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20-game winners are endangered
Posted: Wednesday April 12, 2000 01:08 PM
Mike Hampton, a 22-game winner last year, left his first start as a New York Met at Shea Stadium last Thursday to a smattering of boos. Two days later Baltimore's Mike Mussina, the best pitcher never to have won 20 games, did not come back out for the ninth inning in what was a tie game. Three days, two pitchers, one lesson. You needed only the first full week of the baseball season to realize how difficult it is to win 20 games anymore. And as Hampton, who already has lost half as many games as he did last year, is finding out, the only thing more difficult than winning 20 is doing it again. Only 21 pitchers on the Opening Day rosters of the 30 teams (disabled list included) have won 20 games in a season. Only five of those pitchers have done it more than once: Roger Clemens, Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, Bret Saberhagen and David Cone. As of April 14, Maddux's birthday, none of them are younger than 34. Flash back 25 years to Opening Day, 1975. There were 40 former 20-game winners among only 24 teams. A whopping 21 of those pitchers had won 20 games more than once. "Roger Kahn wrote that the great thing about baseball is you can compare players of different eras," said Hall of Famer Jim Palmer, an eight-time 20-game winner. "Well, nothing could be further from the truth now. Mike Mussina would be a great pitcher in any era. Would he be better without the smaller strike zone, the smaller parks and tighter ball? Maybe, but then you don't know how pitching more often and more innings would affect him. He's not a real big guy. There's no way to compare." Check out the total number of 20-game winners by decade in the expansion era: 1960s:
73
The '90s represented an alltime low in 20-game winners, producing roughly only one-third as many as only 20 years ago. Mussina is not among that group despite his Cooperstown-quality lifetime winning percentage of .673 and five All-Star selections. In other words, he has failed to do what his pitching coach, Sammy Ellis, did in what was an otherwise pedestrian career. Ellis, he of the 63-58 lifetime record, is a lifetime member of the 20-Game Winner Club. Baltimore, which once was the cradle of 20-game winners, exemplifies the vanishing of the breed. The Orioles have produced only one 20-game winner in the past 19 years (Mike Boddicker, 1984). In the 19 years prior to that, they produced 23 of them. Mussina's two starts this season typify his nearly great resume. He pitched exceptionally well both outings but won neither of them. In his career he has won 19 games twice, including the strike-shortened 1995 season, which cost him two or three starts, and 18 games last season. "I wouldn't hold it against him at all," Palmer said. "How many 20-win seasons does Greg Maddux have? [Two] And he's a guy with four Cy Young Awards. The standards should be different now because the game is different. "When I was pitching, Earl [Weaver, the Orioles manager] used to tell me, 'Don't think about coming out of a game in the late innings, because I've got nobody in the bullpen better than you.' That's not true anymore. Teams do have someone out there in the bullpen with a better, rested arm." Four years ago, for example, Mussina came out of an early September game tied at two after seven innings against Kansas City. He had thrown 118 pitches. The bottom of the Royals' lineup was due up, while the top of the Baltimore lineup was coming up. That was one of the years Mussina wound up with 19 wins. Palmer, of course, never wound have exited from such a game. He once pitched 12 innings in his last start of the season for his 20th victory.
The more glaring difference between the prime years of Palmer and Mussina is the innings pitched. Palmer threw 288 more innings than Mussina over a five-year span. That's the equivalent of throwing an extra season (and then some). Look at the difference in complete games and you begin to understand why Palmer had more opportunities to win. He didn't come out of games as quickly as Mussina (and everybody else this side of Randy Johnson) does these days. In those five comparable years, Mussina earned a decision in 80% of his starts, Palmer in 85% of them. Now it begins to add up. Take three fewer starts per year, fewer eighth and ninth innings on the mound (see Mussina's start last Saturday against Detroit), two seasons sabotaged by the strike and toss in some plain bad luck -- and what you have is a king who's never been coronated. Mussina is the Colin Montgomerie of baseball, never having won his sport's major. Is Mussina any less a pitcher than Rick Helling, John Burkett or Denny Neagle, 20-game winners all? Of course not. Mussina's value, with or without 20 wins, soon will be very evident. He can be a free agent at the end of the season. The Orioles have offered him $60 million over five years without getting a nibble. Baltimore owner Peter Angelos has not guaranteed any player more than five years of salary. The average annual value of the offer ($12 million) is less than what Boston gave Pedro Martinez -- also a non-20-game winner at the time -- three years ago ($12.5 million) in a six- year deal. It is far short of what the Dodgers gave Kevin Brown ($15 million) two years ago. Let's face it, Mussina is much closer to Kevin Brown than he is to Helling, and his 2001 paycheck -- whoever is signing it -- will reflect it. Over the past five seasons Mussina (84-45) ranks behind only Maddux (90-35) and Martinez (86-39) in win totals. Of the nine winningest pitchers in that span, Mussina is the only one never to have won 20 in a season. Unless he does so this year, you can expect the media to grumble that "he's never won 20" when he signs his big deal, as happened with the Martinez signing. "All the numbers don't mean what they used to," Palmer said. "Look at 40 home runs. It's the same thing. I'm convinced if you let the Frank Robinson of 1966 hit in Camden Yards with this ball and this strike zone, he'd have hit 75 home runs. Easy." Hitting 40 dingers has become much easier than winning 20 games. Thirty-three active players have done it a combined 69 times. The 21 active pitchers who have won 20 games have done it only 32 times. Just as 40 home runs have been devalued, 20 wins should be elevated in status. Still, in a culture comfortable with round numbers, don't look for people to tout 18- and 19-game winners as the new standard-bearers of elite pitching. That's why Mussina will not be properly coronated as one of the greatest pitchers of his era unless he wins 20. Blame it not on the five-man rotation but on arabic numerals. And should he never reach the magic number, Mussina might find getting into Cooperstown even harder than winning 20. Sports Illustrated senior writer Tom Verducci will contribute weekly Inside Baseball columns to CNNSI.com all season. To send a question to Verducci's Mailbag, click here. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the
writer.
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