Time to showcase my custom "19th Century Base Ball Champions" card for the "Little Steam Engine", Hall of Fame pitcher Pud Galvin, from my custom set released in 2018:
Over the course of
his spectacular 15 year professional career, Galvin produced 365 wins,
with 10 20-win campaigns, which included two straight 46-win campaigns
in 1883 and 1884 with the Buffalo Bisons.
In those two
seasons, Galvin started 147 games and completed 143 of them. Read that
again! 143 complete games in two years, with a total of 1292.2 innings
of work! Just astounding.
When he retired after the 1892
season, he was at the top or near top of every pitching mark in
baseball's young history, winning 365 games, tossing 57 shutouts,
completing 646 while throwing 6003 innings, with a 2.85 earned run
average.
Just a powerhouse of a pitcher in the game's early
years, with the end result a spot in Cooperstown when he was inducted as
a player by the Veterans Committee in 1965.
Of special note
for all uber-baseball history geeks out there: it seems that it was
recently discovered that he pitched in the National Association before
his Major League days, appearing in eight games for St. Louis in 1875 as
an 18-year-old, going 4-2 with a league-leading 1.16 ERA, completing
all seven of his starts with a save thrown in. I do not recall this at
all until seeing it recently, and I promise you I've been a fan of
National Association history since the early-80s.
Baseball history STILL evolving with nuggets like this some 150 years later! Fantastic!