Remembering Tom Seaver

As the month of August gave way to September, one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history fell victim to a combination of Lewy body dementia and Covid-19.

Tom Seaver was likely the best pitcher it was ever my privilege to watch. His fastball, powered by the bets use of powerful legs of any pitcher ever, was dominant, and he threw it with such consistency and accuracy that a hitter who wasn’t aggressive at the plate against him would find himself in an 0–2 hole very quickly.

But try and gear up for that fastball, and he’d throw a slider that looked for all the world like a mistake pitch right down the middle until it seemed to dive into the dirt. Seaver also had an outstanding 12-to-6 curveball that forced hitters to bend the knee, and something sort of like a knuckle curve, a slow and deceptive pitch that seemed to tease its way past a hitter.

There’s a reason Tom Seaver struck out 3,640 hitters and led the league in strikeouts five times.

Pitching from 1967 to 1986, Seaver’s career bridged the last era of the great starting pitchers and the beginning of the age of the closer. Four-man rotations were still the norm, but when there was no off day for a while, many teams had a “swingman” who would be slotted in for the occasional start, along with his duties as a reliever.

The best starters still completed many of their games (Seaver would not have a season of less than ten complete games until his twelfth year in the league, 1978), but it was no longer expected that starting pitchers would “finish what they started” lest their outing be considered a failure.

Seaver’s strikeout total is remarkable on its own, and in context. When he retired, he was third all-time on the strikeout list, behind only Nolan Ryan and Steve Carlton, two of his contemporaries. What makes the totals for all three men interesting is that when they pitched, strikeouts were less common than they are in the current game.

The top 30 seasons for strikeouts by a better have all come after Seaver retired. In 2019, the average team struck out 8.81 times per game. In 1986, Seaver’s last season…