Hall of Famer Jim Bunning has died at the age of 85. Author of the first NL perfect game of the modern era, Bunning recorded over 3500 IP and 200 wins in a 17 year career, mostly for the Tigers and Phillies. While often overlooked among the pioneers of the modern, high strikeout pitcher, Bunning established standards for consistency and longevity that few pitchers since have been able to match.
More on Bunning after the jump.
Bunning pitched over 1000 innings in the Tiger farm system before finally making the big club to stay at age 25 in 1957. He made the most of that opportunity, leading the AL in IP and Wins as he posted what would be the only 20 win season of his career (he would win 19 four times, and 17 thrice). Thus began a streak of 11 seasons of 200 IP and 175 strikeouts, still the longest in majors history and matched only by Tom Seaver (1968-78). For some perspective, the longest live ball era streak of such seasons before Bunning was only 5 by Dizzy Dean (1932-36), or 6 by Bob Feller (1938-47), excepting seasons that Feller lost, or mostly lost, to military service.
Bunning’s eleven year run featured 10 seasons with WHIP below 1.3, ten with BB/9 under 3.0, ten with 3 WAR or better, nine with 110 ERA+, eight with 17 or more wins. You get the idea; his teams knew what to expect from him each year, and he rarely disappointed. Among all live ball era pitchers aged 25-35, Bunning ranks fourth in IP, third in starts, seventh in shutouts and eighth in strikeouts.
If Bunning had a bad year in his big run, it came in 1963 with a 12-13 record and 3.88 ERA. At age 31 and with more than 1750 IP in just 7 seasons (plus those 1000+ minor league innings), the Tigers probably figured they were being shrewd in parting with Bunning before he really started to break down. How wrong they were; instead, Bunning would turn in the best four year run of his career for the Phillies, topping 30 WAR with 141 ERA+ and averaging almost 300 IP for those seasons. Among live ball era pitchers aged 32-35, Bunning stands first in starts, second in WAR, IP, shutouts and ERA, and third in strikeouts.
For his 1957 to 1967 seasons, Bunning started 399 games, 230 of them won by his team, a .576 winning percentage (93-69). When he didn’t start, that winning percentage dropped to only .509 (82-80). So, with Bunning on the mound, his teams morphed from also-rans to pennant contenders. Included in these 11 seasons were his perfect game against the Mets in 1964, another no-hitter against Boston in 1958, and a one-hitter against Houston, four weeks before his perfecto. To these, Bunning added 7 two-hitters and 15 three-hitters. Bunning struck out a career high 14 Yankees on Jun 20, 1958, then tied for the Yankee franchise record for most strikeouts in a game.
For the years he was active (1955-71), Bunning ranks 1st in IP, starts, wins and strikeouts, 4th in shutouts and 5th in complete games. Bunning was the first pitcher to record 1800 IP in each league, a feat matched since only by Fergie Jenkins, Gaylord Perry, Nolan Ryan and Randy Johnson. Bunning is also the oldest (at age 34-35) of seven live ball era pitchers (Bob Feller, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, Fergie Jenkins, Mickey Lolich and Nolan Ryan are the others) to record 300 IP and 250 strikeouts in consecutive seasons (Jenkins did it four seasons in a row; nobody else more than two).
Bunning came as close to getting into the HOF via the BBWAA vote as you can, without actually getting in. In 1988, his 12th season on the ballot, he received 74.2% of the vote, falling 4 votes short. After that his vote totals dropped 63.3%, 57.9%, and 63.7%.
Not hard to see what happened. The 1988 ballot on which he was nearly elected had Willie Stargell and not much else (Stargell was the only person on the ballot to be elected by the BBWAA that year or future years). The 1989 ballot added 4 people who would be elected by the BBWAA – Bench, Yaz, Gaylord Perry, and Fergie Jenkins. The following year Perry and Jenkins were still on the ballot, joined by Jim Palmer and Joe Morgan. And then the ’91 ballot still had Jenkins and Perry plus Carew and Fingers.
Still, I find it odd that he wasn’t elected in 1989 after coming so close the year before. Even with the newcomers, the average ballot only had 6.7 votes so there was plenty of space. Instead, it appears that a sizeable numbers of voters simply decided to drop Bunning one year after voting for him.
Nellie Fox missed by 2 votes (74.7%) in his last year on the writers’ ballot in 1985. Some Chicago writers were complaining that since 74.7 would round to 75, they should have let him in.
Jim Bunning was my favorite Tigers Pitcher as a kid growing up in Detroit and then moving to Boston.
