Confirming that Kyle Wright Made (but Might One Day Destroy) History
We're all rooting for him to destroy it!
In 2022, Kyle Wright had what could undoubtedly be described as a “career year.” Wright was a dominant pitcher at Vanderbilt, selected 5th overall by the Braves in 2017 and called up to the big leagues by September of 2018. But he was awful in the rotation to start the 2019 season, mediocre throughout a pandemic-shortened 2020, and only threw 6.1 MLB innings in 2021. Throughout this, Wright was continuing to establish a reputation on the national stage by regularly making postseason appearances, whether very good or very bad.
Kyle Wright was not expected to be a meaningful contributor to Atlanta’s title defense after the 2021 World Series, but ended up making the rotation to start the 2022 season and outperforming the rosiest projections. He made 30 starts and averaged precisely six innings (and one-thirtieth of an out) in each. The Braves had a 24-6 record in Wright’s 30 starts and because he went so deep into games, Wright accumulated decisions in 26 of them, posting a 21-5 record. Wright was Atlanta’s first pitcher to win 20 games since Russ Ortiz in 2003, and nobody else in the major leagues had more than 18 that season. He had two wins entering the season, bringing his career total to 23.
The reason why this can currently be called a “career year” rather than a “late breakout” was the aftermath. Wright pitched poorly in limited time in 2023, going 1-3 with a 6.97 ERA before ending up on the injured list in May for a shoulder strain that eventually resulted in surgery. He was traded to Kansas City that offseason and hasn’t pitched since then.
This timeline is not abnormal when a pitcher is returning from shoulder surgery. A report was posted to Roto Baller literally 47 seconds ago (at time of writing) with the title “Kyle Wright Having Normal Offseason.” He should compete for the fifth starter spot in the Royals’ rotation, and the last time he was in that position it resulted in a career year. We at Trades Ten Years Later sincerely wish nothing but the best for Kyle Wright and are excited to see him pitching with renewed health in 2025. If you are Kyle Wright or his loved ones, maybe stop reading now.
What if he never makes it back to the majors? If Kyle Wright never wins another MLB game, I suspect his name would live forever as one of the more bizarre careers in the history of the sport. As it stands, Kyle Wright has thrown 281.1 innings in 60 major league appearances (51 starts), with a 4.45 ERA and a 24-16 record. 180.1 of those innings and 30 of those starts came in one season, where he piled up an MLB-leading 21 wins and received Cy Young votes. It seems impossible that any pitcher who has been the MLB wins leader has fewer than 24 wins for their career. It also seems impossible that anyone can touch the record of 87.5% of career wins landing in the league-leading season. By a strictly wins-based metric (which is generally nonsensical and should only be applied for entertainment purposes like this), Kyle Wright’s 2022 is probably the most anomalous season possible. He might ruin it if he comes back.
I wanted to confirm this with a custom leaderboard from Fangraphs or Stathead, but was limited either by the capabilities of these tools or my own deficiencies therewith. There doesn’t appear to be a method to build a career stats leaderboard from a sample of pitchers who led the league in wins in a particular season. Baseball-Reference does have a table of each season’s leader in wins, and the next step for efficient problem-solving might be to export this list of names and use it to make a customized career leaderboard.
But wouldn’t it be more fun to be inefficient? Too much of what happens online is about “the answer” rather than “finding the answer.” The current national priority is to build AI tools so powerful that they can solve problems instantaneously, whether or not the users understand where and why that output came from. I’ve never used Statmuse, but my understanding is you ask it a question like this and then it spits out an answer that’s frequently wrong. I don’t want to just confirm that Kyle Wright has fewer career wins than anybody to lead MLB in wins during a season (spoiler alert: he does); I have enough built context for baseball numbers that I can look at numbers this shocking and intuitively confirm it to be the case. What I want is to build even more context around this particular fact. The “knowledge” in this case is almost always useless, but there can be value in the “learning” of that knowledge.
I’m going to verify this fun fact somewhat manually and show my work in doing so. To avoid manually checking through the career stats of 154 pitchers, we’ll make a few stages of rules that can logically eliminate most pitchers from consideration.
Stage 1: Major League Single-Season Win Leaders (1871-2024)
154 eligible seasons remaining
Baseball’s history goes back approximately as far as you’ll allow it. Baseball-Reference allows it to go back to the 1871 National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, a 9-team league where teams played somewhere between 19 and 33 games each. The National Association was created as the first fully professional baseball league, breaking away from the precursor National Association of Base Ball Players to firmly establish themselves as such. It is unlikely that we would recognize this as “professional baseball” if we watched it. The teams of the 1871 National Association combined to record 1,934 errors compared to just 6,750 putouts on their way to an apocalyptic .833 fielding percentage. For context, teams in the 2024 Perfect Game Collegiate Summer League only recorded 928 errors against 15,913 putouts. Players in the PGCSL are not paid so as to maintain their NCAA amateur status, and only the most talented will start any sort of professional career. Their .958 fielding percentage is worse than that of every 2024 professional league for which there is data and eons ahead of the best baseball 1871 had to offer.
