Those tuned in to ESPN for the almost-opener in Miami heard Dan Shulman say that the 2011 Cardinals had 9 different pitchers record at least 1 save.

What’s your gut sense — was that an all-time record? The point here is not to look it up (that’s my job!), but just to say what you think.

(By the way, Shulman was mistaken; only 8 different Cardinals got a save last year, and that includes the postseason, where Jason Motte got all 5 saves. But for the sake of discussion, let’s pretend he was right.)

Ray Narleski, a standout reliever for Cleveland in the 1950s, died last week at the age of 83. Here’s the obituary that ran in the Cleveland Plain Dealer; here is his B-R Bullpen page, and a note from WasWatching.

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Oakland beat Seattle 4-1 Thursday behind 3 late HRs, earning a split of MLB’s out-of-town preview. Bartolo Colon exploited Seattle’s aggressiveness to work 8 strong innings on just 86 pitches, allowing just 3 hits and a walk. The first 3 men in Seattle’s order went 0-12 with 4 Ks.

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Game 3 of the 1941 World Series featured a World Series “first” — something that wouldn’t happen again for 50 years, and only once more since then. What was it? It has to do with the performance of one player in each game.

Congratulations to Kerry W. and to Ryan, who teamed up to provide the full answer; see comments #10 and #16 below.

MLB’s quadrennial miniseries in the Tokyo Dome ushered in another championship season and ended the soul-crushing 5-month box-score drought. When Brandon McCarthy put the first pitch over, and Chone Figgins bounced out to short on the next offering, we felt at once the comfort that baseball was back, same as it ever was.

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[Another work-in-progress. Your observations are welcomed, but please review the “Known shortcomings” at the end of the post.]

Taking suggestions from readers Mike L. and kds, I used the Pythagorean method to calculate the estimated career wins for all starting pitchers with at least 1,000 innings from 1893-2011 (min. 60% of career games as a SP).

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[Update: The concept of W/WAR has been shown to be fundamentally flawed; see comments by kds @11 and me @25. But I’m leaving the post open for any further comments in the threads.]

I’ve been playing around with ways to reflect the role of luck in starting pitchers’ W-L records, using data that can be pulled up with the Play Index. After muddling about with run support, defensive support and general team quality — none of which can be summoned by the Play Index — it occurred to me that those things are already factored into Wins Above Replacement (“WAR,” using the Baseball-Reference formula).

A simple ratio of Wins per WAR, then, might provide a snapshot of Wins luck for starting pitchers. The higher the ratio, the luckier the pitcher; the lower the ratio, the tougher the luck.

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In light of recent discussions of Roy Halladay, here are the best 4-year bWAR totals by pitchers in the past 30 years. The top 15 marks all belong to Clemens, Maddux, Johnson or Pedro (with an even spacing among the top 12); you’ll find Halladay’s 27.7 WAR at #18:

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Following up the Halladay/300-win discussion, here are two age-based graphs of the 18 modern* 300-game winners: wins by seasonal age, and cumulative wins by age
.

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Over the past 4 years, Roy Halladay leads the majors with 77 wins, a 160 ERA+ (min. 500 IP), 969 IP and 27.7 bWAR. With 188 career wins through age 34, he’s the active wins leader (at least until Jamie Moyer takes the mound in a real game). He still in peak form, winning 19 last year while leading the NL in ERA+ and pitchers’ WAR.

What are his chances of winning 300?

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