My favorite game in the “Best Tigers game you ever went to” thread was May 18, 1959 when Bunning pitched and batted the
Tigers to a 14 – 2 Win over the redsox at Fenway. Bunning Homered and Tripled in the game, and is the only pitcher in ML history to accomplish that per one of you men who write here at HighHeatStats.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/BOS/BOS195905180.shtml
Bunning was one of the Pitchers who would throw high and tight, up and in along with Drysdale, Gibson, Wynn. When Bunning retired he was second all time in strikeouts with 2855 K’s, 40 Shutouts, 3.27 ERA. I always remember his windup and delivery and follow through with each pitch as he would almost fall off towards the first base line.
I was so bullsh*t when the Tigers traded Bunning to the Phillies for another right fielder Don Demeter and iirc Gus Triandos.
We already had the best Right Fielder in the American League.
First F Bomb in front of my dad. Pop was old school and you didn’t swear in the house, but he knew how much I loved the Tigers and Kaline and Bunning. Instead of yelling at me he said in so many words, “There are things in life that you will have no control over. It stinks but life goes on, try to make the best of it”.
First my favorite Lion’s player Safety and Punter Yale Lary died a couple of weeks ago and now Jim Bunning.
I will be a basket case when Kaline goes to the Baseball field in the sky.
Doug, Thankyou for writing this story about my favorite Tigers Pitcher and for all the statistics.
Actually, since 1913, there have been 21 occasions of a pitcher hitting a HR and triple in the same game. But Bunning is the only one to have as many as 5 RBI in the game
A couple things in your memory of Bunning being traded are askew.
First, he was traded with Triandos, not for him.
And Demeter was not a RF.
He was a CF, who the year before had been a super-utility guy for Philly, covering CF-LF-1B-3B
Memories from childhood tend to confuse details. When I saw Doug’s post, my first thought was: “Wait! Bunning’s ’59 Topps card was pink!” Turns out I’d reversed the colors on the ’58 and ’59 cards in my neural circuits, just as KalineCountry reversed Triandos’s role in the trade and recalled Demeter only in Right.
Don Demeter! Without checking I still recall a Sporting News (?) cover that called him “Baseball’s Mr. Versatile.” I was impressed. Versatile. Couldn’t have been later than ’64 though so I would have been 10 or so.
Demeter, during his time with the Phillies, lived in the Lansdowne/Yeadon area of Delaware County PA. A friend who is about 65 y.o. said that Demeter gave his time generously to the local little league and helped out the fathers with coaching and everything. He remembered him as a real gentleman.
For thirty years, the mitt I used was a Don Demeter model. Nice signature, but it did nothing to convince anyone I was any good. I forgive him, nevertheless.
I’ve done a little hunting around, and I can only find three top flight players who switched leagues in the 1960s and had roughly comparable success in both leagues. Frank Robinson, Jim Bunning, and, yes, Milt Pappas. The Robinson for Pappas trade was always one-sided, and the fact that Frank had a terrific follow-up year and Milt a middling one only gave it the appearance of being far worse. It was hardly Broglio for Gibson by any reckoning. Pappas put up 22 WAR in Baltimore in nine years, 24.8 in ten years in the NL.
At any rate, my point is this: despite Robinson’s belittling of the AL of the 1960s, Pappas, but especially Bunning, seemed to go the opposite route, finding the NL not especially more challenging. Bunning’s first four years in the NL actually generated far more WAR than did Robinson’s in the AL.
Broglio was traded for Brock
I meant Brock, of course. Don’t be so hard on an old, feeble brain.
I can only find three top flight players who switched leagues in the 1960s and had roughly comparable success in both leagues.
Players just didn’t switch leagues very much in that time. The leagues were competing against each other and tried to keep their best talent by instituting restrictions that limited the ability to make trades between leagues. Without Robinson’s “baggage” seems quite unlikely he could have been traded to an AL team.
Looking at players with 20 WAR for the decade, I can find only three others with even 5 WAR in each league: Frank Howard, Clete Boyer and Claude Osteen.
On another thread I commented that the 1959 Tigers were a strange team, one I thought worthy of comment, and epm (e pluribus menu, for short) asked me what I meant, so I’m answering him here on a thread with an obvious connection to the 1959 Tigers through Bunning’s presence on the team.
To start: this team had incredible success playing the Yankees, going 14-8, with Don Mossi garnering 6 wins and Frank Lary 5. Against the rest of the league they were 62-70.
The team had the two top batters in the AL, Harvey Kuenn at .353 and Al Kaline at .327. The next closest behind them was Pete Runnels at .314. The team together, though, finished fourth in BA.
