Saves Will Keep This One Safe

What’s the biggest, most unattainable record in the annals of major league baseball? Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak? Possibly. Pete Rose’s 4,256 hits? Very likely. Roger Maris’ 61-homer season? Assuredly.

But, I have to think in the overall view of the way the game is going that one day the biggest record of them all will be Cy Young’s 751 complete games.

Why? Well, in the first place, of the 40 pitchers who have thrown 300 or more complete games in baseball history, only three of them are of the post-World War II era. And one of them--Warren Spahn--began his career during the war.

The pitchers with the most complete games pitched in antiquity, in the dead-ball era. Cy Young’s career spanned from 1890 to 1911. Next to him with 557 complete games was Pud Galvin, who quit pitching in 1892. Walter Johnson had 531 completes, but he quit in 1927. Grover Cleveland Alexander--436--pitched from 1911 to 1930.

The complete-game statistic is an endangered species, vanishing from baseball. Do you know how many complete games the New York Yankees’ pitching staff had all last year? Three. Cy Young had that many in a week.

Baltimore had only eight, Texas had nine. The World Series champion Minnesota Twins had 21--and 10 of these were by one pitcher, Jack Morris.

Relief pitching used to be a mop-up exercise. A relief pitcher went in there only when the game was out of hand. Relievers were merely damage control specialists, usually washed-up veterans who were asked to somehow get the game in the hangar with minimal further damage. Earl Whitehill, a Washington Senator pitcher, was kind of the prototype of the breed, one of the first to begin to win games in relief, not merely conclude them.

The “save” statistic didn’t enter the lexicon of the grand old game till the ‘60s, and only in the last few years has a definition of a “save” been standardized.

Managers have lost faith in starters. They have reduced their expectations. “Give me seven good innings,” they plead as their starter takes the hill. At the first sign of weakness--sometimes just a loud foul--they pounce out of the dugout with the hook. There were 94--count ‘em!-- combined shutouts in the American League last year. In other words, a pitcher was lifted, even though he had a no-run game going. That’s nothing. We have had no-hit games pitched by three pitchers.

Seven of those 94 combined shutouts featured four pitchers and one of them even had five.

Some years ago, when the Yankees’ Whitey Ford was posting 25- and 24-victory seasons, the puckish Ford used to crack that, if he got in the Hall of Fame, he should stay there only seven months a year and let Luis Arroyo come in in the late months and finish the year out because that’s what he did in the regular season.

If Scott Erickson, who was Minnesota’s best pitcher last year, ever makes the Hall of Fame, he might want to bring Mark Guthrie along with him, not to finish the year out but to work the middle months.

Erickson was the star of the staff, any way you look at it. He won 20 games to lead the team--and the league--in that category. He had an earned-run average of 3.18. He only lost eight games and he finished second to Roger Clemens in the Cy Young Award balloting.

But Manager Tom Kelly let him finish only five games. In three of these, he threw a shutout.

Mark Guthrie was the relief pitcher. But he comes from the orphan branch of the breed.

You see, the glamour relief pitcher is the Dennis Eckersley type of reliever--the short man, the guy who comes in for nine or 10 pitches (or even two or three) in the bottom of the ninth with the game on the line. He faces, often, the tying and winning runs at the plate. If he comes out unscathed, he gets the precious statistic called “save” on his record, a valuable card in contract negotiations.

Guthrie is what is known as middle relief or the setup man. He’s just kind of keeping an umbrella over the game in the middle innings, a kind of caretaker. He doesn’t figure in the win or loss or save, usually. He comes in as early as the fourth or fifth inning, usually with a lead he’s asked to protect, and he will be expected to turn the game over to the team’s star reliever in the ninth to get one or two final outs.

He pitches a lot of innings but gets neither the victory nor the save. Only innings. You look at his stats at the end of the year and you wonder what he does for a living. His contribution is important but often invisible.

The “short” relief man can get an ERA that cannot be seen with the naked eye--because if he comes in with the bases loaded and he gives up what proves to be the winning runs, those runs are charged to his predecessor. The long relief pitcher has no such insulation. He is usually responsible for runners on base and might pitch almost as many innings as a starter.

“We are working on an ‘inherited runners’ category now to get a better measure of effectiveness,” Guthrie says hopefully.

A short relief pitcher can pitch almost nightly. Mike Marshall appeared in 106 games one year. And he once pitched 13 consecutive games. Kent Tekulve never started a game in his life, but he appeared in the second-most games in history, 1,050. He finished 638 games, most in the league.

They think DiMaggio’s record is sacrosanct. Or Rose’s. Maybe so. But, I’ll tell you one that is--Cy Young’s 751 complete games. That will stand as long as the redwoods.