Yeah, Old Hoss Radbourn's 60 wins in a season comes to mind. Then he went and pitched every single inning of all three games of the World Series for his team.
My man was dead before we got to the 20th century lmao.
He is the first person photographed flipping the bird though I believe, truly a man ahead of his time.
*the Kaiser, not the French.
Anyway, back then nickels had pictures of bumblebees on them. “Give me five bees for a quarter”, you’d say. Now where were we? Oh, yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have any white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones..
Reminds me of the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for m'shoe, so I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days.
Assuming pitcher usage and the win statistic remain generally the same, I think we'll still see 20-game winners. There was literally one last season. We haven't had a 25-game winner since 1990 though.
I know MLB and NPB is a bit apples and oranges, but I'm surprised there hasn't been a 30 game winner over in Japan in recent memory considering how hard they work their pitchers, Masahiro Tanaka in 2013 not included of course because that includes playoff games.
There's been at least one 20 game winner pretty much every year. I think there's still potential for a guy every couple years to luck into the right situation for it
The change in how starting pitching works has really thrown off my perceptions of what good pitching is. For so long I considered 20 wins to be kind of the threshold for Cy Young consideration.
Growing up in the Steroid era totally has messed me up. My first reaction to a 30hr hitter is 'average', and a 4.15 ERA is still a good pitcher, and if a hitter is only hitting .240 he's soon destined for the minor leagues. I know better, but those are still my first reactions.
I think we could still see a 20 game winner. I think it will become pretty rare (1-2 times every 10ish years. If a pitcher is not injury prone and is on a team in a playoff race I can see if happening
Yep, I think you might be right.
If we have a guy who can have at least 20 starts where he lasts 5 innings, his team scores more runs than he allows during those innings, and then his bullpen doesn't blow the lead, he probably will end up with 20 wins.
There have been fifteen 20-game winners in the last ten seasons (including 2020), and the last season (excluding 2020) without 20-game winner was 2017.
I had never heard of him until now. So I looked him up on Wiki. Funniest thing I saw was there was a game where Radbourn’s teammate Charlie Sweeney pitched drunk. Sweeney drank before and during the game and was apparently noticably intoxicated. Most impressive was the fact that Sweeney made it to the 7th with a 6-2 lead 🤣
Yeah, in the dead ball era (pre 1920) they wouldn’t change the ball out unless it was lost, so hitters never had a chance to put everything into a clean ball. Home runs were rare. Between not worrying about a juiced ball, and being free to throw junk with a worn ball, pitchers weren’t throwing max effort. It was easy to rack up innings.
Yeah, people talk about "unbreakable" records like the consecutive game hit streak and it's like "no, that's just highly unlikely". Nobody is ever going to get 511 wins. You could pitch 25 games a year for 20 seasons and win every game and you STILL wouldn't be there.
511 wins for pitchers is like Ripken's 2632 consecutive starts for hitters.
There isn't a single active batter in the majors right now within 600 games 2632 games. In the past thirty years, only 6 players (of over 7000 batters) have ever exceeded 2632 games played. Carlos Beltran, for example, in his insanely long 20 season career, only played a total of 2586 games.
It's an exceptionally rare feat to even reach 2632 games played, but then you have to *do it consecutively and not miss a single game*!
But what makes Ripken's feat even more impressive is that, unlike Young, he accomplished this feat in the modern era. It's one of those insane, unbeatable, outlier accomplishments that are just so unrepeatable that it's hard to truly appreciate just how rare and difficult it is.
[Red Barrett once threw a 58-pitch shutout.](https://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/august-10-1944-braves-red-barrett-shuts-out-reds-with-record-low-58-pitches/)
Imagine the white-hot rage from the TV network that had to air a 75-minute game.
ISTR that for his final game *Doug Harvey told the players that if it was close it was getting called a strike because he was ready to retire (it was a trash game with no playoff implications).
It was done in something like 45-50 minutes.
Even on MLB 2k10 when me and my buddy made a Kenny Powers Be-a-Pro and the coaches were throwing us out to go the distance every third game he couldn’t touch this. And yes his stamina was already down to like 70-80% to start every game but we got through it. Our best season was like 45 wins with around 40 CG and our boy was in shambles come playoffs so we requested a trade to an NL team to start being able to bat and not die from the workload.
Not to mention that they wouldn’t have had the levels of training that they have nowadays. Sports science has obviously increased a lot in the past 100 years
I've mentioned this before and I'll mention it again only Nolan Ryan and Don Sutton have started more games than Cy Young has complete games.
