Denny McClain’s finished the 1968 season win a record of 31-6 becoming the last pitcher to win 30+ games. Will that milestone ever be reached again?

22 comments

  1. Never gonna happen your average starting pitcher pitches only 32-33 games a season and goes five or six innings only.

  2. Denny led such a crazy life after this season and is still alive and kicking today. I’d love to hear some stories that anybody else here might have about him

  4. If anyone hasn’t treated themselves to his Wikipedia page, his life is crazy. I love that he put out two albums of organ music on top of all the baseball and crime.

  5. No, for many reasons. The biggest is the move from a 4-man rotation to 5 (or more). The next-biggest is the ever-ahortening average innings per start leading to even fewer win opportunities.

  8. I think it could, actually. Not by a starting pitcher, but if a team employed a strategy where a long reliever was consistently brought in for tie games in the 4/5/6/7 innings, it’s certainly possible.

  16. McClain made the bigs at age 18 in 1963 and was a full time starter at 19. He won the Cy Young in 1968 and 1969 (shared the latter with Mike Ceullar). Those were his age 24 and 25 seasons.

    Those 2 seasons he averaged 41 starts, 26 CG, 330 IP.

    He was done as an effective pitcher at 26, and out of MLB at 29. He didn’t take the best care of himself (he drank a case of Pepsi a day!) but with that workload is it really a surprise his arm gave out before he was 30?

    So no, we’ll never see anything like that again.

  18. He ended up going 0-2 in the World Series while Mickey Lolich went 3-0, all complete games.

  20. Keep in mind that JV was the closest anyone has gotten to even 25 in 35 years now, and even that was already almost 25 years ago. Without changes to the rule book or some absurd combinations of extreme luck, I’d say even 25 won’t happen again.

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