Cy Young won 511 games. He also completed 749 of them, which is the number that actually explains the first one.
Tom Glavine won 305 games and completed 56. Greg Maddux won 355 and completed 109. Between Young's era and theirs, the job changed so completely that the same statistic was measuring two different things, and by the time you reach the present it has almost stopped measuring anything at all.
The award for the best pitcher in each league is named after Young. Nobody is going to win 511 games again, and the honest reason is not that nobody is as good as he was.
Cy Young, 511
Young pitched 22 seasons, from 1890 to 1911, and threw 7,356 innings.
That innings figure is worth sitting with, because it is the real record. Nolan Ryan pitched 27 seasons, more than anyone, and threw 5,386. Young threw nearly 2,000 more in five fewer years. He averaged 334 innings a season across a career longer than most careers, at a time when a starting pitcher was expected to finish what he began, and he finished 749 times.
He also lost 316 games, which is the record too. You cannot lose 316 games without being trusted with the ball an extraordinary number of times, and that is the whole point.
Walter Johnson, 417
Johnson is second, 94 behind, with a 2.17 earned run average that is the lowest of anyone in the 300-win club by a distance.
He spent all 21 seasons with the Washington Senators. He also lost 279 games, second only to Cy Young, while allowing 2.17 earned runs per nine innings across more than 5,900 of them.
That combination is the clearest statement on this list of what a win-loss record owes to the men batting behind it. Johnson gave up fewer runs than anyone else in the 300 club and lost more games than all but one of them.
Warren Spahn, who did not win a game until he was 25
Spahn is fifth with 363, and he did it starting later than anyone above him.
He appeared briefly in 1942 and did not win a game. Then he served in the Second World War and did not pitch at all in 1943, 1944 or 1945. He came back in 1946 at 25 years old with zero career wins, and finished with 363, which is the most by any left-hander in history.
He had thirteen seasons of twenty wins or more, tied with Christy Mathewson for the most since 1901, and at 42 years old he went 23 and 7 with a 2.60 earned run average, which is the best season any pitcher that age has had.
Take the three lost seasons at his career rate and he finishes somewhere near Grover Alexander and Mathewson in the high 400s. That is a counterfactual rather than a record, and it is the reason his 363 is the most impressive number on the list after Young's.
The complete 300-win club
| # | Pitcher | W | L | ERA | CG | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | 1 | Cy Young | 511 | 316 | 2.63 | 749 | | 2 | Walter Johnson | 417 | 279 | 2.17 | 531 | | 3 | Grover Alexander | 373 | 208 | 2.56 | 437 | | 4 | Christy Mathewson | 373 | 188 | 2.13 | 434 | | 5 | Warren Spahn | 363 | 245 | 3.09 | 382 | | 6 | Pud Galvin | 361 | 308 | 2.87 | 639 | | 7 | Kid Nichols | 361 | 208 | 2.95 | 531 | | 8 | Greg Maddux | 355 | 227 | 3.16 | 109 | | 9 | Roger Clemens | 354 | 184 | 3.12 | 118 | | 10 | Tim Keefe | 342 | 225 | 2.62 | 554 | | 11 | Steve Carlton | 329 | 244 | 3.22 | 254 | | 12 | John Clarkson | 328 | 178 | 2.81 | 485 | | 13 | Eddie Plank | 326 | 194 | 2.35 | 410 | | 14 | Don Sutton | 324 | 256 | 3.26 | 178 | | 15 | Nolan Ryan | 324 | 292 | 3.19 | 222 | | 16 | Phil Niekro | 318 | 274 | 3.35 | 245 | | 17 | Gaylord Perry | 314 | 265 | 3.11 | 303 | | 18 | Tom Seaver | 311 | 205 | 2.86 | 231 | | 19 | Old Hoss Radbourn | 309 | 195 | 2.67 | 489 | | 20 | Mickey Welch | 307 | 210 | 2.71 | 525 | | 21 | Tom Glavine | 305 | 203 | 3.54 | 56 | | 22 | Randy Johnson | 303 | 166 | 3.29 | 100 | | 23 | Lefty Grove | 300 | 141 | 3.06 | 298 | | 24 | Early Wynn | 300 | 244 | 3.54 | 290 |
Read the complete games column top to bottom. Nine of the first thirteen finished more than 400 games. The four modern entries, Maddux, Clemens, Glavine and Randy Johnson, finished 109, 118, 56 and 100 between four full careers.
Lefty Grove's record is the one that stands out for a different reason. He went 300 and 141, a winning percentage of .680, which is the best of anyone on the list.
