The Pitching Club

Pitchers have the 300 win club that parallels the 3,000 hit club for hitters. A sort of uncanny symmetry emerges. 24 pitchers have won 300 or more games, compared with the 28 members of the 3,000 hit club. Maybe the similarity is just a product of selecting parameters that yield a result we were already shooting for, but the 300/3,000 thing is just cool.

What's even cooler is when I add in a pitching qualifier to narrow the field even more, like when I selected members of the 3,000 hit club who had 300 home runs. Just to keep the numbers fun, how 'bout let's see how many pitchers have 300 wins and 3,000 strikeouts. See what I did there? I used a 3,000 thing so the hitters and pitchers...you get it.

Turns out, there are ten pitchers with 300 wins and 3,000 strikeouts. Do you remember how many hitters had 3,000 hits and 300 home runs? Ten. Am I blowing your mind right now? Far out.

                                                   thechive.com


Not on the list, somewhat shockingly, is Cy Young. The all-time leader in games started (815; Ryan is next with 773), and wins (511), who, even with 316 losses maintained a career winning pct. of .618, an ERA of 2.63, and a WHIP of 1.13, fell almost 200 strikeouts short of membership into this club. In almost 2,000 more innings pitched than Nolan Ryan, Cy Young struck out 2,900 fewer batters. Please re-read that last sentence. I just had to double check that, because that is bizzarre. The thing is, it's not as if Cy Young should have had, in those 2,000 more innings, 2,900 more punchouts, or 2,000, or even 1,000 more; all he needed was 200 more! One every ten innings if my math checks out. Maybe comparing Young to the all-time strikeout leader skews the picture, but Young's other percentages are so stellar that it just seems like he would have accidentally tripped over 200 more strikeouts.

Maybe Cy Young was a pitch-to-contact guy. I never saw him pitch, obviously, but I don't think "maybe" fits that statement. He had to be THE pitch-to-contact guy in baseball history. Out of the pitchers in the 300/3,000 club, I consider Greg Maddux to be the one I've seen who unabashedly pitched to contact. Maddux (.250/1.14) and Young (.252/1.13) have very similar batting avg. against and WHIP percentages. Maddux struck out 568 more batters than Young, and he did it in 2,348 fewer innings. It's just weird.

The members of this exclusive club with their career ERA and WHIP:

Walter Johnson   417/3508   2.17/1.06
Greg Maddux     355/3371   3.16/1.14
Roger Clemens   354/4672   3.12/1.17
Steve Carlton      329/4136   3.22/1.25
Nolan Ryan         324/5714   3.19/1.25                    
Don Sutton          324/3574   3.26/1.14
Phil Niekro          318/3342   3.35/1.27
Gaylord Perry      314/3534   3.11/1.18
Tom Seaver         311/3640   2.86/1.12
Randy Johnson     303/4875   3.29/1.17


Walter Johnson's resume is astonishing, and if the game was easier for pitchers back in his day, then why is he the only one from his day on the list? Seaver is the only other pitcher in the club with a sub-3 ERA, which is terrific. In fact, with all the innings these guys threw, The highest ERA and WHIP came from the knuckleballing Niekro, and those numbers are still very solid.