Last week, somebody (not on BJOL) mentioned a terrific pitchers’ duel that took place late in the 1965 season, between two fading stars, famous ex-teammates (former roommates, actually), which I’d never heard about, so I looked up the game and marveled at the excellence of the duel. (A pitchers’ duel-- for those born in this millennium—was two simultaneous low-scoring complete games thrown by each side’s pitcher, usually ending 1-0 or 2-1.) This one went 0-0 until the bottom of the seventh when a famous nutjob and future batting champion hit a home run off one 44-year-old pitcher and then in the eighth inning another solo shot was hit off him by one of the weaker hitters in league history, giving his youthful (38-year old) former roomie a 2-0 win.

I was completely unaware of this game, or had forgotten it, but it looked like a great, suspenseful game—the 38-year-old winner was facing a lineup that featured three Hall of Fame sluggers in the prime of their power, so anything could have happened when he came out to pitch the ninth inning. (Can you imagine the controversy today if a manager sent a pitcher in his late thirties out to pitch the ninth in a save situation? With the previous season’s saves runner-up well-rested in the bullpen? Again, kiddies, this sort of thing used to happen all the time, honest.) He got the least of the three sluggers (only 379 HR) to hit into a doubleplay to end the game. The guy who mentioned the game to me (I think on some online baseball-trivia site) was taken by the fact that he’d never known that either pitcher even had played for the team he was on at the time.

The losing team was in second place, one and a half games out, at the time (August 31^st) and the winning team was also in contention, five games further back, so it’s not as if this game was devoid of public interest but it, for some reason, never went down in the history books with other better-known matchups like the Spahn-Marichal marathon, where each man went 16 innings,  or the 1958 World Series where Cy Young Award-winner Bob Turley faced the previous year’s World Series MVP Lew Burdette three times, including game seven.

I mention those examples because the two pitchers, as you’ve probably guessed, were Warren Spahn and Lew Burdette, pitching for the Giants and the Phillies, respectively. It was Spahn’s final MLB loss, as it happened, and both men’s careers were basically done: Spahn pitched a few odd games after 1965, but none in MLB, and Burdette had ten more MLB decisions left in him over the next two seasons. The exceptionally high quality of their pitching in this game, coupled with the proximity to the ends of their careers, was what really caught my eye.

Both men were obviously capable, at this very late stage of their careers (which totaled 566 victories), of throwing an excellent game, but each man was almost out of chances to start, ever again. Spahn in particular would start only three more games, after this masterpiece, in his career, which had a month to go.

It seems to me, maybe I’m wrong, that if a pitcher today throws a complete game 3-hitter like this, no team would pull the plug on the guy after just one more month, and if they did, there would be teams lined up around the block offering the guy a contract and a dozen more starts, at least, to see what else he’s got left in the tank.

But maybe this game was a complete fluke? Maybe the guy had routinely gotten bombed out recently, making this game into an anomalous freak blast-from-the-past? Maybe Spahn was definitively washed up, and one fluke game doesn’t change that soundly demonstrated conclusion?

Aha! (Ahem.) That’s why this game really drew my attention. Earlier this year, just after I was doing my research into Bill Wakefield (whose place on the 1965 Mets roster essentially got aced-out by Warren Spahn—link to the SABR-bio on Wakefield that I’d promised, here: https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/421f2c9c ), I looked at the 1965 Mets fairly closely, and noticed that while Spahn had a terrible won-lost record, he actually hadn’t pitched that poorly. When the Mets released him (released him!) in July, his W-L record was 4-12. (That winning percentage, .250, matches precisely the Mets’ winning percentage in their first year, 1962, when they made their bones as the most inept MLB team since the innovation of fielding gloves.)

Going through Spahn’s 1965 record game-by-game, however, I found out that though he’d gotten bombed out now and then, like every other pitcher on the team, he’d actually pitched a very impressive number of what we would now label as "Quality Starts." He lost many of them, but like the Burdette game later in the season, you really couldn’t put any of the blame on him. He did his job the vast majority of the time, but because the team behind him didn’t hit or didn’t field, usually both simultaneously, his W-L record stunk. He finished up the year, and his career, with a 7-16 record.

