With the baseball world abuzz over Cub starting pitcher Jake Arrieta’s twentieth win of the season, it seems as though the twenty-win plateau is still an admirable achievement, even in this modern age where sabermetricians have proven beyond a doubt that a pitcher’s win total has very little bearing on his overall effectiveness. So what about the Angels? It’s clear that their best shot at having a 20-game winner this season, Garrett Richards [with 14 wins under his belt], is not going to have a chance with just two more scheduled starts left in his season.
But have the Angels ever had a 20-game winner on their staff? Well, of course they have. In fact, eight times in franchise history an Angel pitcher has had the honor of saying that he was a twenty-game winner. And here they all are, with the season they achieved it and their win total:
- Jered Weaver (2012), 20 wins
- Bartolo Colon (2005), 20 wins
- Nolan Ryan (1974), 22 wins
- Nolan Ryan (1973), 21 wins
- Bill Singer (1973), 20 wins
- Andy Messersmith (1971), 20 wins
- Clyde Wright (1970), 22 wins
- Dean Chance (1964), 20 wins
One of the things that jumps out at me after looking at this list is the exclusion of Chuck Finley, the Angel’s franchise leader in career WAR, but he played on some pretty bad teams in the late 1980s and the 1990s, so the opportunity wasn’t there that often.
Of all the men on this list, the only one not to make the All-Star team that season was Nolan Ryan in 1974, and he had a ridiculous 201 strikeouts at the All-Star break (!) but he also had a middling 3.48 ERA. The Ryan Express worked his ERA down to 2.89 by season’s end, though, and got the 22 victories which accounted for 32 percent of the Angel’s 68 wins that year, the highest percentage of any of the eight seasons on this list.
Ryan also came in third in Cy Young Award voting that year. Dean Chance and Bartolo Colon won the Cy Young in their twenty-game winning seasons with the Angels, and everyone else on the list received Cy Young votes for their seasons except for Bill Singer (his 3.22 ERA was too high to motivate voters).
The pitcher who had the toughest time getting the 20 wins was Dean Chance. The Angel offense only mustered up 2.94 runs per game in Chance’s starts that year, so Dean had to wait until his 34th start of the season to get his twentieth win. Jered Weaver had the easiest time of it as the Angel offense scored an average of 6.03 runs per game in his starts, and Jered earned win number twenty in his 29th start of the year (though that’s not to say Weaver wasn’t dealing that season—he led the league with a 1.02 WHIP).
Now, in the era of the five-man rotation and limited pitch-counts, achievements like Jake Arrieta’s are difficult to come by. There have been an average of about two MLB pitchers a year over the last decade to win at least 20 in a season, so it makes you wonder how long it will take to add a ninth pitcher to that Angels list.
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