Offensive WAR: Kaline, Eddie Yost, and Kuenn finished in a virtual tie for second in the league. The team finished a poor third.
Yost, escaped at last from Griffith Stadium, banged out 21 HRs, led the league in runs, walks and OBP. Charlie Maxwell also had a career high in HRs at 31(tying Mantle for fourth); he and Kaline joined Yost in the top ten in walks; Kaline and Kuenn were behind Eddie at third and fourth in OBP. The team was third in the AL in runs, second in HRs, second in walks, first in OPS. Sounds good, right?
The team’s four-man starting rotation had three 17 game winners, Bunning, Mossi, and Lary, and a 14 game winner in Paul Foytack. Sixty-five Ws with 51 CGs. Sounds really good. The rest of the pitching staff? Eleven wins.
Pitching WAR: Mossi 4.1, Bunning 3.8, Lary 2.1. Team total 7.2.
A different era, maybe? This pitching staff led the league in fewest walks allowed and was second in Ks recorded by a tiny margin. It finished seventh, though, in ERA, runs allowed, and earned runs allowed.
Personnel: Don Mossi and Ray Narleski, the one-two relievers on the Cleveland league champs of 1954. Eddie Yost, escaped from Washington as already mentioned. Gus Zernial and Larry Doby hanging on. Rocky Bridges at shortstop, his chaw as big as MVP Nellie Fox’s, but with nothing else comparable.
That’s it, epm.
A very nice analysis, nsb (no statistician bot, for long). Thanks for replying to my query on the other string, and especially for noting the magnificence of Rocky Bridges’ chaw (his other feature comparable to Fox was his baseball smarts). As I wrote on that earlier string, the Tigers of that era were my go-to team for beating the Yankees, and since, between the departure of the Bums from Ebbetts Field after ’57 and the arrival of the Mets at the Polo Grounds in ’62, I had no local option for games but the Stadium that housed the Enemy, I tried to get to as many Detroit games there as I could. For a couple of years, the Tigers won every game I attended, and I became a loyal fan (which worked out well when I wound up living near Detroit from ’66 to ’85 — I got to watch Kaline frequently in two cities, like KalineCountry, whose feelings for Kaline I completely understand).
Apart from the ’59 Tigers’ unusual dominance of the Yankees, and a vague sense that the Tigers always seemed to underperform in the standings, I had not put together the various odd dimensions of the team’s unbalanced record, as nsb has done: lots of top quality performers, operating in a relative vacuum. (Of course, one can’t use the phrase “odd dimensions” without thinking of Don Mossi.) It’s worth noting that in 1958, against a much stronger Yankee team, the Tigers went 12-10: not quite as glossy on the surface, but still the only team to prevail over the Yankees in a season series that year: I think it’s really the two-year 26-18 record (15-7 at the Stadium!) that stands out on that front. (The trend ended in 1960 — a bad year for the Tigers after the disruption of the Kuenn for Colavito trade — but the Tigers rebounded to 8-10 against the ’61 Yankee juggernaut, winning over 100 games themselves, so over the four-year span I rooted for the Tigers in Yankee Stadium, they did have an even 42-42 record against the Yankees, 20-22 at the Stadium, despite finishing a cumulative 50 games behind them in the season standings.)
Although, as nsb pointed out earlier, Bunning was not one of the Tiger pitchers who thrived at the Stadium, he was terrific to watch there. As KalineCountry noted, he seemed to fall off the mound with every pitch, as though his arm had gone off in the essential direction and the rest of him had been tossed aside as a disposable byproduct. Of course, the pitcher I admired most on that team was Frank “The Yankee Killer” Lary. I was distraught when his career flared out after its 1961 peak, but continued to root for Bunning even after his shift to the NL and his unforgivable game against the Mets in ’64 (which I remember listening to the end of on radio up in Hastings-on-Hudson, for some reason). I have to admit, though, that I thought Lary had a better record in regard to the Senators, though opinions on that will vary.
EPM and NSB – Not sure if either of you read Bill James’ Abstracts, but in one of them he had a long essay about how the Tigers could never seem to put things together, despite having lots of top level talent. He attributed this to them having woefully inadequate third baseman throughout the years, though that seems like a lot of responsibility to pin on just one position.
