The greatest pitching rotation there ever was
In 1954 the Cleveland Indians won a shocking 111 games as they captured the American League pennant. Yankee catcher Yogi Berra had once said of those Indians that they had “those four pitchers and nothing else.” But in ’54 the Tribe lined up behind their Big Four and rolled to a record victory total.
The four starting pitchers who led the Indians in that era included three future Hall of Famers. Their record together and pedigree as bona fide aces individually made them the best rotation in baseball at that time and as the record shows, the greatest starting rotation in baseball history.
All four were right-handed and possessed excellent fastballs. The oldest of the quartet was an American hero and one of the most famous athletes in the world. Another was the son of immigrants who could hardly speak English but who had what Ted Williams called an “unhittable pitch.” One of them was a pitcher by necessity: he had started his ballplaying career as an outfielder but switched to the mound after it became apparent that he wasn’t a good enough hitter to be in the lineup every day. The final member of the group was a mean-tempered competitor who honed his craft as a moundsman under the guidance of one of the best pitching coaches in baseball history, the same coach who helped two of the others fill out their repertoire of pitches.
The “Great Rotation” was Bob Feller, Mike Garcia, Bob Lemon, and Early Wynn.
From 1949 to 1954 the four were in the rotation together, making 749 of the 924 starts for Cleveland over that six-year stretch, or slightly more than 81% of the team starts. The fifth starter didn’t really matter that much because the first four, who comprised the Great Rotation, were so damn good. They were a combined 429–244 (.638). They completed an amazing 393 of their starts, or roughly 52%. When they were handed the ball they usually did their job very well.
Want more numbers? Feller/Garcia/Lemon/Wynn combined for eleven 20-win seasons in those six years and twice three of them reached the 20-win mark in the same season.
The Cy Young Award was first awarded in 1956, so the appropriate way to see how good these four were is to look at MVP voting. In 1950, 1951, 1952, and 1954 one of them finished in the top five, and in 1953 three of them were in the top nine in MVP voting. In 1954 Lemon and Wynn finished fifth and sixth. Year after year they were among the best players in their league.
While the Indians were always more than just “those four,” the team benefited from the Great Rotation. The Indians won 89 games in 1949 and then won 92 or 93 each of the next four seasons before winning that absurd total of 111 in ’54, burying the feared Yankees.
Of all the great pitching rotations, this one stayed together longer than any other. Feller, Garcia, Lemon, and Wynn were active together as members of the starting rotation for six full years and were teammates for nine seasons. They finally disbanded when Feller retired in 1956.
Most teams struggle to keep three good starting pitchers together for more than a few seasons, and four starters rarely stick together for more than two seasons. But to have three Hall of Famers and another All-Star in the rotation for six years is unparalleled in baseball history.
How did the Indians do it? Part of it comes down to great scouting and excellent coaching. Three of the pitchers were unearthed and signed by Cleveland scouts who scoured the country for talent in the 1930s. The other, Wynn, was acquired thanks to the keen eye of the team’s pitching coach, a former hurler who played a key role in the success of the four.
The Indians didn’t win a championship with their Great Rotation, but they were a formidable challenger to the Yankees, a great team who won five pennants during this stretch. In ’54 the Tribe captured the flag but lost the Series in one of the biggest upsets in the history of the Fall Classic. Still, the greatness of the four pitchers cannot be diminished by their failure to shine in the World Series.
The relationship between the four great aces was not always friendly. Feller was supremely confident and cocksure. Wynn and Lemon hated losing and carried on a rivalry for several seasons for the position as heir to Feller as the #1 man on the staff. Everyone loved Garcia, but he mostly kept to himself or tagged along with his best friend on the team, second baseman Bobby Avila.
Friends or not, the greatest starting rotation in baseball history was a quartet who deserve to be remembered.
Grumpy Gus
If the Great Rotation were being cast as a movie, Bob Feller was the midwestern farm boy, Bob Lemon was the golden child from California, and Mike Garcia was the son of Mexican immigrants. Which left Early Wynn as hard-headed rebel from the south.
