I was having a discussion with a friend about complete games, and the question came up about the 1971 Orioles, who had 4 twenty game winners (Palmer, Cuellar, McNally, Dobson). Where (or how) can I find out how many of those 80+ wins were complete games?
Baseball-reference.com would likely have it.
Baseball Reference is the site you want.
Here are the 1971 game logs for each of those 4 pitchers. By my count, their numbers are:
Cuellar: 20 W, 19 CG, plus 2 CG losses
Dobson: 20 W, 17 CG
McNally: 21 W, 11 CG
Palmer: 20 W; 18 CG
Why go to the game logs? Complete games is a statistic kept among the main ones.
Cuellar: 21
Dobson: 18
McNally: 11
Palmer: 20
The discrepancy is probably caused because there can be a 10-inning (or more) complete game
Because the question asks how many of the wins were complete games, not how many complete games the pitchers had in total.
Not sure why you’d count losses anyway. Hell, I could pitch a complete game if you count losses. It make take a few days, but I could do it.
But you would be pulled by your manager well before the last inning. The point of counting CG losses is that, if you’ve been left in there to pitch the full game, it generally means you’re pitching very well.
For example, on May 10 last year the Phillies lost 2-1 to the Marlins, and the only pitcher used by Philadelphia was Roy Halladay. I don’t see any problem with counting this as a complete game. Halladay gave up only 2 runs (1 earned). It’s not his fault if his teammates couldn’t score more than 1 run.
Also, i miscounted on Dobson last night, and didn’t give the full info about Palmer. Here are the revised numbers, which i think are accurate:
Cuellar: 20 W, 19 CG, plus 2 CG losses
Dobson: 20 W, 18 CG
McNally: 21 W, 11 CG
Palmer: 20 W; 18 CG, plus 2 CG losses. Also, in one of Palmer’s 2 non-CG wins, he actually pitched 9 innings, but the game went into extras.
Looking at Cuellar’s logs, that wasn’t really the case in either of his complete-game losses in '71. I don’t remember if MLB had September call-ups in 1971 (both of his CG losses were in September), but if they did, the Baltimore bullpen would have been reinforced with more young arms.
On September 5, he pitched an 8-inning complete game against the Senators. In that game, he gave up 12 hits and 5 runs (all earned). In that game, the Orioles surrendered the lead in the 3rd inning (Cuellar giving up 3 runs), and never regained it.
On September 15, against the Yankees, he pitched a little better, but still gave up 9 hits and 4 runs (two in the 9th inning).
I dug around a bit to see if the Orioles had depleted their bullpens on the days before these two games. Nope. On the 4th, Palmer had pitched a complete game. On the 14th, Palmer had gone 6 1/3, and two relievers had pitched a total of 1 2/3 innings.
I also looked to see if maybe Baltimore just had a terrible bullpen that year. Nope. Their primary “closer”, Eddie Watt, had an ERA under 2, and they had three other frequently-used relief pitchers with ERAs under 4.
It seems like Earl Weaver just believed in complete games. 
It’s possible, I suppose, that Weaver was leaving Cuellar in those games, in hopes that perhaps the Orioles would come back and win, in an effort to get Cuellar to 20 wins.
Well, in the Yankee game leaving him in was perfectly understandable. Going into the 9th, he was only down 2-1. He was only one out away from getting out of the 9th too, but then gave up the hits that scored the runs.
The Senators game is more unusual. I was curious, so i used my university’s ProQuest account to look up the Baltimore Sun’s story about the game. The writer actually commented on the issue of why Cuellar wasn’t replaced:
True enough. Going into the 9th, he’d only given up 5 hits (and no walks). Current-day conventional managerial wisdom probably would only have left him in that game if his pitch count was low (hard to know, since pitch count isn’t in that box score), but I can see why Weaver had no good reason to pull him.