Soon afterwards, I got all caught up in Bill’s fabulous series on lucky and unlucky pitchers, not seeing much there about Spahn particularly, certainly not his 1965 W-L record, and came away wondering if Spahn had been luckier, just plain luckier, in 1965,  he would been able to extend his MLB career even longer than he had.  

Certainly, if he’d been able to turn a few more of his quality starts into wins rather than losses, he might have had a record much closer to .500 in July, which would have made him into the Mets’ best starter, at least as measured by won-lost record. But even if the Mets did release him when they did, some other major league team would have seen him as a valuable asset down the stretch, as the Giants did, and if he would have finished up the year with a winning record, as I will show he might well have, would he have been released again after the season (the Giants let him go on October 15^th,, fifty-two years ago today) and never been picked up again?  I say: No way.

I’m not going to try to reproduce Bill’s methods in assessing Spahn’s 1965 luckiness or unluckiness (if you want to take a stab at it, be my guest) but instead will try to make my case by laying out the Quality Starts that he got very little credit for at the time (no doubt because that stat didn’t yet exist).

First place, Spahn’s 1965 actually got off to a decent start, as measured by W-L record: as late as the morning of May 28^th, he’d won 4 games and lost 4, which on those early Mets teams, was a team-record setting pace. (Seriously—the team’s season-record for wins was Al Jackson’s 13, which would stand until Tom Seaver came along. Spahn was on pace for sixteen wins.)  He would then, however, lose eight straight games, winning none, but several of his twelve overall Met losses came in very strong efforts:

·        Back-to-back complete-game victories against the eventual World Champion Dodgers and the powerhouse Giants on April 20th and 25^th, giving up 4 earned runs in 18 innings.

·         A complete-game loss to the Phillies (Jim Bunning), a 4-hitter, giving up one run in 9 IP on May 5^th.

·        A complete-game victory over Philadelphia (Bunning again), 2 ER in 9 IP on May 24^th.

·        A complete-game 2-1 loss to LA (Don Drysdale), 2 ER in 9 IP on June 11th, followed by another 2-1 loss to Sandy Koufax (2 ER in 7 IP) on the 20^th.

Totaling it up, that’s six gems against top competition, (5 CGs, one 7 IP) 52 IP and 11 ER, for a 3-3 Won/Lost record, and a 1.90 ERA. These are not quality starts: they are top quality starts, against Hall of Fame competition. (The two initial wins were earned against Claude Osteen and Bob Bolin, not exactly slouches either.) In handy chart form:

Spahn pitched four other quality starts for the dreadful Mets in the first half of the year, not quite up to the quality of those six gems, but official quality starts nonetheless:  in his first start of the season, against Houston, for example, he gave up 3 ER in 8 IP, a pretty strong game. And then he lost two games to Pittsburgh in the space of ten days, giving up 1 ER in 8 IP against Bob Veale on May 28^th (and losing on unearned runs) and then matching up against Veale again on June the 6^th, losing the game on 3 ER in 6 IP.  He then lost on June 15^th to the Reds (Sammy Ellis, on his way to 22 wins) giving up 3 runs in 7 IP. The totals in these four quality starts show that Spahn pitched 29 innings and gave up 10 earned runs, for a W/L record of 0-4 but an ERA of 3.10.

Combining these two charts, the top quality starts with the just-plain quality starts, gave Spahn ten quality starts for the Mets, in which he had a 2.33 ERA and a 3-7 W-L record to show. The National League as a whole in 1965 had a 3.54 ERA, so this old guy gave the Mets ten starts in half a season where he gave up under an earned run per game fewer than the league did as a whole, averaging better than 8 innings per start. So how did they reward this half-season of work?

They dumped him. That’s right, they released him. Mind you, he was not only pitching pretty well by my count, but he was also their pitching coach. Dudn’t matter. They cut him loose.

