Before we delve into tributes to two pitchers who left their marks on the game, two football games that merit comment, and a race, there is one thing we want you to understand.
TRAVIS KELCE AND WHAT’S HER NAME ARE NOT SPORTS.
And this is the only time you will read about them in this column.
(FOND FAREWELLS)—–
When Will We See Players Like TheseAgain?
Every year about this time, those of us who live for the next baseball season and live for the first day a spiked foot steps across a baseline in Florida or in Arizona bid farewell to some young men who are too old to play our game anymore.
We’re going to forego our usual appraisal of the Cardinals and the Royals today. Both have seasons best left in the quickly descending night of the 2023 baseball season. Instead, we want to say some things about two guys whose careers will far overshadow their final successful days in struggling seasons.
We Missouri baseball fans have been blessed by two remarkable pitchers who are leaving, or likely to leave, the game with memorable performances and memorable careers.
(WAINWRIGHT)—Adam Wainwright struggled all year He wanted to to reach a goal, to realize a dream, to accomplish something rare in today’s game. He finally won his 200th game.
Remember that night. It will be years before we see something like that again.
It wasn’t just a personal goal. It was a professional goal. He has known that in today’s game, 200 wins is a Hall of Fame credential.
Two-hundred baseball wins seems to be a modest amount for those who have watched the greats of the past. But in today’s game of 100 pitch limits, five-man rotations and parades of pitchers to the operating room for Tommy John or other surgeries, 200 wins is remarkable. This year, for example, only five pitchers threw more than 200 innings. And there were only 35 complete games pitched.
When did the last THREE-hundred game winner throw his final pitch? Fourteen seasons ago, when Randy Johnson retired with 303 victories. Since 1990, only four pitchers have reached 300—Johnson, Tom Glavin, Greg Maddux, and Roger Clemens. All are in Cooperstown but Clemens, a victim of the performance enhancing drugs era.
Only five pitchers ended this year with 200 victories. Justin Verlander, 40, has 257. The Royals’ Zack Greinke has 225. Former Missouri Tiger Max Scherzer is in at 214 and is 38. 35-year old Clayton Kershaw of the Dodgers has 210 and Wainwright with his 200. All of them are in the twilight of their careers or at the end.
Are all of these guys, even Wainwright, bound for Cooperstown some day? Yes, although most of them are unlikely to be first-ballot selections.
Brady Farkas, writing on FanNation a few days ago, pointed out that Wainwright’s 200th win makes him unique. He is the only player (not just pitchers) whose career has been within the divisional era (there have been 10,331 of them) to hit ten or more home runs in their careers (2,395) AND win 200 games as a pitcher (36).
He also has 75 RBI and a career .193 batting average.
The first pitch he saw as a major league hitterr turned into a home run.
He is a three-time All-Star. He has two Golden Gloves and a Silver Slugger bat and a World Series Ring. He never won the Cy Young Award (runnerup a couple of times), but he led the league in wins twice, led the league in innings pitched two times, and was a 20-game winner in 2014.
And, from all accounts, he’s been a class act.
When will someone else win number 200? It might be quite a while.
Cole Hamels has 163 wins and he’s 39. Johnny Cueto is next at 144. He’s 37. Gerrit Cole seems to have the best chance. He’s only 32 but has 145 wins. If he has three more years such as the last three years, he could be within 10-15 wins of 200. Aaron Nole is 30 with 90 wins. The biggest winner for pitchers less than 30 is Jose Berria, who is 29 and has 83 victories.
Wainwright’s final game was a seven-inning masterpiece. He was given only one run and he tenaciously battled to keep that lead. It was a final curve, to Milwaukee’s Josh Donaldson that induced him to fly out to end the seventh. He had gone into the game with back spasms and struggles during his pre-game warmup and he knew he had to make one more pitch, get one more out, before leaving the mound after the 7th inning.
“I know its gonna hurt. I’ve gotta go one more time over the top and get this ball to have a little more depth to it. I think I can do one more of those,” he recalled in an interview with Post-Dispatch reporter Derrick Gould and others a few days later. “I knew in that moment, from up on top, that I had one more pitch.”
His discussion of his last pitch is a masterpiece in describing, in real not Hollywood dramatics, all that went into it—the curve to Milwaukees’s Josh Donaldson that induced Donaldson to fly out. “I literally left everything I had out there,” he said a few days later. Watch this rare insight we fans don’t usually get to hear.
(screenshot from Gould’s article, Sept. 27, 2023)
He thought he might have another start or two before the end, but when tried to play catch a couple of days after the Milwaukee game, he hurt badly enough that he decided he had thrown his last pitch.
He has herniated discs that will need repair and says his shoulder needs looking-at because he can’t lift his arm over his shoulder without pain.
He goes out with others recognizing his uniqueness, competitors who appreciate not only what he has done but what he is. Cincinnati’s Joey Votto presented Wainwright with a bouquet before the game and eloquently explained the respect the game has for Wainwright later in the locker room—
“This game gets harder not only the older you get but as your tools fade. To be able to stay put and still be a contributor at you know, 30, 35, 40 and beyond, which Adam has done, and to be steady with it, is admirable. There’s a reason why the St. Louis fanbase is celebrating this weekend, because it’s rare, rare is the pitcher who can compete this deep into their career, can stay with one organization, can be a productive player, productive member of the community, and to me that’s what I admire the most. Game recognizes game.”