I read many of his annuals years ago, David, and still consult the Historical volume, but I don’t recall spotting this. I don’t think it would apply to the ’59 Tigers, since Yost was still productive at 3B during his Tigers stint, but it’s certainly true in the mid/late ’60s that 3B was a desert for the Tigers — not to throw shade on Don Wert, but he was what he was. Nevertheless, when the Tigers finally dominated the league in 1968, Wert’s BA at 3B was 65 points higher than Oyler’s at SS — not quite the level of excellence that may seem to imply, however, since Oyler batted .135 (but his power and keen batting eye lifted that to a robust .399 OPS). After all, in the ’68 Series, when outfielder Mickey Stanley played an infield position he had one week’s training in just to remove the hole in the lineup, it wasn’t 3B he played. (I was never an admirer of Mayo Smith, but I think that remains the gutsiest managerial move I can recall having seen — playing a novice at SS for the World Series.)
EPM – If memory serves me correctly, it was under a comment for Tom Brookens, who James once referred to as “the worst player in the league last year”. James went all the way back to the Cobb years in the comment.
[I thought I posted something like this last night, but it’s not showing up. If this is a repeat, I apologize.]
James’s statement seems odd to me, David. Brookens, of course, comes from a different era from the one we’ve been discussing, but even so, although he was no world-beater, I don’t recall him being as bad as that, and B-R gives him positive WAR all through his ten-year Tiger tenure. James used to get bees in his bonnet, positive and negative, about certain players, and perhaps Brookens was one – maybe part of James’s campaign to throw shade on anything connected with Sparky Anderson.
But looking over Detroit’s baseball history, I really can’t see the effect James mentions, primarily because their third-basemen don’t seem historically weaker than other teams’ (remember, 3B was such a weak position before the 1960s that we couldn’t stock the CoG with players at that spot comparable to any other), and also because the Tigers did, in fact have plenty of success. Cobb’s teams, with ordinary, low-positive WAR third basemen like Moriarty and Vitt, won three consecutive pennants, largely powered by their outfielders; the 1930s-40s Tigers, with average third basemen like Owen and Higgins (Pinky actually looks above average), won four pennants. The nine pennants that the Tigers won from the team’s creation through the “Brookens Era” was a strong showing in a league where the Yankees took 33, leaving the rest of the teams to divvy up the remainder. Those nine tied the Red Sox for third place in the league, after the A’s twelve. It’s true that in later years, third basemen like Wert, Aurelio Rodriguez (who I think was better than his record shows, because of fielding skills I’ve described here before), and Brookens were sub-par for the era, but I also agree with you that James’s comment would have attributed too much determinative power to a single weak position. When I was little, Brooklyn was weak at third – Billy Cox, Don Hoak, Randy Jackson – but won pennant after pennant: in fact, during Cox’s five-year term as a regular, the Dodgers won three pennants and lost the other two in their last season inning.
If there is any AL team that truly underperformed its overall strength over the course of its existence it seems to me it would be Cleveland. For the history of the eight-team AL, 1901-60, Cleveland was a First Division team 41 seasons (almost 70% of the time), a perpetual contender, but managed only three pennants (and they’ve added only three in the 55 pennant-seasons since). Over that sixty-year period, the Tigers had 32 First Division finishes and seven pennants. My yellow pad tells me that means Cleveland parlayed strength into victory 7% of the time, vs. 22% for the Tigers over that 60-year stretch. (It becomes harder to sort that out once expansion kicks in.)
I agree with your points EPM. James obviously did groundbreaking work but he also had a tendency to stake out a position and then look for facts to support it (something we all do). This may be one of those cases.
Though to be fair to James we obviously have more sophisticated tools to evaluate than what he was using. Using the tools available to him at the time, these players may have looked a lot worse than they do now.
At the same time, it’s not clear what the Tigers should have done. As you noted, it’s not like there were tons of great third baseman that the Tigers could have acquired for nothing. In fact, the supply was quite limited and to improve at third base would have likely made the Tigers worse at one or more other position.
Third base in the 1960s was a desert for most AL teams. It was Brooksie and then everybody else, basically.
I think that may be oversimplifying a bit, Doug, though your main point’s right: Robinson’s in a class by himself. But McMullen and Boyer were producing WAR at a good clip (and Boyer was matching Brooks in the field): they just spent fewer years in the AL. Bando was ramping up to Robinson-like WAR levels, and in his first ten years as a regular (including 1968-69), he produced 54 WAR, just like Robinson – no way were Rollins and Wert in his class. Nor were they in Charles’s, when he was having a good year: his best four in the ’60s produced 16+ WAR, but some were in the NL. And, of course, you have the oddity of Killebrew stepping in and out of the 3B role. Robinson just happened to come into his own exactly at the start of the decade and to play the entire ten years in the AL, so this particular window creates a little distortion (though, bring Brooksie, he continued at the same rate for half of the ’70s as well).
