Randy Myers Hits The Century Mark

[dougiejays]

When it comes to pitcher wins, 100 might not seem to be a particularly important number. It’s a solid number, sure, the sign of a respectable career, but nothing to write home about. A young up-and-coming stud might blow past a hundred wins in his mid- to late- twenties; a middling journeyman might collect his hundredth win after lingering around the league for a decade or so, collecting ten to twelve wins per season almost by accident. In the world of big fat round baseball numbers, 100 wins barely registers on the radar next to big kahunas like 3,000, 500, and 300. After all, all five starters in the Jays’ current rotation have at least 100 career wins on their resume, and the three aces at the front of the rotation each have more than double that number.

But for Randy Myers, 100 wins is a big fricking deal.

Normally, when we think of pitcher wins, we think of starting pitchers. Sure, a reliever might vulture a win here or there, but it’s just a fluke, a happy accident, a sign that the starter got knocked out early or a guy just happened to come in while the game was tied. Reliever wins don’t mean anything, the common wisdom goes, not in the same way that starter wins mean something – they’re just a byproduct of luck and circumstance.

Randy Myers has never started a game in his major league career. Through 16 years and more than 1000 appearances in the bigs, he hasn’t notched a single start – not one. This is not a case of a guy banking a bunch of early wins with a few years as a middling starter and eventually pushing himself over the hump with some vultured reliever wins – no, every single one of those hundred has come in relief, and all but the first seven wins of his career have come in Blue Jays blue.

Throughout the annals of [real] baseball history, there are not very many people who can say that. Prior to Myers notching his 100th win in a 7-5 victory over Tampa Bay on Sunday afternoon, the leader in all-time wins among pitchers who had never started a single game was Sparkly Lyle, who notched 99 wins between 1967 and 1982. The only other pitchers who can claim more relief wins than Myers are Lindy McDaniel, Hoyt Wilhelm, Goose Gossage, and Rollie Fingers, with McDaniel’s 120 leading the pack.

But Myers isn’t your typical reliever, either. He’s not some one-inning shutdown closer who comes in and slams the door at the end of games – in fact, in contrast to his 100 wins, he only has 45 career saves. This was a conscious decision: early on in his career, when Toronto had an opportunity to turn Myers into a closer, the braintrust decided that his talents would be better suited to middle relief.

“Right from the moment we got him from California it was clear that he was an exceptional talent, and if we’d put him in that role he could have made for an unbelievable closer,” GM Doug Davis said in a press conference after Sunday’s game. “But one thing that stood out even back then was the resiliency of his arm – here was a guy who could give you 3, sometimes even 4 great innings out of the pen, and to pigeonhole him into the closer’s role would have limited that somewhat. You look at the closers around the league, they’re not throwing 100 innings – it’s like 60-70 innings, max. And we figured that by keeping him out of that role, we could really match him up with the other team’s best hitters whenever we needed to instead of focusing on getting him the save.”

The results speak for themselves. Over the years, Myers has often led the league in both appearances and reliever innings pitched – since being acquired before the 1987 season by the Blue Jays, he has never notched fewer than 68 innings in a season and averages closer to 100, peaking with an incredible 134.1 IP, 14-1 1993 season which really should have put him in Cy Young consideration.

But incredibly, despite almost a decade-and-a-half of being the most dominant middle reliever in the game, Myers has only one career All-Star appearance under his belt – it’s hard for MRs to wow voters without gaudy saves or wins totals. And when the 36-year-old eventually hangs things up, it’ll be interesting to see if HOF voters will feel the same way. A pitcher with a career line of 100-49 with a 3.24 ERA and 45 saves doesn’t quite jump off the page as a Hall of Famer, but for those who have watched him pitch over the past fifteen years, there’s no doubt that Myers is among the best in the game.

“Just throw out the saves stat and match him up with any closer in the league over the past decade,” Davis said. “And I think Randy can take just about any of them.”

[CSCommish]

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