Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
August 10, 2003
Warren Spahn

Yesterday, I was talking to a friend, and told him, "If anyone asks you a pitching trivia question, and you don't know the aswer, say 'Warren Spahn.'" This morning, I get an e-mail from James Joyner of Outside the Beltway with an exceprt from an ajc.com about Warren Spahn. James thought the following passage was interesting:


"I don't think Warren Spahn will ever get into the Hall of Fame," Stan Musial once said. "He'll never stop pitching."

"I'm proud of the fact that I pitched as long as I did, and I was a consistent 20-game winner," Spahn said. "I always felt I had to win to keep my job. I felt I had a bad year if I didn't win 20.

"The ballclub never offered me a raise," said Spahn, who pitched during the age of one-year contracts and never made more than $87,500 in salary. "I had to fight for every damn dollar I made. I always felt I had to have a good year or I was going to lose my job because I was that old. And when Greg came along [in 1950], I had another mouth to feed. I couldn't fail."

Spahn led the NL in victories eight times. His 63 career shutouts are the most by a left-hander. He threw an NL-record 5,246 innings, pitching every fourth day in a four-man rotation. His first no-hitter came at the age of 39, a 4-0 victory over Philadelphia on Sept. 16, 1960. The following April, five starts later, Spahn no-hit San Francisco, 1-0.

But his most remarkable start may have come in 1963, when Spahn, 43, dueled the Giants' Juan Marichal for 15 scoreless innings. In the 16th, on his 201st pitch that night, Spahn hung a screwball to Willie Mays, whose homer won it 1-0.

"It became rhythmic that one out followed another," Spahn recalled. "I thought I had to get ahead of Mays and I hung that screwball. Afterward, I was beat. Oh, man. Gangrene set in after I got in the clubhouse. Marichal was 25, and said the only reason he stayed in was he didn't want an old guy to beat him.

"Today, everybody's afraid they're gonna hurt a guy's arm," Spahn said. "A guy gets a hangnail and they're out for a week. I had aches and pains, but I never had an arm I couldn't throw with. Now, guys are on the disabled list forever. I don't think we had a disabled list."


Well, plenty of arms got hurt back then, too. Old ballplayers have a habit of not remembering that. I think a reason is that often pitchers did not come back from injuries.

Spahn was born in 1921. Forty seven other ML pitchers were born that year. If you look at that group of 48, 29, or 60% had their careers end before 1951, when they would have been 30.

Go forward 40 years, and look at pitchers born in 1961. There were 55 ML pitchers born in that year. Twenty six of then had their careers end before 1991, or 47%. Why? I can site a number of reasons:


  1. More jobs due to expansion.

  2. Bigger money means the pitchers want to hang around longer.

  3. When they are hurt, they are allowed to heal.


Spahn, like Nolan Ryan, Roger Clemens and Randy Johnson was a physical freak who could pitch forever. Guys like these are rare.

What I also found interesting in the article was Spahn's evaluation of today's Braves, and how spot on it is:


After Tuesday's statue unveiling, Spahn is eager to watch the Braves play in person that night. "You look at that lineup, there's so many new guys and where did they come from?" asked Spahn, who watches the Braves religiously on TV. "And they're all doing well. Their pitching isn't quite there this year, but the offense has taken over. What amazes me is, where did [Marcus] Giles come from? And [Rafael] Furcal? I didn't think he'd be as good as he is. And the first baseman?

"Who's the third baseman now?" Spahn asked of Vinny Castilla. "He's strong, but nobody changes up speeds on him. I had an instinct for pitching, for changing speeds. The hitters had to [adapt to] my game. With Chipper, everybody tries to pitch him inside. If they make a mistake, he hurts them. The raw talent is in centerfield, that son of a gun. But he doesn't have discipline. He chases balls in the dirt a lot. [Greg] Maddux has had his problems, but he'll get there. And [John] Smoltz has been amazing. He's added pitches, and been able to go out there every day. It seems like the Braves have a dead spot right at the time of the playoffs, but maybe this year will be different."


Congratulations to Warren Spahn on getting a statue honoring him in front of Turner Field!


Posted by David Pinto at 08:46 AM | All-Time Greats | TrackBack (3)