Votto knows what he’s talking about because he is a Wainwright kind of guy—17 years with one team, almost 40, finishing a disappointing season after having surgery on his shoulder, an aging veteran on a team that has seen a good crop of promising young talent come up from the minors. An extended standing ovation that prompted the umpire to delay the last game of year in Cincinnati so he could enjoy it showed the affection for Votto in Cincinnati that Wainwright has gotten in St. Louis. The crowd seemed to realize it was seeing a great player for the last time although Votto hasn’t said yet that he’s retiring.
And Votto has a sort-of connection to St. Louis. A Canadian native, now a naturalized American citizen, he and former Cardinal Larry Walker are the only Canadians in major league history to have 2,000 hits, 1,000 runs batted in, and 300 homers.
Game recognizes game.
So Wainwright has reached his goal and has come to the end of the line as a major league pitcher, the last of a generation of Redbirds that included last year’s retirees, Albert Pujols and Yadier Molina.
The torch has now fully been passed to the next generation. We wonder who among them in what has become a game for contract gypsies will be as beloved fifteen, twenty years from now as Adam Wainwright is to this generation of fans.
There’s a red jacket in his future when he joins the Cardinals Hall of Fame. And eventually, we think, a bronze plaque on the wall of a building in a picturesque little upper New York town.
(GREINKE)—We might have seen the last of Zack Greinke of the Royals Sunday. As was the case with Adam Wainwright, he finished with a season that was far less than he hoped it would be. But in his last game, he was young again.
Greinke went five innings, gave up only one run on four hits and struck out two. He finishes the season 2-15—and a standing ovation from the crowd.
He’s a free agent seemingly with limited possibilities for another season in the majors. We don’t know if he has, or had, some goals he wanted to reach this year—as Wainwright wanted to get his 200th win. He did reach 225 wins with the outing Sunday, putting him ahead of Hall of Famers Jim Bunning and Catfish Hunter on the all-time win list. But he finished about twenty strikeouts short of 3,000.
But there is a significant strikeout milestone he DID get. On May 13th, he fanned Brewers rookie Joey Weimer to become only the fifth pitcher ever to strike out 1,000 different batters.
(The Royals created a special commemorative image for the accomplishment.)
That night, he joined Nolan Ryan (1182), Randy Johnson (1123), Greg Maddux (1049) and Roger Clemens (1022). He finished with two more than Clemens.
The one thing that has eluded him is a World Series ring.
He started with the Royals, but battled depression and social anxiety and almost gave up the game after leading the league in losses (17) in 2005. He left spring training early in 2006 but returned late in the season to make three relief appearances. He returned to starting pitcher status in 2008 and the next year won the Cy Young Award by going 16-8 and leading the majors with a 1.66 ERA.
His best years were eight seasons with the Dodgers and the Diamondbacks when he went 134-49, a .732 winning percentage.
And he was a pretty good hitter for a pitcher. He finished with a .225 batting average and won two Silver Slugger Awards. As with Wainwright, his first major league hit was a home run. He also succeeded in nine out of ten stolen base attempts. He pinch hit in the 2021 world series and became the first pitcher to have a pinch hit since Jack Bentley of the New York Giants in 1923.
He is, as of today, the last pitcher to get a hit in a postseason baseball game.
Greinke admitted after signing with the Royals that he had hoped to stay in the National League for a couple more years because he hoped for more chances to hit. But when the NL adopted the designated hitter, he looked to returning to the Royals. He hoped there might be a chance to pitch AND be a designated hitter some time when the team was short at that position. But he never got the chance. He cited Kansas City’s fan enthusiasm and his relationship with former Royals official Dayton Moore, for signing with the team in March, 2022. He pitched the last two opening days for the team. His 2022 start was the first time he’d pitched for the Royals on opening day since 2010. It set one of those arcane records baseball is so full of—the largest gap between opening day starts for the same team. He finished his career by starting the first and the last games of the 2023 season for the Royals.
Cooperstown for him, too? Wouldn’t it be nice if both Greinke and Wainwright could go in on the same day?
(CARDS/ROYALS)—The Cardinals had their first losing season since 2007 when they were 78-84. The Royals tied their record for losses with 106. The last year the Royals had a winning record was their World Series-winning year of 2015.
The Royals finished on a hopeful note, going 14-12 in September—their only winning month of the year (well, they were 1-0 in October). The Cardinals had only two winning months, going 15-13 in May and 14-13 in July. The Royals finished the year going 12-5.
The Cardinals’ Miles Mikolas was one of the five pitchers to throw 200 innings this year—201.1. No MLB pitcher gave up more hits than he did—226. He faced 860 batters, the most in the major leagues. His 35 starts were the most of any pitcher in the majors. He finished 9-13 with a 4.78 ERA.
