We can start with Terry Felton of the Twins, 0-13 in 1982. (0-16 career, if I remember right.)
All of this reminds me of Barry Jones, who had an Elroy Face-like half-season for the 1990 White Sox. He was 10-1, all in relief, on the first of July.
He was quite effective that year, and the White Sox didn’t want him getting saves, because he wasn’t their closer. That role was occupied by Bobby Thigpen, who set a record that year with 57 saves.
But, Jones’s 10-0 record that year was pure luck. The White Sox would bring him in, and bang, they’d go ahead. It couldn’t last, and of course it didn’t–he finished the season 11-4.
Which was still a lot of decisions for a guy who pitched only 74 innings.
Or, nobody has had a ML season of 20 or more wins without at least 3 losses.
[ul]
[li] In 1978, as of September 19, Ron Guidry was 22-2. Finished 25-3, pitching 273 2/3 innings.[/li][li] In 1996, as of August 23, Gaylord Perry was 20-2. Finished 21-8, pitching 255 2/3 innings.[/li][/ul]
1966 for Perry. Good points.
I remember Terry Felton. Saw him pitch (badly) in a loss to KC back in '82. We were in the upper deck in RF very near a fan who kept calling him “Ace” in some of the loudest air quotes it has ever been my pleasure to hear. Nice pitching, Ace. Great fastball, Ace. Wanna see if they can hit the curve too, Ace?
So close… but Anthony Young went 1-16 in 1993 in the midst of a 27 game losing decision streak (stretching from the 1992 season into 1993). A six year career record of 15-48.
In 1959, when Face went 18-1, the “save” statistic didn’t officially exist. There was no such thing as a “closer,” someone who was specifically tasked with entering the game when it was possible to earn a save, something that wasn’t even formally a thing at all.
Baseball statistics do count saves prior to the formal introduction of the stat in 1969, but they’re all retroactively determined through research. Face is now credited with 10 saves in 1959 (he had as many as 28 in another year) but if you’d been looking around in 1959 for how many saves a guy had you would have been unable to find that, or would have seen conflicting numbers.
That is the record, as far as I can tell - I can get that there was one pitcher who went 0-12 and two that went 0-10, but can’t get any names.
Felton’s 0-13 is the record (6 starts out of 48 games), followed by a couple of 0-12s:
Russ Miller, 1928 Phillies (12 starts out of 33)
Ron Gerkin, 1945 Philadelphia A’s (12 starts out of 21)
Five are 0-9:
Edgar Gonzalez, 2004 Arizona (10 starts out of 10)
Heath Slocumb, 1997 Boston (5) and Seattle (4) (zero starts out of 76 - 27 saves)
Rod Beck, 1996 San Francisco (zero starts out of 63 - 35 saves)
Earl Hamilton, 1917 St. Louis Browns (8 starts out of 27)
Tom Tuckey, 1909 Boston Doves (NL) (10 starts out of 17)
How about no-decisions?
In 1979, Bert Blyleven started 37 games, going 12 and 5 with 20 no-decisions.
Blyleven that year was indeed the first pitcher to have twenty no decisions in a season. What I find amusing about it was that this was just seven years after Gaylord Perry became the last pitcher to have zero no decisions in a season (among full time starters I mean)…he had forty starts sand a decision in each. The times they were (rapidly) a-changing.
Roy Face was 17-0 in 1959 with 4 of his wins resulting from blown saves where the Pirates came back and won in spite of him. He lost his first game on another blown save. I think he had 9 for the year. The record for consecutive wins before the first loss appears to be held by Rube Marquard who won his first 19 games of the year in 1912 before finishing 26-11.
As noted above, “saves” didn’t officially exist in 1959, though it appears that Face’s Pirates were among those who were unofficially tracking something like the save (though their criteria apparently weren’t consistent). If you look at Face’s page on Baseball-Reference.com, it credits him with 10 saves (and 9 blown saves), but that’s been done retroactively.
After Face’s 18-1 1959 season, sportswriter Jerome Holtzman noted that 10 of Face’s wins were ones in which he gave up a tying or lead run, but the Pirates then rallied to win the game (and give Face the win) – what we would now call “blown saves”. (I have no idea why Holtzman noted 10 instances, but Baseball-Reference notes 9.)
Holtzman codified rules for saves (similar, if not identical, to what’s used now), and the Sporting News (where Holtzman wrote at that time) tracked saves, unofficially, from 1960 until 1968; MLB adopted the rule officially for the 1969 season.
New to this thread. For the record note that Ken Holtzman was 9-0 in 1967 (National Guard responsibility during Vietnam era) and Patrick Mahomes was 8-0 for Mets in 1999. So he’s still got the family Undefeated bragging rights.
I saw Felton pitch, too. I don’t remember him being all that bad. The whole team was bad, but he seemed to be more hard luck than most. I do recall him walking a couple of guys and giving up a home run in a bullpen stint.
I seem to remember the Twins pulling him from a game in the 6th with a 5-0 lead in the hopes of getting his first win, but the execrable bullpen not being able to hold the lead and it just going down as a no decision.
Face only had seven wins in which he gave up a run. He actually pitched well in some of them - his 18th win, for instance, was an extra inning affair in which he went four innings, finally giving up one run in the 12th inning but the Pirates walked it off in the bottom of the inning.
It was a weird season, though.