Juan Marichal

[In a post at Confabulation, Robert Kennedy pointed out that legendary San Francisco Giants pitcher Juan Marichal never won a Cy Young Award despite winning 20 games six times during the Sixties.]

Marichal's luck was even worse than that: he only received a single vote for the Cy Young Award in his entire career, and it was not for one of his 20 win seasons, but in 1971, when he was 18-11. He tied for 8th in the voting that year. Three of his 20 win seasons (1963, 1965, 1966) came in years when Sandy Koufax won the award unanimously; another came in a year when Bob Gibson won unanimously (1968). In his two other 20 win seasons (1964, 1969), Dean Chance and Tom Seaver won by wide margins; in his other 18-11 season (1962), Don Drysdale won handily. (The Cy Young Award was given jointly for both leagues through 1966, by the way.) It was a pitcher's era, with gaudy stats that would need to be corrected for any comparisons to the present era; there were also many gifted pitchers at the time, no matter how you slice it. (Baseball statisticians have determined that it is impossible to analyze Sandy Koufax's accomplishments away, no matter what method you choose, and even allowing that Dodger Stadium is an extreme pitcher's park.) Marichal was just plain unlucky, but still made it into the Hall of Fame.

He is also unfortunate in that no matter his accomplishments, the first image any historically-minded baseball fan has of Marichal is of him taking a bat to Dodger catcher Johnny Roseboro's head in the famous incident in 1965. That not only affected perceptions of Marichal, but, unfortunately, of many "fiery Latin" players thereafter (Joaquin Andujar is a perfect example).

[Robert pointed out that Marichal, amazingly, had more complete games (244) than victories (243).]

We will never see the like of those complete games again, because of pitch counts. It will be interesting to see whether the pitch count strategy actually lengthens careers. The complete games might have shortened Marichal's -- he had a relatively short productive career, only 11 years (1961-1971, with one lead-up year and four tailing years for a total of 16 seasons). But a lot of factors played into that.