King Kaufman's Sports Daily
N.Y. media uproar: The case of the missing complete game! Plus: If minor league umps strike, does it make a sound?
Read more: Sports, Baseball, New York Daily News, King Kaufman, Sports Daily
April 18, 2006 | Twice in the last few days, a prominent New York typist has written a column grumbling about the decline of the complete game.
The complete game! Heavens, next thing you know rotary-dial phones will be a thing of the past.
"Finish What You Start!/Complete Games a Forgotten Art," rhymed the headline and subhead on a column by Bill Madden in the New York Daily News. "The Decline of the Complete Game" was the stately headline on a YES Network column by Phil Pepe, who covered the Yankees in the '60s and '70s for the Daily News.
Yessir, nothing slips past those New York media boys.
The complete game is in decline all right. There have been five of them so far this year in 193 games, which works out to one complete game every 77.2 starts. Last year there were 189 complete games in 2,431 contests, an average of a pitcher finishing what he began once every 25.7 starts.
So that's a big decline just from a year ago! But the season's young. The stats don't mean anything yet. And before you write to correct my math, remember there are two starters in each game.
Still, as Pepe points out, the New York Yankees alone had 123 complete games in 1904 -- despite the inconvenient fact of being called the Highlanders. And what he doesn't say is that they trailed the league in that category!
In those days, pitchers were pitchers. "What we have now," Pepe writes, "are iPods, cell phones, rap music and 'quality' pitching performances in which the starter courageously huffs and puffs through six innings."
Good grief! These pantywaists today could learn a thing or two from Jack Chesbro of the Highlanders, who completed 48 games to lead the junior circuit in ought-four, or from George Mullin of the Detroit Tigers or Cy Young of the Boston Pilgrims, who each went the distance 40 times.
Forty? Why, Chris Carpenter, who is almost 31 years old and the defending National League Cy Young Award winner -- the George Mullin Award never panned out -- has completed only 20 games in his entire career. The active leader in complete games is Greg Maddux, who has 108 at the age of 39. Young passed that number when he was 26 and ended up with 749 of them.
And he didn't even have an iPod!
Next page: Paying starters more to get "less." Plus: Minor league umps strike