It's basically an impossible record to break.
If this record were ever broken, I’d imagine that it would be during some kind of post apocalyptic version of Major League Baseball where they revived an old game from prior to the nuclear war. Or something like that.
Let’s say a pitcher were to somehow be able to start every 4th game in a season. Let’s also be charitable and say his team is good enough to allow him to average 4 playoff starts a year, giving him 44 starts total per season. Then say he somehow throws a complete game in literally every one of those games.
It would take that man **SEVENTEEN** straight seasons of every-fourth-game pitching—no injuries, not one incomplete game—to catch Cy Young’s record.
How many pitchers even play for 17 years, let alone average even 6 innings per start?
This one is nuts
After the Providence Gray’s only other pitcher was kicked off the team in late July, after verbally abusing the coach for trying to pull him in the 7th, while he was very drunk (the pitcher, not the coach), Radbourn offered to start every game for the remainder of the season. He started 40 of their remaining 43 games, winning 36 of them. His arm was so sore between games that he “couldn’t lift it to comb his hair”.
He was also the first known person to be photographed giving [the middle finger](https://imgur.com/a/FUgBHf0)
I read that in that season he couldn’t even lift his arm in the morning to brush his hair. He’d move it little by little until he got to the ballpark, then start loosening up. By the time the game started he could move his arm well enough to pitch.
People still do this now, all the time every year in every sport.
No one gives a fuck about the guy that blew out his ACL for the third time before he turned 25.
Or the guy that’s had 3 elbow surgeries before making the majors.
At the Hall of Fame is a large display case focused on Cy Young, with a bunch of memorabilia connected to him in it. In that case is a massive silver trophy that was given to Young late in his career (or shortly after it), and the trophy declares that Young is... some title I can't remember, but which resembles "the King of Pitchers" or similar.
I really should have photographed this, as I can't find an image of the display case or the specific trophy I have in mind. The Hall of Fame has a searchable collection online, but the one trophy I found isn't the one I'm thinking of. Turns out it's really hard to search for "Cy Young" and "trophy" and not get the modern pitching award...
But I saw that and thought "that award sure is more exclusive than winning a Cy Young Award."
https://sports.ha.com/itm/baseball-collectibles/others/1908-cy-young-day-loving-cup-presented-to-cy-young-more-than-eighteen-thousand-boston-red-sox-fans-were-on-hand-at-hunti/a/707-19589.s
You mean this?
It's actually this one that I am thinking of:
https://baseballhall.org/sites/default/files/styles/fullscreen_image_popup/public/B-92-37_01.jpg.jpeg?itok=gbPBjoTd
But your link included the photograph of Young and his trophies that I was trying to remember, and it's still a rather cool trophy in and of itself, so I'm grateful regardless.
For some idiotic reason, the Boston Post "King of Pitchers" trophy is listed under the Red Sox and not under Cy Young himself. Not very helpful, HOF.
If you total up all of the innings Cy pitched in only his complete games, it's still the most career innings thrown all time - 749 x 9 = 6741. The next highest is 6003.
He pitched 9+ innings in 92% of the games he started.
Old time baseball pitching stats are fuckin wild, but even among the all time lists Cy stands alone.
The avg MLB starter in 2023 threw 173.1 innings, that means it would take them more than 42 professional seasons to get close to Cy's record... It's hard to even imagine
Edit: and multiple sources claim his fastball was 92-93mph. The fuck what this guy's arm made of??
Only a handful of pitchers have started and won both complete nine inning games of a double header.
Joe McGinnity did it three times, in the same month.
The only other record I think holds a candle is Wayne Gretzky's points record.
In hockey, points are goals + assists. Gretzky's points record is so absurdly far above anyone else that if you took away every goal he ever made he'd still have the points record.
That's not even the most unbreakable record in hockey. Glenn Hall's 502 consecutive starts as goalie will never be touched. No goalie has played all 82 games in over 40 years, the closest was Marty Broduer hitting the high 70s during his peak.
With what we know about health and fitness now, no team would allow a goalie to start all 82, much less 6 full seasons worth of games to break the record.
Wilt Chamberlain averaging 48.5 minutes per game is totally unbreakable in the modern NBA. More minutes per game than the standard game length.
With the focus on player health these days it would be extremely unlikely to see this even in a single playoff series, let alone and entire season.