Wynn was born in the deep southern part of Alabama, eight months before Lemon entered the world. Like Feller, Wynn was raised on a farm and he became “country strong” milking cows and working behind a mule. By the time he was 17 years old he was a strapping 200-pound specimen with solid legs and a powerful right arm. The Washington Senators caught sight of him at a tryout camp in Florida and quickly got his name on a pro contract. two years later he made three starts for the Senators in September, but he was still raw. He had yet to tame his fastball.
Wynn stayed pretty unrefined during his years with Washington, but he had something that Cleveland owner Bill Veeck liked: moxie. Pitching coach Mel Harder was also pretty confident that with some tuning here and there, Wynn could be a big winner.
“He had a good fastball,” Harder said later of Wynn, “but he needed a strong second pitch to get him over the hump.”
Veeck swiped Wynn from the Sens for three players at the winter meetings in 1948. It proved to be a highway robbery. Prior to joining the Tribe, Early had somehow managed to win 72 games over a decade without a good breaking pitch to set up his fastball. After Harder’s tutelage, Wynn won 228 games and became a Hall of Famer.
“Mel made a pitcher out of me,” Wynn later admitted.
And what a pitcher he was. Wynn won 20 games five times in the 1950s, and over an eleven year stretch through the age of 40, the big righthander never missed a turn in the rotation due to injury. While Feller may have been the confident veteran leader of the Great Rotation, Wynn was the true ace. From 1949 to 1954, he pitched more innings and won more games than any other pitcher in the league other than his teammate, Lemon.
Of the four, Wynn was the meanest on the mound. Which was saying quite a bit, since Feller was no lady on the hill and Lemon was a notoriously fierce competitor who once hit four batters in one game.
“If they crowd the plate, I have no choice but to hit them,” Wynn snarled.
As David Fleitz relates in his excellent biography of Wynn, in one game against the Yankees after Mickey Mantle hit a ball back through the middle that nearly flipped Wynn on his back, the Cleveland hurler fired several pickoff attempts over to first carefully aimed at the Mick’s legs. Long before Bob Gibson and later Nolan Ryan deservedly earned reputations as “no-nonsense” workers on the mound, Wynn was the prototype.
Wynn, who earned the nickname “Gus” for unknown reasons while pitching in the deep south, despised losing, so it was a good thing that he usually won. He tallied exactly 300 wins in his career, winning his final one, the celebrated #300, back in a Cleveland uniform in 1963 after he’d spent a few years with the White Sox where he led that team to a pennant.
Wynn was the last of the four to pitch in the majors, tossing his last game for the ’63 Indians at the age of 43. One of his teammates on that club was a young Tommy John, who would make his final pitch in the big leagues in 1989.
Dependable Mr. Lemon
On September 11, 1942, Bob Lemon was at third base for the Cleveland Indians when a Boston batter hit a groundball to his right. Lemon shifted, snared the grounder, and fired the ball the first. His throw was strong and beat the runner by several steps. It also had an unusual movement on it. Still, first baseman Eddie Robinson gathered it in to record the out. It was the first assist for Lemon in a big league game, but he wouldn’t do much of that in a 15-year career that landed him in Cooperstown.
“His throws came in with a natural break on them,” Robinson recalled years later. “His arm was special.”
Lemon is a rarity: he’s one of the only position players to transition to pitching while in the major leagues. His arm was that good and he was that talented.
In 1946 after returning from three years in the U.S. Navy, Lemon found himself blocked at third by veteran Ken Keltner. His inability to hit breaking pitches also worked against him. By mid-season, Lou Boudreau was using Lemon on the mound. Helped by coach Bill McKechnie and later Al Lopez and pitching coach Mel Harder, Lemon matured into his new role. Remarkably he relied mostly on his natural arm strength the first few seasons.
In 1948 when the Indians won the pennant by beating the Red Sox in a one-game playoff, Lemon won 20 games for the fist time. He would do it six more times in his career, all within a nine-year stretch of dominance. From 1948 to 1956 his 186 wins were the most in baseball and 29 more than any other pitcher in the American League.
Lemon’s staple was his sinking fastball which had that natural movement that occurred when he threw a baseball. He once speculated it was because he had short fingers. The California native also had an excellent slider, the best of the members of the Great Rotation. He threw no fewer than five pitches: his standard fastball, sidearm cutter, slider, curve ball (which improved under the watchful eye of Mel Harder), and a changeup he added mid-career. He developed a slinging three-quarters sidearm motion that gave his pitches even more “pop” as they hurtled toward home plate.
