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Now in his seventh big-league season, Righthander Marichal already has posted 115 victories. He has lost only 53 games, and his winning average of .684 is the third highest in baseball history.*Thirty of his victories have been shutouts. He has struck out 1,098 batters, walked 338—a ratio of better than 3 to 1—and his lifetime earned-run aver age is 2.64, which is pretty spectacular considering that an average big-league team scores at least four runs per game.
This season, even spectacular may be too tame a word for Marichal. Up until the end of last week, he had started eleven games and finished all but two of them. In 101 innings of pitching, he had struck out 69 batters, walked only eleven, allowed just 58 hits and nine earned runs—for an earned-run average of 0.80.
Then boom. Any pitcher can have a bad night (and they all do), but Marichal had a pip: in four horrendous innings he gave up six runs to the same Philadelphia Phillies he had blanked for 14 innings nine days before. Juan himself could not understand it. "I'm fine," he had assured Manager Herman
Franks before the game. "I'm ready." Eight hits, two walks and two hit batsmen later (he only hit four all last year), he was on his way to the shower, quivering with embarrassment. For half an hour afterward, he sat on a clubhouse bench, head between his knees, face buried in a handkerchief. Then, dressing hastily, he ducked reporters and disappeared into the night.
He'll get over it. With a record any other pitcher would trade his shirt for —ten victories, one loss—and more than two-thirds of the 1966 schedule still to play, Marichal is an odds-on bet to post his fourth 20-victory season in a row. He could, with a bit of luck, win 30. Only one National League pitcher (Dizzy Dean in 1934) has accomplished that feat in the past 48 years.
Captain & Crew. Coming when it does, in the era of the rabbit ball, the lively bat, the narrowed strike zone, shortened fences, hardened infields and exploding scoreboards that make every home run sound like a Viet Cong ambush, Marichal's performance to date should automatically qualify him for a niche in the Hall of Fame—or the Smithsonian. But Baseball Is a Funny Game, as Sportscaster Joe Garagiola is forever pointing out. To purists, it is blasphemy to suggest that Juan Marichal is as good as Walter Johnson, say, or Ed Walsh, or Rube Waddell—even though Johnson was strictly a fastballer, Walsh doctored the ball freely with saliva, and Waddell was a drunkard who chased girls and fire engines with more gusto than he pitched. Marichal will probably never equal the National League record of 373 lifetime victories held jointly by Christy Mathewson and Grover Cleveland Alexander, and he certainly will never approach Cy Young's major-league mark of 511—but those records were set during the "dead ball" days prior to 1930, when the pitcher was king, the game was tailored to his taste, and a fearsome slugger named John Franklin Baker acquired the permanent nickname of "Home Run" by hitting twelve balls out of the park in one year.