But he wasn’t quite done. He signed with the Giants a few days later, and pitched for them, not quite as well as he’d pitched for the Mets: he only had six quality starts for the Giants in a little over two months. In those six games (July 27^th, August 13^th, 19^th, 27^th and 31^st, September 12^th) Spahn pitched 45 innings and gave up 11 ER, for an ERA in those games of 2.20 (Won/Lost 2-3, 3 CG). I’ll spare you the chart, but his opponents in these six starts were five former or current All-Stars (Ray Herbert, Bob Purkey, Burdette, Drysdale and Bob Buhl) and one Met rookie, Darrell Sutherland, whose ass I’m sure he was tickled to watch Mays, McCovey, Hart and co. kicking all game long.

As with the Mets, of course, Spahn also pitched in other games for San Francisco, not nearly as well as he did when he pitched his 16 quality starts, but neither the Mets nor the Giants needed him to pitch every day like the Warren Spahn of 1947-1963, which is to say, like the #1 pitcher in the game.  They just needed Spahn to be an adequate end-of-the-rotation guy, whether they were a strong club or a very weak one.  The Giants in particular had a pretty deep rotation (Marichal, 22-13; Bob Shaw 16-9; Bob Bolin 14-6;  plus Gaylord Perry, who was just getting started, and Jack Sanford, who was just finishing). The Mets were still desperately awful, particularly their pitching staff, so why either of these clubs were so eager to release a 350+ game winner capable of pitching these 16 gems is a head-scratcher.

For the year, Mets and Giants combined, Spahn’s totals in these 16 quality starts came to 126 IP and 32 ER, for a 2.29 ERA. Oddly enough, he pitched exactly 126 innings for the Mets that year, so according to my calculations, in his 20 other games, he had a stratospheric ERA of 7.03. That’s pretty bad, but you can only lose a game one time. Does it matter how badly you pitch when you get your ears beaten in (and Spahn had some outsized ears to beat in), if you’re also throwing 16 quality starts from the end of the rotation?

For both teams in 1965, Spahn’s overall ERA came to 4.01, less than a half a run per game over league, about where a back-of-the-rotation guy should be. I’m not trying to make the case that Spahn’s 1965 is an important building block in his HoF credentials, not at all, but what I AM trying to argue is that it’s nothing to end your career over. MLB’s general consensus on Spahn’s final season was badly skewed by his misleading 7-16 W-L record. That record, and an ERA a half-run over league, led to the inevitable conclusion that it was time for this 44-year-old to call it a career. Right?

Well, no. From 2017, we can easily see that anyone who throws 16 quality starts, such as I’ve described, was far from washed up. On the other side of the ledger, there were exactly seven starts that he richly deserved to lose—terrible starts, in which he failed to pitch more than 6 innings but gave up earned runs at least at a 6.00 rate.  These seven terrible starts occurred about once a month, except for June, when Spahn got killed three times:

The ERA here smells particularly foul, well above ten earned runs per game. Spahn also had another seven starts in which he pitched neither a QS nor a stinker:

So we call this final batch of seven games Spahn started, with a 3.86 ERA, which were neither very good nor terrible, "non-decisions." Then he has his 7-16 Won-Lost record reversed. Now he’s that old coot who still "knows how to win." Sixteen wins, seven losses. Here’s a link to his 1965 game-by-game breakdown, if you want to check my arithmetic: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/gl.fcgi?id=spahnwa01&t=p&year=1965 .  (I’m eliminating from this discussion his six relief appearances, where he didn’t pitch particularly well or particularly badly or particularly much, facing 35 batters in 1965 in relief, winning none, losing none, and saving none. Most of them came in the season’s final two weeks, after SF had dropped him from the starting rotation. His final two MLB appearances came in mop-ups, 9-1 and 17-2 blowout losses.)

