As a young southpaw, I naturally felt an affinity for major
league left-handers. Lefties, by nature, are outsiders. The consensus of
sources spanning more than three decades states that only about 10 percent of
the population is left-handed, making we portsiders indeed a rare breed. I,
personally, never experienced the forced switching of penmanship meant to
“cleanse” left-handed schoolchildren of earlier generations—a barbaric act harmful
to the esteem, if not to the wiring of the brain itself. However, I was
encouraged to slant my lined paper at a right-hander’s angle. And many a
classroom offered a dearth of one-piece desks built for left-handers, my left
elbow hanging humiliatingly in midair while my “normal-handed”
classmates wrote in fully supported olecranal luxury.
When you’re left-handed, it dominates your whole being in a
way that the majority of the world cannot understand simply because the world
is fitted to them.
Still, even from a young age, I was told that baseball teams
are forever on the lookout for left-handers who can throw with control, which
made me feel special, even if my backyard catches with Dad hadn’t yet graduated
from tennis ball to horsehide.
Thus, it’s no surprise that I possessed an innate connection
to southpaws who took the mound at Veterans Stadium, on television, and on my
baseball cards. Hometown Phillies Steve “Lefty” Carlton, Tug McGraw, Jim Kaat,
and Randy Lerch (a lefty with my name!).
Randy Jones (a Cy Young–winning lefty
with my name!). Don Gullett, Mickey
Lolich, Fred Norman, Paul Splittorff, Frank Tanana, Jerry Koosman. And, of
course, the deity of all southpaws, Sandy Koufax, who, though just before my
time, commanded the highest respect in my household because the electrifying southpaw,
by virtue of his Jewish heritage, single-handedly revived my Flatbush-born father’s
interest in baseball after his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers broke his heart. (Sadly,
that renewed vigor for the game once and for all abandoned my father with
Koufax’s retirement.)
Of course, I also knew of the great lefties of old: Lefty
Grove, Lefty Gomez, Eddie Plank, Carl Hubbell, even Babe Ruth himself! But the
southpaw who loomed largest, of course, was Warren Spahn. One of my baseball
magazines contained his lifetime record. Thirteen 20-win seasons. Thirteen?! And a win total, 363, to
which no other lefty stood remotely close. For me, and perhaps other young
southpaws, 363 became something akin
to 714 and 4191, an instantly identifiable benchmark in baseball history that
spoke for itself.
But in examining Spahn’s record more closely, one finds a
statistic that is both so ironic and improbable as to almost defy belief.
During a career in which Spahn pitched 363 victories, the
multitalented hurler also recorded 363 batting hits.
When one takes into account the myriad variables that go
into this mind-boggling confluence—from the fact that a starting pitcher’s
at-bats vary from game to game depending on how well his hurling keeps him in
each contest, to the fact that Spahn relieved in 85 games, further fluctuating
his at-bats—one wonders how something so weird could happen. And then there’s
the additional confounding variable that Spahn appeared in 18 games as a
pinch-hitter, which chance would likely employ to further skew two totals rather
than bring them together.
Macroscopically, how could one total derived from a pool of
750 (games) end up equaling another from a pool of 1872 (at-bats)—especially
considering the first is accrued at a maximum of one per game whereas the
second is almost always accrued multiple times per game?
It is for strange cases such as this that I wish I were a
mathematician so that I could calculate the odds of two wholly unrelated
totals, incurred at vastly different per-game rates (0 to 1 for wins; 0 to
infinity for hits), somehow matching up perfectly over the course of 21
seasons. Still, it doesn’t leave me exactly hollow to state abstractly that the
chance of both totals landing on 363
is merely astronomical.
Even considering that Spahn possessed an uncanny (though
surely unrealized) knack for knocking as many hits in a season as he tossed
victories—Warren authored 11 occasions in which his win total of any given
season equaled his hit total of any given season, including an incredible eight
times in the same season—the fact
that 10 seasons not only did not
match but varied in range from 0 to 21 for victories yet from 1 to as high as
36 for hits still makes this statistically improbable in the extreme.
Yet there exists another
layer to this algebraic madness.
Spahn, who seemed as if he would continue winning forever,
going 23–7 at age 42, finally was snared by Father Time in 1964. After
suffering only his second losing campaign since breaking into the big leagues more
than two decades earlier, he was purchased from Milwaukee by the young New York
Mets just before Thanksgiving.
As the ledger closed on his Braves career, Spahn boasted 356
victories—again, the exact number of hits he notched as a Boston/Milwaukee
Brave.
Struggling through 20 games with the ever-floundering Mets,
Spahn staggered to a 4–12 record, his bloated 4.36 ERA hardly helping the
punchless New Yorkers. Yet in those 20 games, as well as one in which he
pinch-hit, Spahn collected four hits, equaling his victory total.
Going nowhere,
New York released Spahn on July
17. Two days later, the San Francisco Giants, tangled in fourth place yet only
5½ games off the lead, signed Spahn, hoping to coax a last bit of magic from
his left arm for the stretch drive. Perhaps revitalized by taking the mound
once again for a contender, Spahn pitched better, for a time. He cut his ERA by
nearly a run and chipped in three victories, although his last five appearances
were spent in relief, as the Giants came up two games short at the wire.
Yet with eerie consistency, Spahn once again managed to rap
as many hits as victories, rapping a trio of singles to match the 3–4 record he
put up with San Francisco. The Giants released Spahn after the season, ending
his remarkable major league career.
Not only had Spahn managed to produce equal victory and hit
totals across 21 seasons (interestingly, he stroked his first hit in 1942 yet
had to wait, because of highly decorated military service in World War II,
until 1946 for his initial victory), but he, improbably, registered matching
numbers of hits and victories with each franchise for which he played.
Such a quirk in the statistics seems only to make
already-astronomical odds exponentially longer.
Were I capable of calculating the odds of merely accruing
363 for both totals across a career as long as Spahn’s, then trying to do so
while including the further factors of identical sums across three franchises
might cause my calculator to explode. It simply doesn’t seem as if it could
happen.
And if all that weren’t enough, the breakdown of Spahn’s
corresponding pitching wins and batting hits achieved as a Brave by city very
nearly match as well: As a Boston Brave, Spahn won 122 games while collecting
120 hits, which, of course, leaves his totals after the franchise moved to
Milwaukee Brave at 234 pitching wins and 236 hits.
Then again, neither did the probability of a pitcher not
winning his first major league game until age 25 yet going on to win 363 for his
career.