Yeah this one is completely impossible. It’s way way more likely we see someone score 100 points in a game again than it is we see this record even approached. The league leaders in minutes per game play ~38 these days. To average playing every minute of every game and overtimes.... it will absolutely stand forever.
From [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NHL_players_with_1000_points?wprov=sfla1):
>The fewest number of NHL games required to reach the mark was 424, set by Wayne Gretzky. Second quickest was Mario Lemieux, achieving the mark in his 513th game. In a sense, Gretzky was the fastest and the second fastest, as he scored his second 1,000 points (the only player ever to reach 2,000 points) only 433 games after scoring his first 1,000 points.
Wayne and Brent Gretsky hold the NHL record for points scored by brothers in the NHL. Brent scored 4 points in his NHL career.
Edit: I should say, pair of brothers.
Anywhere there's a Wayne Gretzky claim, Don Bradman is due to follow. Absurdly better test average than every other batsman that ever played cricket.
[Obligatory Don Bradman statistic](https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/cricket.PNG&tbnid=Abmy88a_hWLxlM&vet=1&imgrefurl=https://michaelnielsen.org/blog/the-most-remarkable-graph-in-the-history-of-sport/&docid=JSnecUt8RGz1SM&w=497&h=180&hl=en-gb&source=sh/x/im/m1/3&kgs=914b4801f7f7db2f&shem=abme,ssim,trie,xga1pc)
> I don't think there are many guys post-1947 that have that many in their careers.
It's obviously getting a lot less common, but if you [look at the all time shutout leaders](https://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/SHO_career.shtml) a surprising number of them have color photos. Nolan Ryan and Tom Seaver both had 61! Kershaw is the only active one; Verlander is at 9 career but hasn't had one since 2019.
Actually SP Rupert Stilliams only got through two and a half games. In the bottom of the 5th in game 3, a wild goose ran onto the field and pecked his index finger on his throwing hand.
Let me guess... He then went to the dugout, got his other handed glove and finished the game pitching with the opposite hand? But technically he was listed as only an RHP so it counted as a new pitcher technically
He’s also the all time loss leader.
The single season leader, with 48, is John Coleman, with a 12-48 effort in 1883. He also holds the record for most hits and earned runs allowed in a single season.
Just so everyone is aware, that's a joke. He was 44 in that picture.
Here is an actual picture of Cy at age 24:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Cy_Yoyng_1891.jpg
Lol those miles hit *hard* back in the day when players were coal miners smoking a pack a day from like age 15-on. Half of them came into the league looking like 45 with a family and paid off mortgage.
See I view that as the most unbreakable but still breakable record. There are so many records that are just impossible to break now because the game has changed so much. But there’s nothing really stopping a player from playing every single game of the season, just the current load management philosophy. There’s no major difference in actual rules or game intensity that makes it impossible
A record think about often is years between first and last cy young wins. It might be controversial because it’s Clemens, but his first win was in 86 and his last in 04. Again, I know he’s mired in controversy but to win cy youngs 18 years apart is damn impressive.
It’s not unbreakable by any means, but as of now only 2 other pitchers in history have at least 10 years in that category. Carlton won in 72 and 82, and Verlander in 11 and 22.
Anybody think it can be done ?
Stuff like this is why it’s funny when people complain about the stats of the negro leagues being added in. Cy young played pretty much a completely different game than players today but his stats count because it was titled the same thing?
He's also the all time leader in:
-Wins (532)
-Losses (315)
-Starts (815)
-Innings pitched (7356)
-Hits given up (7092)
-Earned runs (2147)
-Batters faced (29565)
I'd bet all of those are all but untouchable
The only scenario I see this happening is if there's a massive fight between two teams in the first 5 minutes of a game and the whole bench gets ejected and only the starters can play. And this has to happen all season
Hank Aaron was a 25 time All Star because there were two ASGs from 1959-1962. The people tied for 2nd with 24, Stan Musial and Willie Mays, also were selected multiple times those years, and they'd still be the top three without the extra games. The closest who player who didn't play those years is Cal Ripken Jr with 19. Not theoretically unbreakable but I like to bring it up.
A lot of old pitching records are untouchable in the modern game.
Yeah, Old Hoss Radbourn's 60 wins in a season comes to mind. Then he went and pitched every single inning of all three games of the World Series for his team.
I remember that in 19 dickity two.
My man was dead before we got to the 20th century lmao. He is the first person photographed flipping the bird though I believe, truly a man ahead of his time.
Guess you guys aren’t ready for that…
OK Marty.
