Baseball Playing Card Of The Day: Lefty Grove

Lefty Grove

Lefty Grove, what a season he had in 1931!

Grove, whose given first name was Robert, was looking for his 17th straight win. One more win and Walter Johnson's and Smokey Joe Wood's name would be erased from the record books for most consecutive wins in one season. 

Then, on August 23, in the first game of a doubleheader, the Athletics faced the lowly St. Louis Browns. Easy pickings!

 But Al Simmons would miss his third straight game in which Grove started. The A's managed only three hits off Dick Coffman and lost 1-0, even though Grove gave up just seven hits himself.

Just a momentary setback as it turns out. Lefty would be around a while, and he had no intentions of one loss hurt him.

But just to add an exclamation to that, he would win his next six straight games before dropping his last start to the Yankees, to finish an astonishing 31-4!

But that was just another great season for Grove, who would finish his career with exactly 300 wins (As later would Early Wynn).

Look at his years from 1929 to 1931, and you find his W-L is 79-15. His team, the Philadelphia A's, won pennants in each of those three seasons. Twice in those years, Philly won the World Series. Their 1930 one was the last time the Athletics would win while playing for the city of Philadelphia.

Later, Lefty was sold by Connie Mack to the Boston Red Sox for $125,000. His winning ways continued, however, as he would post season win totals of between 20 and 31 over the course of the next seven seasons.

Lefty Grove was once almost hit by a ball that was lashed back through the box at batting practice while still with the Red Sox. Grove made sure that the next pitch sent the batter scrawling to the ground!

He twice won the pitcher's Triple Crown (leading the league in Wins, ERA and Strikeouts), which were back to back (1930-31) and his World Series record was 4-2 with a 1.75 ERA in 8 games, 5 starts and 51.1 innings.

As for his career ERA of 3.06, that might not rank up there with the other immortals, but he led the league in ERA an impressive nine times.

Grove was elected to the Hall Of Fame in 1947.

He would die on May 22, 1975 at the age of 75.

References

Sports Reference LLC. Baseball-Reference.com - Major League Statistics and Information. http://www.baseball-reference.com/. Web. 03 Aug. 2011.

Thorn, John, and Pete Palmer. Total Baseball. Vers. 1994. Portland, OR: Creative Multimedia Corp., 1994. Computer software. CD-ROM.