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Business in Baseball

In: Business and Management

Submitted By ci140016
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The pitchers who receive the win and the loss are known, collectively, as the pitchers of record. A pitcher who starts a game but leaves without earning either a win or a loss (that is, before either team gains or surrenders the ultimate lead) is said to have received a no decision, regardless of his individual performance. A pitcher's total wins and losses are commonly noted together; for instance, a pitching record of 12–10 indicates 12 wins and 10 losses.

In the early years of Major League Baseball before 1900 it was common for an exceptional pitcher to win 30 or more games in one season with Old Hoss Radbourn of the defunct Providence Grays holding the record with 59 wins in 1884. Since 1900, however, pitchers have made fewer and fewer starts and the standard has changed. Gradually, as hitting improved, better pitching was needed. This meant, among other things, throwing the ball much harder, and it became unrealistic to ask a pitcher to throw nearly as hard as he could for over 100 pitches a game without giving him several days to recover.

In the first third of the 20th century (especially after the Live Ball Era), winning 30 games became the rare mark of excellent achievement; this standard diminished to 25 games during the 1940s through 1980s (the only pitcher to win 30 or more games during that time was Denny McLain in 1968, in what was an anomalous pitching-dominated season).

Since 1990, this has changed even further, as winning 20 or more games in a single season is now achieved by only a handful of pitchers each season. For example, in 2004 only three of the more than five hundred major league pitchers did so. In 2006 and again in 2009, no pitcher in either league won 20 games.[4] The last pitcher to win 25 games was Bob Welch in 1990.

The New York Times wrote in 2011 that as advanced statistics have expanded, a pitcher's won-loss record has

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