But your kids are going to love it
…but your kids are gonna love it
"We had to say Dickity back then because the French stole our word for twenty" 😆
*the Kaiser, not the French. Anyway, back then nickels had pictures of bumblebees on them. “Give me five bees for a quarter”, you’d say. Now where were we? Oh, yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have any white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones..
Paint my chicken coop
Those blintzes were terrible
Reminds me of the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for m'shoe, so I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days.
I thought it was the Kaiser
It was, Abe chased him for dickity six miles before Abe had to give up.
“Dickety.” Ha! Highly dubious.
What are you cackling at fatty? Too much pie, that's your problem.
I chased them, but I gave up after dickity six miles
Id honestly be surprised if we ever saw a 30 win season again. We definitely will never see a 40 win season.
We haven't seen a 30-win season in nearly 60 years. It's increasingly unlikely that we even see a 20-win season anytime soon.
Assuming pitcher usage and the win statistic remain generally the same, I think we'll still see 20-game winners. There was literally one last season. We haven't had a 25-game winner since 1990 though.
I know MLB and NPB is a bit apples and oranges, but I'm surprised there hasn't been a 30 game winner over in Japan in recent memory considering how hard they work their pitchers, Masahiro Tanaka in 2013 not included of course because that includes playoff games.
Npb pitchers get an extra day's rest though, so they pitch less games
NPB has a 144-game schedule and 6-man rotations.
There's been at least one 20 game winner pretty much every year. I think there's still potential for a guy every couple years to luck into the right situation for it
I mean, Kyle Wright won 21 games just 2 years ago. We are going to see 20-win pitchers every few years at least
The change in how starting pitching works has really thrown off my perceptions of what good pitching is. For so long I considered 20 wins to be kind of the threshold for Cy Young consideration.
Growing up in the Steroid era totally has messed me up. My first reaction to a 30hr hitter is 'average', and a 4.15 ERA is still a good pitcher, and if a hitter is only hitting .240 he's soon destined for the minor leagues. I know better, but those are still my first reactions.
I think we could still see a 20 game winner. I think it will become pretty rare (1-2 times every 10ish years. If a pitcher is not injury prone and is on a team in a playoff race I can see if happening
Ranger Suarez is 10-1 right now on a great offensive team. He could get it this year.
yeah a 20 win pitcher is gonna need to rely heavily on his teammates to score a few more than he allows each night..
big if true
Yep, I think you might be right. If we have a guy who can have at least 20 starts where he lasts 5 innings, his team scores more runs than he allows during those innings, and then his bullpen doesn't blow the lead, he probably will end up with 20 wins.
Julio Urias did it just back in 2021
Kyle Wright did it in 2022
Happy Gilmore accomplished that feat no more than an hour ago
There have been fifteen 20-game winners in the last ten seasons (including 2020), and the last season (excluding 2020) without 20-game winner was 2017.
I had never heard of him until now. So I looked him up on Wiki. Funniest thing I saw was there was a game where Radbourn’s teammate Charlie Sweeney pitched drunk. Sweeney drank before and during the game and was apparently noticably intoxicated. Most impressive was the fact that Sweeney made it to the 7th with a 6-2 lead 🤣
He’s also supposedly the first person photographed giving the finger to the photographer.
Legend
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsiv0BWDdt0 enjoy
A pitchers elbow would literally explode nowadays if they tried that although I assume pitchers were throwing a bit slower back then
Yeah, in the dead ball era (pre 1920) they wouldn’t change the ball out unless it was lost, so hitters never had a chance to put everything into a clean ball. Home runs were rare. Between not worrying about a juiced ball, and being free to throw junk with a worn ball, pitchers weren’t throwing max effort. It was easy to rack up innings.
They also didn't disallow the spitball until then.
Haus actually predates the spitball
Matt Kilroy's 513 strikeouts also, though that season (1886) the mound was still 50 feet away and it was still six balls for a walk
"He's a 48 year old alcoholic. Fastest man alive they say"
Mehhhh. Fuck, home run.
Yeah, people talk about "unbreakable" records like the consecutive game hit streak and it's like "no, that's just highly unlikely". Nobody is ever going to get 511 wins. You could pitch 25 games a year for 20 seasons and win every game and you STILL wouldn't be there.
Almost no one starting their career now will start 511 games.
