Up on the blog today, a fun guy to add to my long-running "Minor League Days: Legends Edition" set, Hall of Fame pitcher Joe McGinnity, who won nearly 500 games over his professional career, which spanned a quarter century from 1893 to 1925:
By the time
McGinnity decided to rest his arm for good after pitching for the
Dubuque Climbers in the Mississippi Valley League in 1925, he finished
his pro career with 478 wins, collected over a staggering 1048 games,
which saw him throw 7091 innings.
Pictured here on this card with Dubuque, he was in his 50's when he suited up for them in 1922-1925.
Nicknamed
"Iron Man", you can understand why when you look at his time with the
New York Giants at the turn of the 20th Century when he teamed up with
Christy Mathewson to form one of the All-Time great 1-2 pitching tandems
in MLB history.
Over his 10-year MLB career spanning 1899
through 1908, he posted 20+ wins eight times, with a high of 35 wins in
1904 when he appeared in 51 games, with 44 starts and 38 complete games,
amounting to 408 innings of work, with nine shutouts.
Incredibly,
a year before that in 1903 he posted a record of 31-20, appearing in 55
games, with 48 starts and a ridiculous 44 complete games, pitching a
mind boggling 434 innings.
He also posted a 28 win season for
the Baltimore Orioles in 1899 as a rookie, followed by another 28 win
year in 1900 now with the Brooklyn Superbas.
His pro breakdown
for wins was 246 in the Majors and 224 in the Minors, with 32 shutouts
as a Big Leaguer, with his Minor League stats lost to history. So who
knows just how many shutouts, complete games, etc he racked up overall.
In
1946 he was eventually voted into the Hall of Fame by the "Old Timers
Committee", joining many of his former teammates in Cooperstown, and
rightly so!
