On the blog today,
we have a 1978 “expanded league leader” card celebrating the top three
strikeout pitchers of the 1977 season in the National League, featuring
three solid pitchers of the era:
We begin with Hall
of Famer Phil Niekro, who was an absolute BEAST in 1977, leading the
league with 262 strikeouts, a career-best for him, while putting in a
workhorse of a year for the Atlanta Braves.
Over the course of
that year Niekro started 43 games, completed 20 of them, tossed 330.1
innings while going 16-20 with a 4.03 earned run average, tossing two
shutouts while allowing 315 hits while walking
164 batters!
If you can believe
it he’d top those innings pitched in each of the next two seasons,
throwing 334.1 and 342 in 1978 and 1979 respectively, while winning 19
and 21 games, completing 22 and 23 as well.
Just the definition
of “workhorse” while throwing his knuckleball on his way to the Hall of
Fame, winning 318 games while striking out 3342 batters along the way,
with 45 shutouts over 864 games in his 24-year
career.
Behind him with 214
strikeouts in 1977, the pitcher who would go on to lead the league in
K’s the following two seasons, Houston Astros fire-baller J.R. Richard,
who matched his previous season’s strikeout
total while winning 18 games along with three shutouts and a 2.97 ERA.
Richard would
eclipse the 300-strikeout threshold in the 1978 and 1979, with 303 and
313 before a stroke during the 1980 season tragically cut his career
short after a brilliant 10-4 start with a 1.90 ERA,
including four shutouts.
The man was well on
his way to a dominant decade in the 1980’s, now teamed up with Nolan
Ryan who arrived in 1980 to form what could have been one of the great
1-2 pitching tandems of all-time.
In third place with
206 strikeouts, overlooked ace Steve Rogers of the Montreal Expos, who
had a fine year in 1977 with 17 wins and a 3.10 ERA over 40 starts,
completing 17 and tossing four shutouts.
Rogers would go on
to post some solid years for the Expos into the 1980’s, winning as many
as 19 games (1982) and even leading the league that year with a 2.40
ERA, and shutouts in 1983 with five.
A victim of some bad
Expos teams in the early part of the 1970’s, he’d finish with a record
of 158-152 over 13 seasons, with a very nice 3.17 ERA and 37 shutouts
over 399 appearances, all for the Montreal
franchise between 1973 and 1985.
