300

There are some numbers in baseball that are truly amazing. 300 wins by a pitcher is one of them. Randy Johnson hit that magic number this week.

I started out with the idea that I wanted to write about aging players hanging around into their mid-forties chasing milestones. Randy Johnson is 44 years old and certainly not the pitcher he was a decade ago.

As I thought about it, I realized I could not diminish the achievement and Johnson is not just hanging on. To win 300 games a pitcher would have to average 20 wins a year for 15 years. In this day and age of middle relievers and six inning quality starts, there are fewer 20 game winners, so realistically you are looking at averaging 15 wins over 20 years. That may be even more amazing.

Randy Johnson won his fifth game of the season to get to 300 the other night. The league leaders in the National league have seven wins and pitch for better teams. Johnson leads his team in wins. He is hardly hanging around. Johnson's season so far projects to 12-14 wins and in this day and age that is a solid number. Maybe not the Cy Young award numbers of years gone by, but good enough to be a number three starter for most teams and a one or two for others.

Also, he has not reinvented himself. He is not hanging around throwing slow curves and change ups. Yes, he is not the power pitcher that he once was, with a fastball touching 100 miles per hour, but he is still a power pitcher.

Injuries slowed Johnson in the middle of his career or we would have been talking about this milestone two years ago. After major back surgery he racked up 5 Cy Young awards and a World Series MVP. He pitched in relief in the 7th game of a World Series after being the starting pitcher in game six. That is unheard of in the modern era. Starting pitchers normally are not seen or heard from until five days after their last start. You certainly don't find them in the bullpen getting ready to go another two or three the next day.

He is not a warm and fuzzy personality and sometimes that diminishes the appreciation for an achievement, but he has never thrown sawed off bats at anyone and there are no allegations of performance enhancing drugs. He has simply been the most dominant left handed pitcher of the past 20 years.

Having reached 300, I hope he will consider retirement over another year of multi-million dollar salaries. I do not want to watch Randy Johnson doing mop up work for the A's or the Orioles in two years. Right now however, he is a legitimate a quality starter as anyone else and he has achieved a milestone that, when you think about it, is mind boggling.