I don’t know how Spahn’s 1965 would rate in Bill’s system of deserved wins and losses—I admit cheerfully and without prompting that reversing Spahn’s W-L record and assigning him 16 wins and 7 losses is more for the sake of poetic justice than it is a carefully reasoned argument. (If you want to call the 7/22 game a stinker and the 6/29 game "not too bad," or both stinkers or both "not too bad"s, feel free.) But even assigning him 3 fewer wins and 3 more losses, which is the worst that you could do, still yields a 13-10 record for the old master in 1965. With a W-L record like that, wouldn’t you suppose he’d get a contract offer from some pitching-poor team in 1966? He didn’t get a one.

But he didn’t retire, either, Not exactly, anyway. He pitched a few games in the Mexican League in 1966, and a few more games in AAA in 1967, delaying his election to the HoF, incidentally, by two full years. His SABR bio claims that these weren’t attempted comebacks as much as they were practical lessons in how pitching is done, for the benefit of the teams he was coaching and managing at Mexico City and at Tulsa.

With 16 quality starts, and maybe 7 or 8 terrible ones, who knows how many more games Spahn could have gone on to win in the big leagues? More to the point, he may have been able to extend his career to age 46 or 47 or…well, who knows? He died in 2003, at the age of 82, so let’s set that as our outside limit to the length of his pitching winning ball.

There were seven pitchers in 2017 who had exactly 16 quality starts (Dallas Keutchel, Jason Vargas, Jhoulys Chacin,  whose first name looks like my last tray in Scrabble, Jake Arrieta, Robbie Ray, Martin Perez and Luis Perdomo) and they had an average W-L record of about 13-9. (Only Perdomo had a losing record—the other five each won between 13 and 18 games, and lost between 5 and 11.)  None of them is being turned out to pasture, correctly so. The Mets and the Giants and eighteen other MLB teams in 1965 and 1966 screwed the pooch, I think, by looking only at Spahn’s W-L record and his birth certificate, and ignoring the sixteen occasions on which he was incredibly effective.

The news coverage of the Burdette-Spahn duel that got me doing this piece, btw, is itself gripping: since it was the last day of August, this game (this doubleheader, actually) was Willie Mays’ last chance to tie Rudy York’s MLB record for most HRs in one calendar month, which the Phillies prevented him from doing, so lots of attention was being paid to this game for that reason alone. Mays staying stuck on 17 HRs for August, though, didn’t mean he wasn’t up to his usual super-human standard: the Giants won the first game in extra innings when Mays scored on an infield grounder, after doubling and taking third on a passed ball (issued in the course of an intentional walk to McCovey—when was the last time you saw that?). In the previous inning, the 10^th, he made a spectacular catch against the scoreboard on a 400-foot blast by Dick Stuart. Also included in the New York Times account is the information that Juan Marichal, still under a nine-day suspension for assaulting John Roseboro with a bat on August 22, was being asked by the Commissioner’s office not to accompany the Giants on their next trip to LA, to which the Giants agreed. (Marichal wasn’t scheduled to pitch in that series, anyway, so it seemed eminently wise to postpone his scheduled lynching.) And in the ninth inning of the pitchers’ duel, down by two runs, the Giants staged a rally against Burdette, with Jim Ray Hart and Jesus Alou singling with only one out. (Incredibly, at this juncture, Gene Mauch still didn’t call for his well-rested closer, Jack Baldschun.) Instead Burdette faced the pinch-hitter, Orlando Cepeda, he of the mere 379 lifetime HRs, and induced him to hit a hard grounder up the middle that defensive wiz Bobby Wine turned into a game-ending DP.  I remember a pun the papers were fond of making around this time, "The Plays of Wine and Rojas," and this was one of their best. I’m glad I got to relive, through the miracle of Retrosheet and newspaper archives, one of the best games I wish I’d seen.

The famous nutjob and future batting champ, btw, if you didn’t feel like looking at the box score, was Alex Johnson, and the weak stick, who hit the other HR off Spahn in the 8^th, was the aforementioned defensive wizard Bobby Wine. As ever, I welcome your comments.