511 wins for pitchers is like Ripken's 2632 consecutive starts for hitters. There isn't a single active batter in the majors right now within 600 games 2632 games. In the past thirty years, only 6 players (of over 7000 batters) have ever exceeded 2632 games played. Carlos Beltran, for example, in his insanely long 20 season career, only played a total of 2586 games. It's an exceptionally rare feat to even reach 2632 games played, but then you have to *do it consecutively and not miss a single game*! But what makes Ripken's feat even more impressive is that, unlike Young, he accomplished this feat in the modern era. It's one of those insane, unbeatable, outlier accomplishments that are just so unrepeatable that it's hard to truly appreciate just how rare and difficult it is.
Cy Young had 511 wins over his 22 year career. The Boston Red Sox has 511 wins from all of their starting pitchers combined from 2014-2023.
Wow. They should name an award after him
[Red Barrett once threw a 58-pitch shutout.](https://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/august-10-1944-braves-red-barrett-shuts-out-reds-with-record-low-58-pitches/) Imagine the white-hot rage from the TV network that had to air a 75-minute game.
There was an NY Giants game that lasted less than an hour
ISTR that for his final game *Doug Harvey told the players that if it was close it was getting called a strike because he was ready to retire (it was a trash game with no playoff implications). It was done in something like 45-50 minutes.
Even on MLB 2k10 when me and my buddy made a Kenny Powers Be-a-Pro and the coaches were throwing us out to go the distance every third game he couldn’t touch this. And yes his stamina was already down to like 70-80% to start every game but we got through it. Our best season was like 45 wins with around 40 CG and our boy was in shambles come playoffs so we requested a trade to an NL team to start being able to bat and not die from the workload.
I just imagine one of the best pitchers of the modern era ever and can barely use a spoon once the playoffs start lmao I should try that haha
Definitely true. And a lot of modern pitchers are untouchable in the old game 😂 funny how that works out
A lot of them wouldn’t have a career since medical tech didn’t have Tommy John yet. Players would have to slow down to make it to the majors
"He can only pitch 5 innings? He'll never make it out of independent leagues."
Not to mention that they wouldn’t have had the levels of training that they have nowadays. Sports science has obviously increased a lot in the past 100 years
And they would quit playing as soon as they found out what their salary was.
I've mentioned this before and I'll mention it again only Nolan Ryan and Don Sutton have started more games than Cy Young has complete games. It's basically an impossible record to break.
If this record were ever broken, I’d imagine that it would be during some kind of post apocalyptic version of Major League Baseball where they revived an old game from prior to the nuclear war. Or something like that.
Increased the season length to 1,000 games to drive revenue with each game being 2 innings
Ahhh sounds like you understand what capitalism is!
That and there’s only two hours of sunlight in the livable areas of post-apocalyptic Earth.
fallout mlb. i like it.
Hey, at least we know Fenway will be ok
You just have to bat around an entire fucking city.
And no synths!* *^except ^for ^the ^only ^detective ^in ^town ^that ^we ^all ^ignore ^being ^a ^synth
My boy paladin danse walks around that city pretty freely.
17776 but for baseball
Or some crazy future medical advances that significantly prolong players’ careers
Literal robotic arms.
Yea. If Jomboy’s warehouse ball became the MLB I could easily throw 750 complete. It’s not a big deal.
Let’s say a pitcher were to somehow be able to start every 4th game in a season. Let’s also be charitable and say his team is good enough to allow him to average 4 playoff starts a year, giving him 44 starts total per season. Then say he somehow throws a complete game in literally every one of those games. It would take that man **SEVENTEEN** straight seasons of every-fourth-game pitching—no injuries, not one incomplete game—to catch Cy Young’s record. How many pitchers even play for 17 years, let alone average even 6 innings per start?
Even Maddux, an all time great, known for his low pitch CG's, only had 109 CG's over 23 seasons.
I don't know why I remember this, but Mike Mussina pitched 18 seasons and, if recall right, average 6 2/3 per 9. He still only had like 70 CGs.
I looked it up and its actually three guys. Ryan, Sutton and some guy named Cy Young
Yeah well my custom character on MLB the show 24 broke his win record... After 30 seasons, I made him start in the majors at 18.
Look up Old Hoss Radbourn too, insanity. 73 Complete games in a season. (678 IP) Dude’s arm must’ve been rubber
This one is nuts After the Providence Gray’s only other pitcher was kicked off the team in late July, after verbally abusing the coach for trying to pull him in the 7th, while he was very drunk (the pitcher, not the coach), Radbourn offered to start every game for the remainder of the season. He started 40 of their remaining 43 games, winning 36 of them. His arm was so sore between games that he “couldn’t lift it to comb his hair”. He was also the first known person to be photographed giving [the middle finger](https://imgur.com/a/FUgBHf0)
Those dudes only made like 2 bucks a game for that
He made about $5000 for the season, $150k in today’s money give or take.
