Pedro Martinez won his 200th game last night and in doing so improved his overall winning percentage to an impressive .701 (200 wins against only 84 losses).
In an era when it is rare to find many teams with more than one outstanding starter on the roster who has been a consistent winner over the course of a lengthy career to say nothing of multiple pitchers who fit that description, I am once more reminded of the Orioles of my youth.
In 15 years, eight of them during his prime with the Orioles, Mike Cuellar was 185 – 130 (.587)
In 14 years, all but one of them with the O’s, Dave McNally was 184 – 119 (.607)
In his entire 19 year career in Baltimore Jim Palmer was 268 – 152 (.638)
2 comments:
Nice call again today. Among those who reached 200 wins, Pedro has the second-lowest career ERA, just fractions behind Greg Maddux. 2.72 or something. So not only wins, but excellent pitching to earn those wins.
Pedro has been impressive. One thing that always troubled me about those great Orioles teams (remember in 1971 they had FOUR twenty-game winners, the three mentioned above plus Pat Dobson)was that although they won the WS in 1966, 1970 and 1983, they lost in 1969, 1971 and 1979. Throw out the 1983 and 1979 series for the purposes of this discussion and you had a period of six years during which they appeared in four WS and won two of them. They should have won four of them but the Mets got unheard of defensive plays from Ron Swoboda, home runs from slugger Al Weiss and other impossibly lucky performances to go with the admittedly solid pitching of their starters. In 1971 the storyline always had Roberto Clemente beating the O's, but in reality Steve Blass and Bob Robertson were the difference. Blass couldn't find the strike zone a few years later and was gone from baseball and Robertson had an uncharacteristically good series, too. And, of course, Clemente was brilliant.
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