He held Ted Williams to a modest .267 average in 149 plate appearances and Mickey Mantle, who batted .202 against Lemon with 26 strikeouts, called him the toughest righthander he ever faced.
A great athlete, Lemon was a true workhorse. He led the AL in complete games give times and in innings pitched four times. He started a game on three days of rest or less an incredible 199 times in his career and his record in such situations was 118–61 with a 3.12 ERA. In ’48 when the Indians were fighting for the flag, he started on two or one days rest nine times and won five times.
After Feller started to fall off a bit, Lemon was his natural successor as top man in the rotation. In 1950 he got the opening day start, which had typically gone to the senior Feller, who was actually only two years older than Lemon despite having thrown his first big league game ten years before Lemon.
Among the four members of the Great Rotation, Lemon was the most cerebral. He was known for having a quick wit and a sharp tongue. He was the only one of the four who went on to manage after his playing career, winning two pennants for the Yankees and one World Series title while working for the insufferable George Steinbrenner.
Lemon was one of the best hitting pitchers in baseball history, and his 37 career home runs are the second most ever by a pitcher. On six occasions he hit a home run to account for the only runs in one of his wins.
He beat the Boston Braves twice in the 1948 World Series when the Great Rotation was three strong (Garcia made a few starts down the stretch but was not yet a regular on the staff).
Lemon finally succumbed to injury in 1957 when he developed bone chips in his elbow. The end came quick, he made only one start in ’58 before leaving the game mod-season. His comeback attempts were failures. His final mark showed 207 wins in 13 seasons as a pitcher, winning 197 of them in a ten-year stretch of brilliance. In 1976 he joined Feller and Wynn in the Hall of Fame.
The Greatest Arm God Ever Made
There are many ways to define the term “legend,” but one of them is this: if anyone is ever called “The Next So-and-So” then that “So-and-So” is a legend.
Bob Feller wasn’t even done with his big league career when a promising young pitcher was being called “The next Bob Feller.” The first pitcher to be hung with that impossible tag was his teammate, Herb Score, a hard-throwing New York native who was lucky to be alive at all. When he was a toddler he was run over by a car, but survived the accident to grow up tall and straight with an arm that could throw a baseball very hard.
In a doubleheader in 1955 the great Feller pitched the first game and hammered the Boston Red Sox with his fastball, while also frustrating batters with his curve ball and getting them to pound the ball into the ground. The veteran pitcher was no longer a flamethrower at that point of his career: the 36-year old struck out only two Boston batters that afternoon in Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium. Thirty minutes after Feller finished off his one-hit domination, 21-year old Score toed the rubber in the second game and allowed only four hits as he pumped his fastball for 16 strikeouts, only two off Feller’s league record. Score took 122 minutes to finish off the enemy.
For years after Feller exited the majors, the newest young flamethrower was compared to him, especially if the youngster happened to be too old to shave. After Score there was Steve Dalkowski, who could probably throw a baseball 100 miles per hour. But neither Score, Dalkowski, nor any other teenage phenom ever matched Rapid Robert. That’s because Feller was better at a young age than any pitcher who ever pitched in baseball.
The story of Bob Feller is an American myth: the farmboy who grows strong tossing hay bales and working farm equipment in the fruited plains. But every word of the Feller story is true: how he learned to throw a curve ball by tossing stones into a lake; how his Pa drew a strike zone on the side of the barn for his son to aim at; how his mother rewarded his exploits by filling the family dinner table with warm home-cooked meals; how at the age of nine he threw a tattered baseball 270 feet; how when he was 12 years old he was throwing a baseball past men more than twice his age.
Even in an era when news spread by word-of-mouth and gossip from the rural phone company operator, Feller’s incredible athletic prowess became known to people outside the farmlands of his native Iowa. When he was eleven his father built a baseball diamond on a portion of their 360-acre farm. It was a real life “Field of Dreams.” Feller was pitching in competitive leagues before he was a teenager.
A baseball bird dog named Cy Slapnicka was the first to set his sights on getting Feller into a professional uniform. He eventually signed Feller to a contract with the Indians for $1 and an autographed baseball that contained the names of the members of the Cleveland club.