Since nobody could play defense, unearned runs were scored frequently. This didn’t tax pitchers too severely because overhand throwing was not yet legal. In fact, the Boston Red Stockings rostered just one full-time pitcher, a 20-year-old named Al Spalding. With the exception of occasional relief from 36-year-old outfielder Harry Wright, Spalding threw every inning for Boston that year. The team won 20 games (good for 2nd in the league) and Spalding was credited with the win in 19 of them. As the league found its footing and seasons grew longer, Spalding continued to lead the league in victories each year, doubling up to 38 wins in 1872 and increasing to 54 by 1875. In 1877, he started wearing a glove while fielding, inspiring other teammates to follow and presumably leading to the substantial reduction in errors that contemporary baseball fans have enjoyed to this day.
It took a long time for pitching to evolve from the one-man show of Al Spalding to the five-and-dive model employed in MLB today. The gradual nature of the transition allows us to lop off most of baseball history from consideration – Wright’s 24 career wins would not be enough to lead the majors for the majority of history. Besides the soft launch of an 1871 season, it took until 1918 for MLB’s leader to win fewer than 27 games. Walter Johnson led MLB with 23 wins in a season that wrapped up by Labor Day after a “Work or Fight” rule was issued that required anyone with a job that wasn’t essential to World War I to find one (or fight).
Baseball never quite returned to days of 30-game winners being the norm, but pitchers continued to throw frequently enough for the bar of 24 wins to be cleared in most seasons. Anybody who won at least 25 games in one season inevitably won more than 24 in their career, so they can be eliminated from our sample. This reduces our number of seasons by 84, a greater than 50 percent reduction.
Stage 2: Major League Single-Season Win Leaders (1871-2024) with <25 wins that season
70 eligible seasons remaining
As you’d probably guess, the fewest number of wins to lead a season came in 2020, when Shane Bieber and Yu Darvish each had 8. The next fewest was 1981, when a bunch of guys tied at 14, and the next fewest was 1994, when Jimmy Key had 17 (all of these seasons were shortened). This is intended more as a deductive point than as a fun fact – since the fewest number of wins that can lead any season is 8, any pitcher who led the league in multiple seasons would have more than 24 wins (unless they led only in 1981 and 2020 and never recorded any wins during the 39 years between those two seasons, which would obviously be a more fascinating career than Kyle Wright could ever hope for).
Eliminating repeat winners is surprisingly helpful for our hunt. Warren Spahn never won more than 23 games in a year, but that year (1953) was one of four seasons he led the MLB in wins. His career total of 363 wins is the 6th-highest in history. Tom Seaver was a co-leader with just 14 wins in 1981, but also led the league with 25 for the 1969 Miracle Mets. He ended his career with 311. Even General Crowder, nicknamed for the guy that issued the “work or fight” edict in World War I, was a repeat offender. In years where a player tied for the lead league in wins one year, but held the lead outright in a different year, only the latter year was removed from consideration (since the player’s co-leader could conceivably break Kyle Wright’s fact).
This method removes a lot of players, but some of the names left behind are surprising. Apparently Randy Johnson’s 2002 season is the only year where he led MLB in wins, as was Pedro Martinez’s 1999. Greg Maddux and Mike Mussina were the outright AL and NL win leaders in 1995, but tied each other at a total of 19. Neither led the majors in wins for any other season.
Stage 3: Major League Single-Season Win Leaders (1871-2024) with <25 wins that season and no other seasons as Single-Season Win Leader
47 eligible seasons remaining
But isn’t it kind of dumb to have these names on the list at this point? I pulled a bunch of Hall of Fame pitcher names for shock value, but being a “Hall of Fame pitcher” obviously means you have more than 24 career wins. When Billy Wagner is formally inducted into the Hall of Fame this summer, he will have the lowest career win total among pitchers in Cooperstown with 47. We don’t want to overexclude, but we can be certain that any Hall of Fame pitcher will have more career wins than Kyle Wright.
Eliminating Hall of Famers is less helpful than you’d hope, but not useless. We say goodbye to the three aforementioned years along with John Smoltz in 1996. We can also eliminate 2010 (a tie between Roy Halladay and the recently-inducted CC Sabathia), can knock out 2013 by making extremely reasonable assumptions about Max Scherzer, and can knock out a four-way tie in 2009 by making extremely aggressive assumptions about Adam Wainwright and Felix Hernandez (tied with Sabathia and multi-time leader Justin Verlander). The aggressive assumptions only relate to Wainwright and Hernandez making the Hall of Fame; they have 200 and 169 wins, respectively. This is probably a more impactful rule if you do it before you eliminate everyone who led MLB twice or won more than 24 games in a season.
Stage 4: Major League Single-Season Win Leaders (1871-2024) with <25 wins that season and no other seasons as Single-Season Win Leader, excluding Hall of Famers
40 eligible seasons remaining
Let’s get serious about these 24-win guys. They survived initial cuts because of an edge-case hypothetical where a pitcher got all 24 of his career wins in one season. This would be an exceptionally literal career year, and Kyle Wright’s 2022 would have no choice but to tip its cap.
