Friday, August 30, 2013

Vintage Fridays: Mike Cuellar and Dave McNally, 1971 Topps #69

On Thursday night, the Orioles won a 3-2 nailbiter over the Red Sox, giving Chris Tillman his 15th win on the fifth attempt. You wouldn't think that 15 wins would be a big milestone, but Tillman is the first O's pitcher to reach that peak since Erik Bedard in 2007. Wins aren't the end-all and be-all of pitching stats these days, but it's a pretty simple indicator of how dang hard it's been for this team to find reliable pitching. If you'd like an interactive illustration of this, there's a fun quiz on Sporcle that asks you to choose the 29 Oriole pitchers who have notched a 15-win season from a larger list of possibilities. I got 25 of the 29, an 86.2% success rate. Can you top that?
at

3 comments:

  1. Ryan HSeptember 1, 2013 at 8:50 AM

    I got 26/29! I'm somewhat surprised that Ben McDonald wasn't one of the answers.

    ReplyDelete
  2. KevinSeptember 6, 2013 at 1:23 PM

    Ryan - I distinctly remembered Ben going 13-14 in 1993 and 14-7 the next year (when he started like 7-0). So if not for the strike, he almost certainly would have won 15.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jim from DowningtownSeptember 7, 2013 at 12:42 AM

    I mis-read it to be 20-game winners, so I skipped over a lot of names. Then I woke up, and got 25 out of 29.

    ReplyDelete