To Doug’s point, remarkably, Wert was on the AL All-Star team (behind Brooks Robinson) in 1968 despite his 0.556 OPS (better in the first half of the season at 0.618). But he doubled against Tom Seaver in his one plate appearance in the game, one that had very few AL batting highlights.
And now Jimmy Piersall has passed away. Piersall put up 29.2 WAR through age 31, but −0.6 WAR for the rest of his career.
Piersall famously struggled with bipolar disorder, which he wrote about in his book Fear Strikes Out, which was later turned into movie. In the movie Piersall was portrayed by Anthony Perkins, who was still a few years from his most famous role as Norman Bates in Psycho.
Thanks for the heads-up, David. The fact that Piersall achieved such success and remained productive into old age, despite a level of bipolarism that can be disabling for life, is reason for celebration. He was always prone to odd bursts, as his audience learned when he was an announcer, but having had plenty of experience with folks who underwent electroshock therapy for bipolarism and lived with lithium medication, I had great admiration for Piersall’s story.
One of his most famous bursts of manic behavior was his running the basepaths “backwards” when he hit his hundredth home run. I remember my father, who had been attending games at the Polo Grounds from the late 1910s, leaping to his feet and shouting, “Look! Look!” as Piersall turned his back to second base and began backpedaling his way there — the whole park was in an uproar. What does a packed house for a Sunday double-header sound like when everyone at once starts shouting in surprise?
Nice story EPM! Piersall is before my time, so while I’m familiar with the name, I really didn’t know much about him.
I have to disagree a little, epm.
1) Running the bases backward, as I recall, was a calculated act, and Piersall said so at the time, though I don’t have documentation. Maybe it’s in his SABR bio, I haven’t looked. A few days before the incident Duke Snider, also running out the string for the lowly Mets, had bashed his 400th HR and circled the bases in a modest trot. Piersall thought Duke should have done something to celebrate the event, and when he himself hit number 100, he put on a deliberate show.
2) Piersall, possibly because of his condition—make that probably—did a lot of stuff deliberately to make other people uncomfortable. He was the pre- or post-game interview the media announcers hated and feared, because he jerked them around with odd behavior, not looking innocent of understanding while he did it but sly and mocking. That he became a media commentator himself is irony of the higher sort, at least to me.
nsb, Piersall did explain later that he knew he was going to run backwards when he hit the home run. Those of us at the park didn’t.
Except for the times he went over the line and hurt himself with his behavior, Piersall turned the character of his manic impulses into the asset of an unpredictable and interesting prankster persona, and managed to keep the depressive persona out of public sight. I imagine that many of his edgy actions were premeditated and that the ones that got him in deep trouble were impulsive. If he was like the manic-depressives I know, the cost to him of having gone over the line in public was very, very high, and that he would keep risking it, decade after decade — what strikes you as ironic (reasonably) — is what I found impressive.
Piersall is inducted in the Halls of Fame of both the Red Sox and the White Sox.
Piersall is 3rd all-time in Rfield for players who primarily played CF, just edging out Paul Blair. The only two players ahead of him are Mays and Andrew Jones.
Piersall and Blair also have very similar offensive numbers. Oddly, while Piersall is Blair’s #1 comp via similarity scores, Blair doesn’t make Piersall’s top 10 list.
Again, to play the skeptic, I’ve always wondered how much of Piersall’s Rfield in the mid to late 1950’s was due to the fact that he played next to Ted Williams who was already a statue for the BoSox in left field. How often did Piersall shade a little to that side and make plays that otherwise he wouldn’t have. It’s smart baseball, good fielding, but it’s also what any competent center fielder probably would have done or been told to do by the manager and coaching staff.
An aside: Three AL center fielders whose careers overlapped in the 1950s who were noted for their defense: Jim Busby, Jim Piersall, Jim Landis.
It’s a good argument, nsb. But Piersall’s Rfield remained high and consistent through his three seasons in Cleveland, following his Red Sox stint. Then it vanishes along with his offense from ’62 on, as he begins to bounce around among teams.
For the record, Cleveland’s outfield defense for Piersall’s three seasons there:
1959 – 48 Rfield – Minoso (14), Piersall (17), Colavito (17)
1960 – 16 Rfield – Francona (3), Piersall (17), Kuenn (-4)
1961 – 29 Rfield – Francona (4), Piersall (17), Kirkland (8)
That was a great defensive outfield in ’59, but something the Indians needed every year with the big dimensions at Municipal Stadium. Piersall’s range factor (2.88, 3.15, 3.00) for those seasons suggests he may have been compensating for the lesser abilities of his outfield mates in the latter two seasons.