Moose!

On Sunday, Mike "Moose" Mussina won his 246th game, breaking a tie with Dennis Martinez as the pitcher with the most victories without a 20-win season. In a sense, this is unimpressive since he has never reached the 20-win mark. In another sense, it's more impressive since it takes strong performances for a longer period of time to reach that win total.

I've been a big fan of Mussina's since he was an Oriole and such an outstanding pitcher. A gutsy big-game pitcher-- and what a curve ball! (He made it very difficult on me in going to play for the Yankees. But by then, the Orioles had become the anti-Orioles-- so who could blame him?) He is one of only a very few college grads playing baseball. (All or almost all of the foreign players did not attend college and most domestic players didn't go to college or left college to play minor league ball.) And he was an econ major, graduating from Stanford in three years!

Because he is so much under the radar, he rarely gets any talk about winning 300 games (as Tom Glavine did yesterday). But at age 38, he has a decent shot at it with his skills as a pitcher more than a thrower-- if he can stay healthy. (Of pitchers with more than 150 wins, only 35-year-olds oft-injured Pedro Martinez [with 206] and fellow Yankee Andy Pettite [with 193] are under 40 years old.)