Feller was such a celebrity by the time he was 17 that his graduation was broadcast on the radio. Slapnicka called him “a once in a lifetime talent.”
Just weeks after his last day in high school, the Indians had Feller and his peach-fuzz face in uniform. He spent a month pitching out of the bullpen, eased in to the world of major league baseball. He was famously wild with his fastball at this time in his development. No one was sure where his heater would go. In his debut in Washington D.C. (the first time he’d been east of Chicago in his life), Feller threw nine pitches as he walked the first two batters he faced out of the bullpen.
After a month or so of seasoning, the Cleveland brain trust determined they were ready to send young Bob out for his first start. The sent him out against the meager lineup of the Browns to bolster his confidence. But “Rapid Robert” didn’t need any help. He struck out 15 batters in a complete game win. With that performance in front of the Cleveland crowd, he won over Tribe fans for good. Later that year he struck out 17 in a game against the Athletics that took less than two hours. He was 17 years old.
The farm boy with the magic right arm had a thing for openings and curtain calls. In ’38 in his first start of the campaign he one-hit the Browns and on the final day of that season he fanned 18 Tigers in an overpowering performance. On opening day the next year he tossed a three-hitter and in 1940 he fired a no-hitter, the only opening day no-no in baseball history. In 1941 just a few months before Pearl Harbor changed his path, Feller fired a one-hitter in what proved to be his last start for almost four years. When he returned after VJ-Day in 1945, he showed little rust in his first start back with the Indians, throwing a four-hitter and striking out a dozen Tigers, including Hank Greenberg twice.
Like Sandy Koufax, Nolan Ryan and Dwight Gooden years later, Feller was not a one-trick pony. His right arm could unleash an excellent curve ball as well as a 100 mile-per-hour fastball. None other than the great Detroit slugger Hank Greenberg (who would later be GM of the Indians in the latter years of the Great Rotation), said of Feller: “He can throw it hard, but it’s [the curve ball] that kills you. It’s murder.”
If Feller were still alive there would be two things he’d especially want you to know about his life. First, he was immensely proud of his service in the Second World War, an event that caused him to miss nearly four full seasons starting when he was 23 years old. Second, he would remind everyone within earshot that had he not been in the uniform of the U.S. Navy he would have put up numbers that would challenge the greatest pitchers in history. Though it became fashionable to tease Feller as a “grouchy old man” in the latter years of his life, it’s hard to argue with his claims. Feller probably missed close to 100 wins and 1,000 strikeouts because of his time in WWII. Who knows how many more no-hitters he would have pitched? As it was he notched three of them, including one on opening day. In the three years prior to WWII when he was 20–22 years old, Feller averaged 25 wins, 320 innings, and 256 K’s. In his first full season back after helping his country make the world safe for democracy, Feller won 26 games and set a league record with 348 strikeouts. The third pitcher on the K list that season had less than half as many. “The Heater from Van Meter” was nearly untouchable at his peak.
By the time the Indians had Wynn, Lemon, and Garcia in their rotation, Feller had been shouldering the load for Cleveland for several years. The team was rarely any good in Feller’s early years, and famously came under a black cloud as the “Cry Baby Indians” when the clubhouse refused to play for an oppressive manager.
In ’49 when the Great Rotation came to be, Feller was only 30 years old, but he would never again be the dominant pitcher who could simply throw a baseball past hitters. He became more of a pitcher in his thirties, still striking fear in the heart of opposing batters. The greatest hitter of his generation, and maybe the greatest ever, Ted Williams, said of Feller, “He’s the best pitcher I ever faced or saw.”
By the 1950s, Feller had thrown a baseball on four different continents, having showed off his stuff while in the Navy and also in winter barnstorming tours in South and Central America. At times he would square off against the negro leagues best hurler, Satchel Paige. Occasionally, Feller would match Satch’s old trick of pulling his defense off the field except for a catcher. Then he’d proceed to strike out the side without a ball being put in play.
While his era is long gone and may seem quaint to us now in the second decade of the 21st century, Feller’s place in baseball history is secure. He was, after Babe Ruth, the first baseball player who was a national hero. He went to war, sacrificing the prime years of his career. He helped fight for the rights of players by supporting changes in the contracts that they signed and throwing his support behind the formation of a union. Feller was among the first prominent voices to call for black players to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. He never let anyone forget about the Greatest Generation and he was an unwavering patriot and American. In a way he was like a real-life Clark Kent who instead of going to Metropolis to be a reporter, went to Cleveland to become an baseball hero.
