greatest pitcher of his era (and certainly, is the greatest lefty of his era and perhaps all-time), won 24 games for Arizona Diamondbacks in 2002, and John Smoltz smoked 24 victories as an Atlanta Brave in 1996, in the first of the two seasons where they won the National League pennant but were vanquished by the Yankees in the World Series.
Tom Terrific’s Record
Tom Seaver set a record, since surpassed, for the highest percentage of votes received, 98.8%. when he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1992. Only Ken Griffey, Jr. and Mariano Rivera have surpassed it.
Many baseball pundits believed Seaver should have become the first pitcher to win four in the strike shortened 1981 season, when he went 14–2 with a 2.54 ERA. His 14 victories was tops in the National and tied for the Major League wins title.
But 1981 was the year of Fernandomania, when Dodgers Fernando Valenzuela ad a spectacular start to his rookie season. When he came back from the strike, Venezuela lost seven games.
Seaver wasn’t the only one who got screwed that year. His team, the Cincinnati Reds, were shutout of the playoffs though they led the major leagues in total victories, due to an idiotic playoff formula advanced by soon-to-be-ousted Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn.
Tom Terrific became a 25 game-winner in 1969, the year the Amazin’ Mets (a sarcastic moniker as the only thing amazing about New York’s expansion National League team is how it went about losing games and the sheer numbers of loses) were transmogrified into the Miracle Mets. He was edged out for the MVP vote by Willie McCovery, both having received 11 first-place votes.
it was Tom who was the Main Man behind the Miracle Mets. He was their star, their outstanding player, a once-in-a-generation godsend to the downtrodden fans that turned out at Shea Stadium. They were losers before Tom Terrific had his name added to the roster, and he took the beloved team of losers to the winner’s circle.
From 1968, his 2nd year in The Show, though 1976, he struck out 200 batters nine times in a row, leading the National League six times in whiffs. Tom Seaver won three ERA titles and topped the Senior Circuit three times in wins.
The 12-time All Star had superb control, having never walked more than 89 batters in a season.
Roger Clemens never won 25 games. The 25-game winner became extinct, though not before Tom Seaver retired from baseball in 1986.
The last person to win 25 or more games in the National League was Hall of Famer Steve Carlton, who won 27 games in 1972, when his team, the Phillies, won but 59 for the entire season. He was the last of the 25-game winner circle in the Senior Circle, a number that was once common, but a candle illumating excellence that has since been extinguished. In the seasons 1962–69, from one expansion to the next, the top winner in the NL had 25 wins or better.
Denny McLain was a 24-game winner in the expansion year of 1969, winning his second Cy Young Award. The previous season, he had made history in “The Year of the Pitcher” when he became the last pitcher to have a 30 win season, going 31–6 and picking up his first Cy Young and one of the MVP awards won by a pitcher.
20 Game Winners
If 20 wins was the benchmark of a superior pitcher in the post-World War Two years, then 25 wins was a notch above, a threshold like hitting .330 and above or blasting 40 home runs, a lesser Himalayan peak climbed by only the superior. It was not the Everest of 30 wins or .400 or 58+ homers, but it was a damn memorable achievement, dwarfing the 24 wins, the .320 batting averages, and 39 dingers of those who got close, but didn’t make it into the elite circle, as per seasonal achievement.
The. National League hasn’t seen a 20-game winner in the last three years, a record. The last time that the National League went back to back seasons without a 20-game winner as the strike years of 1994 and 1995.
And what of the 25-game winner? The 25-game winner is as elusive as the fabled 30-game winner, which is almost in a class of the .400 hitter.
When Denny McLain won 31 games in 1968, there had been a 34-year drought between 30 game winners. Dizzy Dean won an even 30 in 1934. In McLain’s own American League, the last 30-game winner had been Lefty Grove in 1931, thirty-seven years before.
As of 2019, the National League has gone without a 25-game winner for 48 years. The American League hasn’t had a 25-game winner in 30 years.
The last 25-game winner was Bob Welch in 1990 for the World Series winning Oakland Athletics. Backed by the Bash Brothers, Welch went 27–6. The last pitcher to win 25 games in the National League was Steve Carlton in 1972, when Lefty also won 27 games.
The 20-game winner is still with us in baseball, despite the phenomenon of the five-inning starting pitcher. Justin Verlander even won 24 games in his Cy Young-Award winning 2011 season, when he was still on the Detroit Tigers. In his 15 seasons in the Big Leagues, Verlander has only won 20 games twice, most recently in 2019, when he led the majors with 21 victories.
In the National League, Randy Johnson won 24 games for Arizona in 2002, the last time that has been achieved in the senior circuit. A lifetime winner of 303 games, Johnson only notched 20-win seasons twice in his career.
