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| Sunday, May 25 Updated: May 31, 5:43 PM ET Pitchers facing much higher standard for greatness By Jayson Stark ESPN.com |
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It's as rare as two comets whooshing through the same night sky. In the western sky, Rafael Palmeiro's 500th homer crashes into the right-field seats in Texas. In the eastern sky, Roger Clemens shakes hands all around after the 300th win of his career. A 500th homer. And a 300th win. Converging in the same month -- for the first time in the history of box scores, record books or home run trots. This is what's known as a cool reason to contemplate the magnitude of two big-fat-headline, lead-story-on-SportsCenter kind of feats.
But when we compare those feats, what should we think? It's a fascinating question. We've spent our lifetimes looking at them as more than just milestones, as more than just the most picturesque of baseball's round numbers. For pitchers, for hitters, they've meant essentially the same thing: Greatness. Palmeiro was only the 19th player to hit 500 homers. Clemens will be just the 21st pitcher to reach 300 wins. That tells you these men are not your average Reggie Jefferson or Juan Agosto. But what that paragraph up there doesn't tell you is that there is no longer any comparison between the degree of difficulty of Palmeiro's feat and the degree of difficulty of Clemens' feat. Clemens is the first man to bust through the door of the 300-Win Club in 13 years (since Nolan Ryan). Palmeiro was the first man to make the 500-Homer Club in -- what? -- 37 days (since Sammy Sosa)? And as we peer into the future, how many more 300th wins will we have a chance to witness in the next 20 years? One? Two? Four? OK, Greg Maddux. Then who? But how many more 500th homers will there be? Ten? Twenty? Fifty? We don't know that answer, not exactly. But, as one of baseball's most dominating pitchers puts it, we do know this: "It's pretty clear," says Curt Schilling, "that the 500 Homer Hotel is filling up a lot quicker than the 300 Win Club." And the perfect case study was the massive debate Palmeiro's 500th homer unleashed about whether No. 500 made him an automatic Hall of Famer. But now try to imagine that same kind of debate over any pitcher who managed to win his 300th game. Ehhh ... don't think so. Because 300 wins has gotten that much harder. And 500 homers has gotten that much easier. Maybe you hadn't even noticed how much easier until now. But consider this:
So ... see a trend here anywhere? "Yeah, I think I see one," said the next-to-last man to win 300, Don Sutton. "I think I see a lot more opportunities for guys to hit a home run than I do for pitchers to win a ball game. Those hitters are getting 600 at-bats a year. But the pitchers are only getting 33 starts a year. So I see a number of pitchers who are blessed with the talent to win 300 games. They just won't get the opportunity." Pitch counts. ... Blown saves ... Five-man rotations ... Radar guns ... MRIs. They've all limited those opportunities -- and made this a whole new world for pitchers. So to get to 300 wins, you need to overcome all of that. To win 300 now, you need everything to go right. If we were going to design a 300-game winner, here is what would we throw into the mixing bowl:
But even if a pitcher has all five of those qualities, that's still not enough. He's also going to need to pitch just about forever. Which means wanting to -- and being good enough to make some team keep employing you. Look at the last five men to win 300. Nolan Ryan pitched until age 46. Sutton and Carlton didn't stop until 43. Phil Niekro knuckleballed away until he was 48. Only Seaver had had enough by 41. Of those five, only Carlton was in his 30s (38) when he won No. 300. So turning 40 can't be a barrier. It can't even be an issue. And those guys at least pitched much of their career in four-man rotations. All of them except Seaver started 40 games in a season at least once. Now, of course, no active pitcher has ever done that. In fact, only one non-knuckleballer in the last quarter-century has made 40 starts in any season (Jim Clancy in 1982). So the last generation of 300-game winners was making five more starts a year than this generation, if not more. Over a 20-year career, that's 100 starts. Next time you contemplate the odds of Mark Prior winning 300, just think about that: He'll probably have 100 fewer chances to win than Ferguson Jenkins did. But to really illustrate how hard this is, let's choose someone a little farther along in his career -- a guy who has been among the best starting pitchers in baseball for more than a decade. Let's choose Curt Schilling. It's 12 seasons now since Schilling first emerged as a pitcher capable of winning a game practically all by himself. He throws strikes. He pitches shutouts. He has thrown more complete games since 1992 than any pitcher in baseball. It's hard to beat his delivery, work ethic or passion. Yet he's still 142 wins short of 300, at age 36. There are reasons for that, of course. Seven years of pitching for lousy teams in Philadelphia. Two shoulder operations. And several years of squandering his talent by being a self-professed "knucklehead" in his early 20s. So stuff happens. It happened to him. It could happen to any pitcher. But mostly, Schilling's career paints a vivid picture of how tough it is for even great pitchers to win 300 in this era. To get there now, he'd probably have to pitch another 10 years. "You know, I'd like to remain a power pitcher into my 40s," Schilling said. "But I ain't doing this for 10 more years. No way." He isn't getting there. Kevin Brown isn't getting there. Even Tom Glavine, Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez have no more than an outside shot. So that raises another question: When it's time to consider those men for the Hall of Fame, will 250 wins -- or even fewer -- become the magic number that 300 used to be? "I hope they never lower the standard, although it's harder to achieve it," Sutton said. "I hope they never lower it to 220 and say that's something special. I hope 300 will always remain the mark of something special." Oh, it will. Just now it will be the mark of something extra special. And maybe that's why so many people are heaping so much attention on Clemens' latest milestone. "To me," Peterson said, "it says, `Give this guy the biggest trophy you've got.' It says that when you look at all the career feats in sports, 300 wins is up there with any of them." Heck, it even makes 500 homers look like just another round number. Jayson Stark is a senior writer for ESPN.com. |
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