While watching Roy Halladay pitch against the Yankees shortly before the All-Star Break, a friend commented to me as to how much of a workhorse Halladay is. He threw a career-high nine complete games in 2003, and his two-hit shutout against the Yankees the other night was his league-leading seventh CG of the year, tying his mark from last year. Seven complete games at the Break is unheard of in the “hold+save” era, so by today’s standards, Halladay is indeed a workhorse.
I commented about this stat to a co-worker at the end of last week and was told to look at the 1980 Oakland Athletics pitching staff to “see how hard Billy Martin worked those guys.” What I found blew my mind. In 1980, the 83-79 A’s and manager Martin used a five-headed monster consisting of Rick Langford, Mike Norris, Matt Keough, Steve McCatty and Brian Kingman to start an unbelievable 159 games, and between the five they totaled 93 complete games (28/24/20/11/10, respectively). Closer Bob Lacey, who naturally only scrounged up six saves that season, added a complete game for good measure (Wait, what? A complete game from your closer?), giving them 94 as a team. A closer look at this tells me that, taking into account their staff’s 13 total saves, the 1980 Athletics pitching staff lost 23 games in which their pitchers went the distance. Wow. In addition, in the three years that Martin was in Oakland between his stints with the Yankees, the starting rotation (which was pretty much intact for all three seasons) tallied 196 complete games (an average of more than 65 per season).
So who holds the record for the most complete games in a single season, you ask? Cy Young? Actually, no. The record-holder is Will White, who tossed 75 complete games in 1879, winning 43 games and losing 31 (apparently there was a forfeit in there somewhere). He threw a whopping 680 innings that year, and managed just four shutouts despite a 2.33 earned run average. So nice try 1980 Oakland A’s, and nice try Roy Halladay, but I think we’ve found our true workhorse (not to take anything away from the great Cy Young, who more than doubled White’s career CG total with 749, but Ol’ Cy never even topped 48 in a season…slacker).
For good measure, Bob Feller threw 36 complete games in 1946, and Greg Maddux is your active career leader with 109 total in 23 seasons (he had 10 CGs in a season twice) – 71 more than Halladay, who’s been in the majors for half as long.