Relief pitching was a sore point all year. Cardinals relievers saved 36 of 64 games, 56%. Royals relievers held on 53% of the time. Neither was anywhere close to the top in the final rankings. The Royals pitchers had a 5.17 ERA. Cardinals pitchers were at 4.79.
And get this: There were 4,840 games this year. There were only 35 complete games by pitchers. The Royals had three of them. No pitcher went the distance this year for St. Louis.
But both showed a lot of young talent, particularly the Royals’ Bobby Witt who joined the 3030 club with thirty home runs and 49 stolen bases. The Cardinals promise a busy off-season. Several of the Royals’ young hopefuls didn’t pan out, leaving fans to speculate on whether the team will invest in the free agent market or be active traders.
(MIZ)—Missouri’s win against Vanderbilt 38-21 in its SEC season opener has set up a match between two ranked SEC teams next Saturday in Columbia. The Tigers, 5-0 now in their best start in a decade are 21st in the weekly AP poll and 22 in the USA Coaches Poll. LSU, which is 3-2 with three of its games being in the conference already, is 23rd in the polls , a ten-place drop after losing to Old Miss 55-49 last weekend.
Missouri’s ranking is its highest since the fifth week of the 2015 season, the year they won their first seven games of the season. Quarterback Brady Cook will be looking to extend his conference record consecutive passes without an interception, now standing at 347.
The Mizzou offense chewed up Vanderbilt’s defense to the tune of 532 yards, 395 of them by Cook, a personal best. (ZOU)
(CHIEFS)—The chiefs beat the Jets Sunday night but nobody is happy about it including the winners. A late field goal, a fumble by the Jets’ quarterback, and a clock-sapping final drive that ended with Patrick Mahomes sliding to a stop at the New York one-yard line so the clock could run out salvaged a 23-20 win.
The win is number 250 for Coach Andy Reid. That puts him into a tie with Dallas coach Tom Landry for fourth all time. He has won 120 of those games while with the Chiefs and trails Hank Stram for the team record by only four.
The Chiefs seemed to be on the road to a blowout with an early 17-0 lead before rookie quarterback Zack Wilson, filling in as Aaron Rogers and his repaired achilles tendon watched from the owner’s suite, found his rhythm and led the Jets to a 20-20 tie. But he lost a snap with his team on the move in the fourth quarter; the chiefs recovered and picked up a field goal and then held on the rest of the way.
Patrick Mahomes had an off-game with two interceptions. But Isaiah Pacheco’s running kept the chains moving at key moments. He picked up 115 yards on 20 carries and scored one of the two Chiefs’ touchdowns. He also caught three passesfor 43 yards. He was responsible for 158 of the Chiefs’ 401 total yards.
(BATTLEHAWKS)—We’re waiting to learn if the St. Louis Battlehawks of the XFL will survive the merger of the XFL and the USFL, announced last week. The merged league plans to begin play next spring.
The XFL has been resurrected twice. The last couple of years there have been eight teams in eight cities—St. Louis; Arlington, San Antonio, and Houston Texas; Las Vegas; Orlando, Florida; Seattle, Washington; and Washington, D. C.
The USFL was reincarnated a couple of years ago with all games played in Birmingham, Alabama. Last season, the eight teams were located in four “hub” cities—Detroit, Memhis, Birmingham and in Canton, Ohio, the home of the NFL Hall of Fame.
The Battlehawks have played in the domed stadium abandoned by the Rams. The team drew a record 38,310 fans for the fourth game last year. They have compiled seven of the biggest crowd numbers in theleague’s short history.
Officials will announce late rif all 16 teams will have home cities when play starts after the NFL’s Super Bowl in February.
Now, on to the crash-and-turn sports.
(NASCAR)—Ryan Blaney has survived 500 tense miles on the Talladega high banks to pick up his ninth career win and second of the year.
Blaney finished .012 seconds ahead of Kevin Harvick, the biggest margin he has enjoyed in his three wins at Talladega. He beat Ryan Newman and Ricky Stenhouse, respectfully, in 2019 and 2020 by 0.007 of a second.
He only led eight laps in a race that featured 70 lead changes during its 188 laps with the field running two and three wide in a tight pack for most of its running.
Harvick’s second-place car was disqualified after the race because some windshield fasteners were found to be loose. He was moved to last place. Crew Chief Rodney Childers says some windshield bolts loosened and vibrated out because of buffeting caused by the close running.
The win locks Blaney into the semifinal field of eight drivers who will compete for the final four spots in the last race shootout of the season. The field of 12 will be cut to eight at next weekend’s race on the Charlotte “Roval,” a road race course that uses part of the tri-oval track and a road course on the track’s interior.
(NASCAR—IOWA)—Missouri NASCAR fans have another Cup race within driving distance. Iowa Speedway has been added to the schedule next year. The track has featured IndyCar races for the past several years. It’s a .875 track designed by former NASCAR Cup winner Rusty Wallace, a St. Louis native. The track is at Newton, Iowa, about 30 miles east of Des Moines.
Actually, NASCAR’s first choice for a new track on its schedule had been Montreal, Canada but that deal never came together, opening the door for Newton. The race is set for next June 16.
