One of the Major League Baseball records that no current player will ever even remotely approach belongs to the immortal Cy Young, for who the award given to the best pitcher in each league every year is named. The mark in question is Young’s complete game total of 749, however, even if Young had thrown a quarter of that amount of complete games, his record would stand forever. Incredibly, or perhaps not so, in this age of relief specialists, the highest active player on the all-time complete game list is New York’s Roger Clemens. The Rocket has thrown just four complete games in the last nine full seasons, and his 118 puts him at 327th place on the career roster.
Young had 103 more complete games than the number two hurler behind him, James “Pud” Galvin, who pitched from 1875 until 1892 and finished 646 of his starts. Galvin in turn completed 92 more games than Tim Keefe, another pre-1900 mounds-man who possesses the third most all time. Then comes Walter Johnson and Kid Nichols tied at 531; Johnson toiled for the Senators during the first quarter of the last century, while Nichols bridges the gap from the 1800s to the 1900s.
The only pitcher in the top twenty-one on this list that can be considered part of the modern era is the great lefty Warren Spahn, who retired after the 1965 campaign with 382 complete game efforts. The disparity between the way the game was played prior to the advent of the dominating closers and set-up men and the way it is now is obvious in the statistics. Jack Morris is the most recent pitcher to retire that was able to make the top two-hundred career wise in finishing games he started. Jack retired in 1994 with 175, a sum that today would almost seem to be unassailable, yet that put him at only 181st on this inventory.
The only other active pitcher that has even reached the century mark for complete games is the Padres’ Greg Maddux, who now has 109. Following Maddux is 43 year old Randy Johnson with 98, but his recent back surgery has many feeling that he may never pitch again. Boston’s Curt Schilling has collected 83 complete games over his fine career, and then the drop-off after him is extremely dramatic. Mike Mussina occupies the 5th spot for complete games among the active players, but he has just 57.
Cy Young had nine seasons where he threw at least forty complete games, meaning that if he had just pitched that one campaign he would still have more than all but eleven of today’s pitchers. The single season record for complete games has nobody that took the hill after 1900 on it, as the game was a totally different affair back then. Looking closely at the leaders in complete games in much more recent times shows you that it has been eight seasons since anyone threw double-digit complete games. Randy Johnson had a dozen for the Diamondbacks in 1999, while Scott Erickson’s eleven the year before was the last time an American League pitcher compiled more than nine.
Fernando Valenzuela had 20 complete games in 1986, the last time anyone attained that many. Catfish Hunter earned every cent of his big free-agent contract with the Yankees in 1975 when he got that 27th out on 30 occasions, which was the last time that anyone had that many. This season, Brandon Webb of the Diamondbacks has four complete games to lead the senior circuit, while Roy Halladay of the Blue Jays has seven to be in the forefront in this category in the American League. Cy Young would have had that many combined by mid-May. Young started 906 games altogether in his 22 seasons, meaning that he was able to put the finishing touches on a remarkable eighty-three per cent of his outings. Clemens seventeen percent success rate in completing games pales in comparison.