The last pitcher to notch 20-win seasons back to back was Roger Clemens in 1997–1998, a feat he performed in 1986–1987, leading the league in wins all four years. Greg Maddux, who won one more game than Clemens in his career, had back-to-back 20-game seasons only once. In 1992 and 1993, Maddux won 20 games: It was the only time in his career that he was to win 20.
Maddux won the first of four consecutive Cy Young Awards in 1992, and likely would have racked up 20 wins in both 1994 and 1995 but for the strike. His final totals that year were NL-leading 16 and 19 wins.
From 1931, when three NL hurlers topped the senior circle wth 19 wins each, through the strike year of 1981, the NL always had a 20 game winner.
Founded in 1901, the American League went fifty-nine seasons before it had a year without a 20 game winner. In 1960, two pitchers put 18 wins on the board to lead the junior circuit. It wasn’t until the strike year of 1981 that the wins leader failed to notch 20 victories, a scenario repeated in 1982.
Since that time, not counting the 1994–95 strike years, there have been four times when an AL picther failed to botch 20 wins in a season, but none of those four have been back to back.
It’s been 40 years since the National League has seen a 25-game winner. The American League has had two, Steve Stone in 190 and Bob Welch with 27 wins in 1990.
Welch’s Fluke Year
It took 38 years between Jim Bagby winning 31 games for the 1920 World Champion Cleveland Indians for another 30-game winner to emerge. In 1968, Denny McClain won 31 games and, along with Mickey Lolich (an eventual 25-game winner in 1970), pitched his Detroit Tigers into the winner’s circle.
That’s the most wins in the American League since Bob Welch’s fluke 27 wins with the mighty Oakland A’s dynasty of 1988–90. Frank Viola won 24 games in 1988 for the Minnesota Twins, as did a young Roger Clemens in 1986 for the Red Sox, his Most Valuable Player year.
Baltimore Orioles pitcher Steve Stone had another fluke season akin to Welch’s, when he racked up 25 wins in 1980. His previous high for wins was 15 in 1977, and he won four in 1981 and was out of baseball the following year. Sabermetrics reveals that Mike Norris was the far ore deserving winner, with a higher Wins Above Replacement score and a better Wins+ score. Goose Gossage would have been a better choice than Stone, for not only was he the most fearsome reliever of his time, he had a high Wins+ score than Morris and Stone, had a 3.4 WAR to Stone’s 4.0 (Norris clocked in with 5.9).
Goose also got his New York Yankees team into the playoffs, where the great George Brett hit a memorable homer off of him to put the Kansas City Royals, loser of three AL playoffs to the Yankes from 1976–78, into the catbird’s seat of the World Series. Nonplussed, unlike , Goose hurled the Yanks into the World Series in 1981 and San Diego into the Fall Classic in 1984.
Willie Hernández won the Cy Young and the MVP awards that year, as the World Series winning Detroit Tigers’ closer.
Since 1961 initiated expansion, there have been 19 times when 25 or more wins have been recorded in major league baseball. There have been years with multiple 25 game winners:
1963,: Sandy Koufax and Juan Marichal both won 25 games
1966: Sandy Koufax won 27 games, and Juan Marichal and Jim Kaat racked up 25 wins
In 1968, The Year of the Pitcher, there were only two 25 game winners: Denny McClain with 31, and Marichal with 26. Four pitchers won between 20 and 22 games.
In 1962, an NL expansion year, eight pitchers won 20 or ore games, topped by Hall of Famer Don Drysdale’s 25 wins. The following year, 10 pitchers won 20 or more games, topped by Koufax with 25, and nearly matched in 1965, with nine pitchers winning 20 or more, and Koufax topping both leagues with 27 wins. In he expansion year of 1969, 15 pitchers won 20 or more games, topped by Seaver’s 25.
After 11 pitchers won 20 or ore games in 1970, there were 14 20-game winners in 1971 (with Lolich notching 25 wins for the Denny McLainless Detroit Tigers), 13 in 1972, and 11 in 1973, when Fergie Jenkins and Catfish Hunter both won 25 games, tops in the National and American Leagues respectively. The nine 20-game winners of 1977 was the last time there’d be so many.
Aside from the strike years of 1981,1994, and 1995, 2006 would be the first year that neither league produced a 20 game winner, a phenomenon repeated in 2017. One would have to go back to 1871, the first year of pro baseball, to find a season lacking a 20-game winner, when Al Spalding managed only 19 victories in 31 starts. He went on to be a 40 game winner four times in the span of four years, winning 52 and 54 games in the middle of that streak, book-ended by 41 and 47 victories. He also win 38 the year before the streak.
You can look it up.