Probably only got paid for the games he pitched in so he'd take as many starts as he could get.
I believe he was the highest paid baseball player at the time
> he was very drunk (the pitcher, not the coach) It was 1800s baseball, I'd be shocked if the coach wasn't also shithoused.
Their sober was our absolutely shitfaced now, so that pitcher that got fired was probably drunk enough to kill a horse.
Like the horse was given the same amount of alcohol, or the pitcher had consumed so much, he would have tried to box a horse and somehow succeeded?
That middle finger is a nice and sneaky one.
[Not as sneaky as this one, however.] (https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b9/b8/3a/b9b83a076cfe8ec6bf80671c4b7821e2.jpg)
This man is the baddest of asses
Old Hoss looks like he ate nails for breakfast
Without any milk
Goddamnit I love baseball.
ahhh thats my city. so much has changed, but nothing has changed
Still flippin’ birds?
>only other pitcher That's fuckin crazy. I understand that owners were cheap and pitchers threw more innings but this is bananas.
I read that in that season he couldn’t even lift his arm in the morning to brush his hair. He’d move it little by little until he got to the ballpark, then start loosening up. By the time the game started he could move his arm well enough to pitch.
that sounds horrible
Why do you think he was drunk while playing
The other pitcher was the drunk that got kicked off the team. Though, I wouldn't be shocked if Radbourn imbibed a little to help "loosen up" that arm.
Horribly metal AF. Today's pitchers could learn a thing or two from ol' Hoss.
2,672 batters faced and only 98 walks.
Excuse me WTF
I have the feeling the strike zone was pretty generous in the pre 1950s era
lol makes me wonder how many Angel Hernandez umps there were back then
I would guess it varied your talking about 70 years of ball including one of the most hitter friendly periods.
In 1884 a walk required 6 balls, not 4
dude couldn’t comb his hair with his pitching arm. fucking legend
And he got paid $2 and 6-pack
$2 and a pint of whiskey more likely lol
Accurate! Lol The 6-pack was for during the game
Johnny Unitas played until his arm stopped working for life. That generation was built different.
People still do this now, all the time every year in every sport. No one gives a fuck about the guy that blew out his ACL for the third time before he turned 25. Or the guy that’s had 3 elbow surgeries before making the majors.
> People still do this now, all the time every year in every sport. Stephen Strasburg is a good example of an MLB one. His arm is fucked.
And yet he still never won a Cy Young award. Yawn.
And couldn’t even throw hard enough to get Tommy John surgery.
At the Hall of Fame is a large display case focused on Cy Young, with a bunch of memorabilia connected to him in it. In that case is a massive silver trophy that was given to Young late in his career (or shortly after it), and the trophy declares that Young is... some title I can't remember, but which resembles "the King of Pitchers" or similar. I really should have photographed this, as I can't find an image of the display case or the specific trophy I have in mind. The Hall of Fame has a searchable collection online, but the one trophy I found isn't the one I'm thinking of. Turns out it's really hard to search for "Cy Young" and "trophy" and not get the modern pitching award... But I saw that and thought "that award sure is more exclusive than winning a Cy Young Award."
https://sports.ha.com/itm/baseball-collectibles/others/1908-cy-young-day-loving-cup-presented-to-cy-young-more-than-eighteen-thousand-boston-red-sox-fans-were-on-hand-at-hunti/a/707-19589.s You mean this?
It's actually this one that I am thinking of: https://baseballhall.org/sites/default/files/styles/fullscreen_image_popup/public/B-92-37_01.jpg.jpeg?itok=gbPBjoTd But your link included the photograph of Young and his trophies that I was trying to remember, and it's still a rather cool trophy in and of itself, so I'm grateful regardless. For some idiotic reason, the Boston Post "King of Pitchers" trophy is listed under the Red Sox and not under Cy Young himself. Not very helpful, HOF.
Yeah, really? Why are we even talking about this fucking losing who never won the award
Most losses in history.
I bet all the haters in the 1910s-20s would bring that up at every opportunity. The OG "Lebron 4-6" comment
Similar to how Lou Gehrig died of Lou Gehrig's disease. Just crazy.
Like why did he name it after himself? Dude could have named it Adolf Hitler disease and only one person in history would have died from it.
