Uncle Scoopy's Ballpark: The great pitching season you never really noticed.

Uncle Scoopy's Ballpark: The great pitching season you never really noticed.

Based on what we know today, there have only been two cases in baseball history when a team played .900 ball behind one of its regular starters. In both cases it was exactly .900, with 27 wins and 3 losses.

One of those was the great Lefty Grove pitching for the 1931 As, who were so good they played .655 ball when he wasn't pitching, and won the pennant by 13 1/2 games over the Yankees' famed Murderer's Row of Ruth, Gehrig and company. I'm not writing about that one. Everyone already knows that was a brilliant season.

I'm writing about the other team, a team that played only .452 ball behind its other starters, yet .900 behind their ace. That .448 differential is even better than Steve Carlton's incredible season for the 1972 Phillies, when the team played .707 ball in his starts, but .261 ball when their other alleged pitchers got the call.

And yet nobody really thinks of this season as one of the all-time greats. The guy won 18 games. Meh. His ERA was 2.48. Nice, but we see performances like that regularly, don't we?

No, not like that. The easily recognizable stats are deceptive in this case. This was an incredible season in which a superstar pitcher single-handedly pitched a sub-.500 team into the post-season by getting them to play .900 ball for him..