Wynn, Early

▪ 2000

“Gus” 

      American baseball player (b. Jan. 6, 1920, Hartford, Ala.—d. April 4, 1999, Venice, Fla.), was a phenomenal right-handed knuckleballer and fastballer who became only the 14th baseball pitcher to win 300 major league games. Wynn, who maintained that he would knock down his own grandmother if she stood too close to the strike zone, was, according to Ted Williams, “the toughest pitcher I ever faced.” Wynn never finished high school and began throwing knockdown pitches at batters in 1939, as a rookie with the Washington Senators. Despite the general mediocrity of the Senators' teams, he managed to win 72 games in eight seasons (with time off in 1945 for U.S. Army service) before he was traded to Cleveland in 1949, in what Indians owner Bill Veeck called “the best deal I ever made.” There, pitching coach Mel Harder taught the fastball specialist how to throw curves, sliders, and knuckleballs. Wynn responded by becoming one of the American League's leading strikeout pitchers, and he had the league's leading earned run average (3.20) in 1950. The Cleveland starting pitchers—Wynn, Bob Lemon, Mike Garcia, and Bob Feller, who was later replaced by Herb Score—became the decade's outstanding pitching staff, and Wynn was a 20-game winner four times for the team. He tied Lemon for the league lead in victories, with 23, when the team won the pennant in 1954. After joining the Chicago White Sox in 1958, he again led the league in victories (22) as well as innings pitched (255) in 1959, the year of the Sox's last pennant; then, in his only World Series victory, he threw an 11–0 shutout against the Los Angeles Dodgers, all at the age of 39. He spent his entire career in the American League, winning his 299th game for Chicago in 1962 and his last game for Cleveland the next year. Altogether, over an unusually long career (23 years), he won 300 games, lost 244, pitched 4,564 innings, and slammed a total of 17 home runs, a rarity for a pitcher. In later years he was a pitching coach for Cleveland and Minnesota, a minor league manager, and a baseball broadcaster. Wynn was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972.

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