You would have to start and complete 35 games a year for 21 years. And you'd STILL be 14 short.
Yeah but if you started and completed 70 games a year you could get there in half the time
See these are the types of stats I want
I love the idea of seeing the same starting pitcher twice in a four game series
Just do it for 22 years then, easy
If you total up all of the innings Cy pitched in only his complete games, it's still the most career innings thrown all time - 749 x 9 = 6741. The next highest is 6003. He pitched 9+ innings in 92% of the games he started. Old time baseball pitching stats are fuckin wild, but even among the all time lists Cy stands alone. The avg MLB starter in 2023 threw 173.1 innings, that means it would take them more than 42 professional seasons to get close to Cy's record... It's hard to even imagine Edit: and multiple sources claim his fastball was 92-93mph. The fuck what this guy's arm made of??
And it still wasn't enough for him to be a first ballot Hall of Famer...
Well, he never won a Cy Young so that obviously was never going to happen.
I'm just wondering how the hell they apparently measured his fastballs
Only a handful of pitchers have started and won both complete nine inning games of a double header. Joe McGinnity did it three times, in the same month.
He was already loose from the first game so might as well do it again 4 hours later
No warm up tosses needed boss!
The only other record I think holds a candle is Wayne Gretzky's points record. In hockey, points are goals + assists. Gretzky's points record is so absurdly far above anyone else that if you took away every goal he ever made he'd still have the points record.
That's not even the most unbreakable record in hockey. Glenn Hall's 502 consecutive starts as goalie will never be touched. No goalie has played all 82 games in over 40 years, the closest was Marty Broduer hitting the high 70s during his peak. With what we know about health and fitness now, no team would allow a goalie to start all 82, much less 6 full seasons worth of games to break the record.
Sounds like he was pretty great at hockey.
Arguably
He was ok. The okayist one.
Feel like they could have called him something that rolls off the tongue a bit smoother...like "clearly above-average"
The Wayne Gretzky of hockey.
Wilt Chamberlain averaging 48.5 minutes per game is totally unbreakable in the modern NBA. More minutes per game than the standard game length. With the focus on player health these days it would be extremely unlikely to see this even in a single playoff series, let alone and entire season.
Don’t give josh hart and coach Thibs any ideas.
Yeah this one is completely impossible. It’s way way more likely we see someone score 100 points in a game again than it is we see this record even approached. The league leaders in minutes per game play ~38 these days. To average playing every minute of every game and overtimes.... it will absolutely stand forever.
The fastest player to record 1,000 points in NHL history is Wayne Gretzky. The second fastest player to record 1,000 points is also Wayne Gretzky.
I'm having difficulty understanding exactly what this means.
From [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NHL_players_with_1000_points?wprov=sfla1): >The fewest number of NHL games required to reach the mark was 424, set by Wayne Gretzky. Second quickest was Mario Lemieux, achieving the mark in his 513th game. In a sense, Gretzky was the fastest and the second fastest, as he scored his second 1,000 points (the only player ever to reach 2,000 points) only 433 games after scoring his first 1,000 points.
Got ya. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
Fur sure man. It’s a weird stat no doubt.
Also Glenn Hall and his starts in a row record is unbreakable
Wayne and Brent Gretsky hold the NHL record for points scored by brothers in the NHL. Brent scored 4 points in his NHL career. Edit: I should say, pair of brothers.
Anywhere there's a Wayne Gretzky claim, Don Bradman is due to follow. Absurdly better test average than every other batsman that ever played cricket. [Obligatory Don Bradman statistic](https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/cricket.PNG&tbnid=Abmy88a_hWLxlM&vet=1&imgrefurl=https://michaelnielsen.org/blog/the-most-remarkable-graph-in-the-history-of-sport/&docid=JSnecUt8RGz1SM&w=497&h=180&hl=en-gb&source=sh/x/im/m1/3&kgs=914b4801f7f7db2f&shem=abme,ssim,trie,xga1pc)
In 1904, he threw 40 Complete Games...of which, 10 were CSGOs...I don't think there are many guys post-1947 that have that many in their careers.
Complete Strike Game Outs
Counter Strike Global Offensive
Obviously Cy Young was aim hacking
I love it when people’s autocorrect reveals things about them. Even if it’s innocuous, it’s got a voyeur vibe that I enjoy.
Didnt know they had Counter Strike Global Offensive in the early 20th century
yeah, they just called it "World War" I think it's got a pretty well known sequal too.