The Big Bear
Of the famous quartet that made up the Great Rotation, Mike Garcia was the only one who didn’t end up in the Hall of Fame. But for at least a few years he was nearly the equal of his more famous teammates.
Like Lemon, Garcia was California-born and bred. But unlike Lemon, little Mike was not fortunate enough to belong to a middle class family. The Garcia’s were part of the Mexican farming community that moved around the west to wherever there was work. Garcia enjoyed a growth spurt between his 14th and 15th year and suddenly became a tall, strong young man growing up in the San Joaquin Valley, just a few clicks south of Sacramento.
The youngest of the four members of the Great Rotation, Garcia had to wait until after World War II to earn his chance in the big leagues. Tall (he was a shade over 6'1) and barrel-chested, Garcia was 24 years old in 1948 when he dominated the competition in Oklahoma City and earned a September summons from Cleveland.
His shot finally came in one of the most famous games in Indians’ history: the final game of the season against Detroit. The Tribe needed a win to capture the pennant but the Tigers pounded them and Mike got in to face a few batters in a lopsided loss. The next day the team beat Boston in a playoff for the pennant.
In the six years that the four members of the Great Rotation pitched regularly, Garcia averaged 17 wins with a 2.91 ERA. He was a notorious slow starter, never fond of the cool weather, he warmed up when the weather warmed up.
Of the four, Garcia had the most resilient arm, and thus he was frequently tabbed to pitch in relief between starts when needed. He averaged 11 appearances out of the bullpen in the years 1949–54. That extra work rarely troubled the unflappable Garcia, however. He was 23–8 with a 2.22 ERA in 38 starts on two days rest!
Twice, “Big Bear” led the American League in shutouts, his best season coming in ’52 when he fired six whitewashes among his 22 victories and finished ninth in Most Valuable Player voting. That season Wynn finished fifth and Lemon was eighth.
Because he was a Spanish-speaker, Garcia was the least recognized and shyest of the four in the Cleveland rotation. Even so, when he wanted to he made his voice heard. In one game against the Yankees in 1953, catcher Jim Hegan made a hasty visit to the mound to calm down his big pitcher after a few pitches were called against him. “The next batter, [New York outfielder] Hank Bauer, who had heard some Spanish during his years in the war, said he couldn’t recognize every word Garcia was using but he knew some of it wasn’t friendly,” Hegan recalled.
During his best seasons Garcia frustrated opposing batters because he could get them with several pitches. He had a great fastball, the type that baseball men called a “heavy fastball.” That is, a pitch that even if contact was made, it usually thudded off the bat. But Garcia also arrived in the big leagues with a top-notch slider and he probably had the best pitch of that type in the league for several seasons. He learned the curve from pitching coach Mel Harder and then added a fourth pitch that let’s just say had a little “wet stuff” on it. The spitter was a devastating pitch that Garcia saved for special occasions when he really needed a strikeout. Ted Williams frequently complained about Garcia;s illegal pitch.
Whether his fourth pitch was illegal or not, Garcia was a great pitcher, earning All-Star selections in three straight seasons. In the magical season of 1954 when the team gobbled up 111 wins to bury the Yankees for once, Garcia not only had 19 wins on his ledger he also saved six games when Al Lopez waved him in from the pen. Two of those saves came for his buddy Lemon and one was in relief of Feller.
In his later years, after the other three had moved on or retired, Garcia was riddled by a series of injuries, some of them bizarre. He slipped at home in the offseason and hurt his back, the first of many back troubles for him that included a fall on a wet mound. He was hit in the leg and the arm by line drives, and he broke a finger in spring training when he tried to catch a popup. He underwent one of the very first surgeries for a slipped disc and returned briefly in 1959 to pitch his last complete game. But his comeback was short-lived and Garcia was done after a brief two-month trial as a reliever for the expansion Senators in 1961.
Unfortunately, Garcia is remembered almost exclusively now because he was a member of a rotation with greater pitchers. But for a five or six year stretch he was one of the better hurlers in baseball.