The nineteenth century group
Six men on the list, Galvin, Keefe, Clarkson, Radbourn, Welch and Nichols, did most of their work before 1900, and their numbers need a different frame rather than an asterisk.
Pud Galvin won 361 games in fourteen seasons, which is 26 a year. Old Hoss Radbourn won 309 in eleven. John Clarkson won 328 in twelve. These are not long careers, they are short ones at an intensity that no arm has been asked to repeat: Galvin completed 639 of his starts and threw 5,941 innings before he turned 36.
The pitching distance was shorter for much of it, overhand delivery was newly legal, and a rotation was often one man. So the totals are real and the job was not the same job. Which is the same sentence this entire list requires, applied to a different century.
The last member: Randy Johnson, 2009
Randy Johnson won his 300th on 4 June 2009 and retired at the end of that season with 303.
Seventeen years have passed and nobody has joined since.
Look at when the rest of them got there and the shape of the thing is obvious:
| Pitcher | 300th win | |---|---| | Early Wynn | 13 July 1963 | | Gaylord Perry | 6 May 1982 | | Steve Carlton | 23 September 1983 | | Tom Seaver | 4 August 1985 | | Phil Niekro | 6 October 1985 | | Don Sutton | 18 June 1986 | | Nolan Ryan | 31 July 1990 | | Roger Clemens | 13 June 2003 | | Greg Maddux | 7 August 2004 | | Tom Glavine | 5 August 2007 | | Randy Johnson | 4 June 2009 |
Six men reached 300 in the nine years between 1982 and 1990. Four more did between 2003 and 2009. In between, and ever since, nothing.
Those two clusters are not coincidences. The first is the generation that came up in the 1960s, when a starter still took the ball 40 times a year. The second is the generation that came up in the 1980s, the last one to be trained that way. Both groups aged out, and no third group is coming.
Why the win is disappearing
This is the mechanism, in one column. Complete games per team, per season:
| Decade | Complete games per team | |---|---| | 1900s | 117.8 | | 1920s | 76.5 | | 1940s | 66.0 | | 1960s | 40.7 | | 1980s | 24.4 | | 1990s | 11.5 | | 2000s | 5.8 | | 2010s | 3.5 | | 2020s | 1.1 |
A team in the 1900s had a starting pitcher finish the job 118 times a year. A team in the 2020s manages it roughly once.
The consequence for wins is direct. A pitcher who leaves after six innings with a lead has handed the decision to somebody else, and across a career that is hundreds of wins that used to be automatic and now are not. The average win total for a pitcher making at least 20 starts has fallen from 15.7 in the 1900s to 9.1 in the 2020s.
The best single season has fallen the same way. In the 1900s somebody won 41 games. In the 1920s the decade's best was 31, in the 1970s it was 27, and in the 2020s it is 21.
Who is closest now
| Pitcher | Wins | |---|---| | Justin Verlander | 266 | | Max Scherzer | 223 | | Clayton Kershaw | 223 | | Gerrit Cole | 161 | | Chris Sale | 159 |
Verlander is 34 short of 300 and is in his forties. He is the only realistic candidate left from his generation, and it is genuinely close.
Behind him the drop is the story. After Scherzer and Kershaw at 223, the next active pitcher is at 161, which would require fifteen more seasons at ten wins a year. There is no young pitcher anywhere near a pace that gets to 300, because the pace no longer exists.
What a win actually measures
The win has been the most criticised statistic in baseball for about twenty years, and most of the criticism is correct. A pitcher can throw eight shutout innings and lose. He can give up six runs and win. The statistic depends on run support, bullpen quality and the scoring rules, in that order, and only then on how he pitched.
All of that is true and none of it makes this list uninteresting. It just means the list is answering a different question than the one people assume.
Look again at the top. Young, Johnson, Alexander, Mathewson, Spahn. Every one of them was handed the ball more often than almost anyone in their era and kept being handed it for twenty years. The 300-win club is not a ranking of quality. It is a record of trust, sustained over a working life, in a version of the job that required a man to finish what he started.
Glavine and Maddux got there under different rules by being excellent for twenty-two and twenty-three seasons respectively. Verlander may get there under rules harsher still.
After him, the number stops. Not because pitchers got worse, but because the thing 511 was counting no longer happens.
The back half of the 300 club is where trivia rounds are decided, because Keefe, Clarkson, Radbourn and Welch all blur together after a century. Name a leaderboard against three outs in MLB Top 10 Quiz, or trace a pitcher's clubs one stop at a time in MLB Career Path.