Wednesday, August 13, 2008

#611 Tommy John



Why this card is awesome: Because if you're a true baseball fan, you should just love the back of this card...packed full of years and years of stats. Tommy John's name is best known due to the surgery associated with him, but he was a pretty darn good pitcher too.

Cool stat: For the 26 pitchers with 4000 IP since 1901, John has one of the very lowest strikeout rates, and the guys ahead of him all pitched in much earlier eras with much lower average strikeout rates.

8 comments:

Unknown said...

Only Phil Niekro, Charlie Hough, Nolan Ryan, and Jamie Moyer have started more games after their 40th birthday.

Andy said...

Here's the list for that:

http://www.bb-ref.com/pi/shareit/DXrc

That goes by "40 year old season" and not explicitly by the date that each guy turned 40. Moyer is having a nice year this year and will probably end up #2 on that list. He has only a very slim shot of catching Niekro, though.

Jim said...

his card # was 611, bad number for a good pitcher

Unknown said...

I found this blog after reading a blurb about it on baseball-reference.com, this is a ton of fun...thanks for doing it.

I'll probably get fired however because I'm spending waaaay to much time on it here at work.

Andy said...

Thanks for visiting the blog!!

cdorso said...

The best part about any Tommy John card is always that innocuous-looking 1975 "On Disabled List" line.

One injury-lost season that changed baseball forever.

Andy said...

Chris--did you get your cards?

Jim said...

I noticed and thought that too Chris