My last post on pitchers who won two-thirds of their starts in a season got me to thinking again about Gator's amazing record in September division title races. I noted Lefty Grove's incredible '31 season in which he won 27 of 30 starts, a feat unmatched in baseball history. I noted that Bob Welch won a higher percentage of his starts in 1990 than any pitcher since 1954, and he won only 24 games during his best 30-start stretch.

I've noted before the sheer improbability of winning 26 of any 30 starts selected on the basis of any unbiased criterion. It's highly improbable that a pitcher would win 26 of 30 weekend starts, or starts in day games at home, or starts against teams in your own division. But to get an even clearer idea of how difficult it is to win 26 of any 30 starts, even 30 starts selected by a manifestly biased criteria, consider the following.

Let's make the criterion games in which a great Hall of Fame pitcher received 11 or more runs of support in a start, a very biased criteria because tremendous run support will skew the results toward an extraordinarily high percentage of starts won. Steve Carlton made 32 starts in his career in which he was lavished with 11 or more runs of support. He won 27 of those games, or a slightly lower percentage than Guidry's percentage of wins/start in September pennant races. Don Sutton got 11+ runs of support in 25 starts and won 20. Phil Niekro won 16 of his 21 starts in which he received 11+ runs. Fergie Jenkins had the best record in this category of the pitchers I examined, winning 20 of his 22 starts where he received 11+ runs.  All in all, these four Hall of Fame pitchers started exactly 100 games in which they received 11+ runs of support and they won 83. You don't need your calculator to determine that works out to 83%. Ron Guidry won 86.7% of his September starts in division title races.

That's how difficult it is to win 26 of 30 major league starts under even the best of circumstances. Take a Hall of Fame pitcher, give him the run support of his dreams, and he still won't win 26 of 30 starts.

I'll be turning back to Guidry's big-game record in future posts because it is, I believe, the crux of his case for the Hall of Fame, if for no other reason than that most fans, sportswriters and HOF voters are probably unaware of this record. Guidry for some reason isn't associated with the term "big game pitcher" in the same way that various other pitchers are. If you ask most knowledgeable baseball observers to name a big-game pitcher from the '70s and '80s they'll mention Jim Palmer, Tom Seaver, Jack Morris or Luis Tiant. Each of those pitchers was indeed a great big-game pitcher, but Guidry was even better. I think the Veterans Committee of the Hall of Fame should be aware that Guidry was the best big-game pitcher of his generation. It might not be enough to put him over the top, but I think we can all agree that a pitcher's big-game performances are an important qualification for the Hall. It certainly helped put Catfish Hunter in the Hall. It was unquestionably the reason why Bob Gibson was a first-ballot inductee in 1981 and Juan Marichal wasn't. And when Curt Schilling makes the Hall, as he almost certainly will, it will be in no small measure a result of his spectacular big-game record in October.

I obviously believe, with passion and conviction, that Gator belongs in the Hall. If the Veterans Committee disagrees, if they believe his career was too short, or his peak too brief, I'll disagree but I'll respect their judgment. But if the Veterans Committee denies Gator and are unaware that he was one of the greatest big-game pitchers in baseball history, that would be a shame.