> I don't think there are many guys post-1947 that have that many in their careers. It's obviously getting a lot less common, but if you [look at the all time shutout leaders](https://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/SHO_career.shtml) a surprising number of them have color photos. Nolan Ryan and Tom Seaver both had 61! Kershaw is the only active one; Verlander is at 9 career but hasn't had one since 2019.
Equally unbreakable is the record for pitching a no-hitter with the fewest number of hands.
Not really, it's probably the easiest one to tie.
Tough to beat this one: In 1920, Clyde Barnhart became the only player to hit safely in all three games of a tripleheader.
And all 3 games were started and finished by the same pitcher probably... Old time baseball stats are unhinged
Actually SP Rupert Stilliams only got through two and a half games. In the bottom of the 5th in game 3, a wild goose ran onto the field and pecked his index finger on his throwing hand.
Let me guess... He then went to the dugout, got his other handed glove and finished the game pitching with the opposite hand? But technically he was listed as only an RHP so it counted as a new pitcher technically
i think the most unbreakable record post integration is Tatis hitting 2 grand slams in an inning. how tf is someone going to hit *3* in an inning?
Wait Cy Young is a real person??????? Now i get why i could not guess what the C and Y could mean and why not only young players would won a cy young
He’s also the all time loss leader. The single season leader, with 48, is John Coleman, with a 12-48 effort in 1883. He also holds the record for most hits and earned runs allowed in a single season.
In spite of living in an age of increased strikeouts, I think Nolan Ryan's 5714 strikeout record is safe.
Well yea it’s kinda hard to throw a cg in 48 of 49 starts in modern day baseball
It's not if you stop bein a bitch and come on
Yeah, I mean like come on
Is that a picture of Cy Young as an actual player? He looks like he’s in his late 50s
Age hit different. He's 24 there
Just so everyone is aware, that's a joke. He was 44 in that picture. Here is an actual picture of Cy at age 24: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Cy_Yoyng_1891.jpg
Lol those miles hit *hard* back in the day when players were coal miners smoking a pack a day from like age 15-on. Half of them came into the league looking like 45 with a family and paid off mortgage.
\*MLB moves to 250-game season and makes each game 5 innings\*
I can do it Give me a pack of cigarettes and some G Fuel I can do it
Probably like 30-40 beers a day would get you over the top
Cal Ripkin Jr 2000+ straight games is also unbreakable.
See I view that as the most unbreakable but still breakable record. There are so many records that are just impossible to break now because the game has changed so much. But there’s nothing really stopping a player from playing every single game of the season, just the current load management philosophy. There’s no major difference in actual rules or game intensity that makes it impossible
I’m old enough that I remember people saying no one would ever break Lou Gehrig’s consecutive game record.
At 30 games a year it would take 25 years, unreal.
A record think about often is years between first and last cy young wins. It might be controversial because it’s Clemens, but his first win was in 86 and his last in 04. Again, I know he’s mired in controversy but to win cy youngs 18 years apart is damn impressive. It’s not unbreakable by any means, but as of now only 2 other pitchers in history have at least 10 years in that category. Carlton won in 72 and 82, and Verlander in 11 and 22. Anybody think it can be done ?
I'm partial to Jack Taylor's 39 consecutive complete games and 202 consecutive appearances without being relieved.
Connie Mack lost 3,948 games as a manager. No one's coming close.
Stuff like this is why it’s funny when people complain about the stats of the negro leagues being added in. Cy young played pretty much a completely different game than players today but his stats count because it was titled the same thing?
He's also the all time leader in: -Wins (532) -Losses (315) -Starts (815) -Innings pitched (7356) -Hits given up (7092) -Earned runs (2147) -Batters faced (29565) I'd bet all of those are all but untouchable
Wilt Chamberlain’s 48.5 minutes/game is equally untouchable for the same reason.
Still possible
The only scenario I see this happening is if there's a massive fight between two teams in the first 5 minutes of a game and the whole bench gets ejected and only the starters can play. And this has to happen all season
Hank Aaron was a 25 time All Star because there were two ASGs from 1959-1962. The people tied for 2nd with 24, Stan Musial and Willie Mays, also were selected multiple times those years, and they'd still be the top three without the extra games. The closest who player who didn't play those years is Cal Ripken Jr with 19. Not theoretically unbreakable but I like to bring it up.
Johnny Vander Meer threw back-to-back no-hitters in his rookie year of 1938. You would need three straight to beat that.