# 1 > True winning 20 games in a season has always been the ultimate badge of honor for a major league pitcher. But a look through baseball history shows plenty of players have sewn the patch on their uniform. Cy Young won 20 or more games a record 16 times. Christy Mathewson and Warren Spahn each reached 20 wins on 13 occasions. Creeping closer to the modern era, who can forget about the 1971 Baltimore Orioles? Dave McNally sparked their run to the World Seeries with 21 wins, while rotation mates Jim Palmer, Mike Cuellar and Pat Dobson each won 20.
# 2 > All in all, there has been at least one 20-game winner per season in baseball's modern era, not including 1981, 1994 and 95, which were shortened by work stoppages. The trend appeared to strengthen itself in 2005, when Florida's Dontrelle Willis ( 22 wins ), St. Louis Chris Carpenter ( 21 ) and Houston's Roy Oswalt ( 20 ) all reached the coveted plateau in the National League while the Angel's Bartolo Colon won 21 games in the American League. But in 2006, baseball's long running streak of producing 20-game winners finally came to an end. Minnesota's John Santana and New York's Chien-Ming Wang came close in the A.L., winning 19 apiece.
# 3 > Compared with their N.L. counterparts. Santana and Wang were classic overachievers. It took only 16 wins to claim the N.L. victory title, a decidedly underwhelming feat accomplished by Arizona's Brandon Webb, who won the Cy Young Award, along with Cincinnati's Aaron Harang, Chicago's Carlos Zambrano, Atlanta's John Smoltz and Los Angels Brad Penny and Derek Lowe. "Kind of hard to explain," Says Chicago White Sox starter John Garland, who finished just behind Santana and Wang with 18 wins. "I think you have to have a lot of luck to win 20 games. You have to stay healthy, you have to be able to go deep into games and you've got to be lucky enough to get enough run support night-in and night-out."
# 4 > Garland touches on several key points when asked about the absence of a 20-game winner, and health is certainly near the top of the list. A partially torn rotator cuff limited Colon to just 10 starts last year, and the burly right-hander managed just one win. The Yankees Randy Johnson managed 17 wins, but a sore back limited his effectiveness and left the Big Unit with the highest ERA ( 5.00 )of his Hall-of-Fame career. In the N.L., typically big winners like Oswalt ( back ), Pedro Martinez ( calf, hip ) and Mark Prior ( shoulder ) were slowed by injury. Another proven ace, Roger Clemens, pitched only half the season after coming out of retirement and signing with the Astros.
# 5 > "who knows, it could just be a fluke," Mets pitching Coach Rick Peterson says when asked about the absence of even one 20-game winner in 2006. "But there were an enormous number of premier pitchers on the D.L., or they were missing starts. I think that's the first place you'd have to look." Plenty of big-time winners stayed out of the trainer's room and made their expected 30-plus starts last season. Still, none was able to reach 20 wins. To offer another explanation, maybe you have to look at how the game has changed in relation to the bullpen.
# 6 > Back in 1971, Cuellar, Dobson and Palmer all threw 280-plus innings and combined for a mind-boggling 59 complete games. McNally, the slacker of the bunch, managed "only" 224 innings while throwing 11 complete games. It's worth noting that Eddie Watt, Baltimore's closer in 71 finished the season with 11 saves. In today's game, 11 saves is just about an average month's work for most of the top closers. And forget about 280 innings for a starter, or double-digit totals in complete games for that matter.
# 7 > Bud Black, the new manager of the San Diego Padres, has seen the transformation first-hand. After spending 15 seasons in the major leagues as a pitcher, Black served as the Angels pitching coach for seven years before taking over the Padres. "The whole philiosophy of how the bullpen is used has changed," Black says. "Starting pitchers are out of the game a lot earlier now, and they're not throwing the number of pitchers they used to in a game. When starters are not going as deep into games as they used to, I think it's only natural the win total is going to decline. And it's just not in major league baseball. In college and the minor leagues, the same thing is happening." Closers have certainly become high-paid fixtures on just about every big-league club's staff. But there is also a long list of setup relievers earning a very nice living in the game these days, and most teams have right-and left-handed specialists.
# 8 > "Guys in the bullpen are making a lot of money now," says Don Cooper, the White Sox's pitching coach. "And as I've been saying, the skill of a starting pitcher in this era is to keep his team in the game and then turn it over to the bullpen. You're seeing a lot of starters leaving in the sixth inning, maybe the seventh, when the game is tied. That's something you never used to see." Naturally, money can also be blamed for the lack of a 20-game winner last season, workloads continue to be monitored more and more closely. That means fewer starters are staying on the mound past 100 pitches. As a result, fewer starting pitchers are racking up 20 wins.
# 9 > "You just don't want to tax a guy too much now," Cooper says. "The No. 1 goal nowadays is winning the game. But you want to keep your horses ready for their next start, and the start after that, and so on. So it's the end of the sixth inning, and your starter has thrown 96 pitches. Well, it's probably time to get him out of there. When you're paying a guy $10 million to pitch, the last thing you want is to have them go on the shelf." Major League Baseball has come down hard on steroid use, and that seemed to turn the game back in favor of the pitchers two seasons ago.The Boston Red Sox (.281 ) were the only team in baseball to bat .280 as a team that year, but overall offense picked up again in 2006. In 05, there were a total of 5,017 home runs hit in the major leagues. Last season, the number jumped to 5,386. "It's an offense game now, and it has been an offensive game for a long time," Cooper says.
# 10 > "Years ago, teams were using four-man starting rotations. That's gone to five-man rotations for a long time, and there's more and more talk about increasing that to six. Somewhere along tne line, the number of guys you see winning 20 games is going to decline." Add it all up__the injury factor, the increased importance of having a strong bullpen and offensive firepower__and it looks like 20-game winners might be going the way of 100 stolen bases in a season. It has been 20 years since Vince Coleman was the last to achieve that feat. "I think every starting pitcher goes into a season wanting to win 20 games," Garland says. "But going out there and taking the ball every fifth day and giving your team a chance to win, it doesn't matter which pitcher gets it. That's the most important thing.
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