Obviously this didn’t actually happen. I recognize the names of all but 1.5 of the guys to lead MLB with a 24-win season and can assume without stress that all of them had at least one additional victory. The following 24-win seasons are cut from consideration based on my pre-existing understanding that these people won at least one additional game:
1948 Johnny Sain (139)
1964 Larry Jackson (194)
1970 Mike Cuellar (185) / Dave McNally (184) / Jim Perry (215)
1983 LaMarr Hoyt (98)
1985 Dwight Gooden (194)
1988 Frank Viola (176)
All of these guys have 100-plus wins except Hoyt, who led the AL in wins prior to his 24-win season. 1973 would be cut if it were just Wilbur Wood, but he tied for the lead with an unfamiliar man named Ron Bryant. Ron Bryant and 1929 George Earnshaw probably have more than 24 career wins, but survive this round of cuts based on my lack of name recognition.
Stage 5: Major League Single-Season Win Leaders (1871-2024) with <25 wins that season and no other seasons as Single-Season Win Leader, excluding Hall of Famers and known 24-win pitchers
34 eligible seasons remaining
If we’re doing it that way, there are plenty of these guys who I can release on recognizance because I’ve personally witnessed at least some of their 25+ win careers. Blake Snell has a notoriously low win total for a pitcher of his caliber, but he’s won more than 4 games outside of his 21-win 2018 season. 1992 survived despite Hall of Famer Jack Morris’s 21-wins because fellow 21-game winner Kevin Brown isn’t a Hall of Famer, but he probably should be? The “short peak” co-leaders of the 2008 season prove the difficulty of what we’re trying to accomplish – 22 wins in that season still left 121 more for Cliff Lee and 65 more for Brandon Webb in the rest of their careers.
In addition to the aforementioned seasons, this eyeballing knocks out the following years:
1994 Jimmy Key (17)
2001 Matt Morris / Curt Schilling (22)
2005 Dontrelle Willis (22)
2006 Johan Santana / Chien-Ming Wang (19)
2007 Josh Beckett (20)
2012 Gio Gonzalez (21)
2015 Jake Arrieta (22)
2016 Rick Porcello (22)
2020 Yu Darvish / Shane Bieber (8) (pandemic)
2021 Julio Urias (20)
Stage 6: Major League Single-Season Win Leaders (1871-2024) with <25 wins that season and no other seasons as Single-Season Win Leader, excluding Hall of Famers, known 24-win pitchers, and other pitchers known to exceed the career total
21 eligible seasons remaining
I regret not thinking of the next filter sooner, as it would’ve saved a lot of trouble, but Kyle Wright would still have bragging rights over anybody who co-led the league in wins. He had three more wins than the next closest guy! 14 of the remaining 21 seasons are co-led seasons, and the last filter I used was “personalized eye test,” so this is clearly a better method of exclusion. I will include a career win total next to whichever player retained eligibility for this season to remain in the list to see if there’s anyone remotely close to 24 career wins:
1942 Mort Cooper / Tex Hughson (96)
1943 Mort Cooper / Elmer Riddle (65) / Rip Sewell (143)
1951 Larry Jansen (122) / Sal Maglie (119 even though my confidence was higher)
1958 Bob Friend (197) / Warren Spahn
1960 Ernie Broglio (77) / Warren Spahn
1967 Mike McCormick (134) / Jim Lomborg (157) / Earl Wilson (121)
1973 Ron Bryant (57, I’m vindicated) / Wilbur Wood
1976 Randy Jones (100) / Jim Palmer
1981 Tom Seaver / Dennis Martinez (245) / Steve McCatty (63) / Jack Morris / Pete Vuckovich (93)
1984 Joaquin Andujar (127) / Mike Boddicker (134)
1991 Tom Glavine / John Smiley (126) / Scott Erickson (142) / Bill Gullickson (162)
1993 John Burkett (166) / Tom Glavine / Jack McDowell (127)
2017 Clayton Kershaw / Carlos Carrasco / Corey Kluber / Jason Vargas (99) (had to be sure)
2024 Chris Sale / Tarik Skubal (41)
Tarik Skubal is a useful parallel for Wright. The reigning AL Cy Young (and wins leader) is a year younger than Wright, but had a more normal buildup to league-leading performance. A slow start after a 2020 debut was followed by two increasingly promising seasons in the rotation, then an exciting but injury-shortened 2023. All of these years were spent on basement-dwelling Tigers teams that limited his capacity to earn wins. In 2024, Skubal put everything together and Detroit finally had a winning record. He’s not even in the same area code as Wright’s single-season isolation, with his 18 wins in 2024 equating to less than half of his career total of 41.
Elmer Riddle is something of a parallel, too. After tying for the league lead with 21 wins in a war-impacted 1943 season, Riddle was pulled during a start in early May of 1944. After attempting the best medical treatments that 1944 had to offer (something called “diathermy treatments”), Riddle underwent the best shoulder surgery that 1944 had to offer (presumably very bad). He threw 60 innings between 1945 and 1947 and spent the 1946 season formally retired, but then decided to take his injury recovery into his own hands. As a 32-year-old Riddle told it, “I pushed basketballs up to a basket by the hour with my right arm to strengthen the muscles,” which was then supplemented with a stretching routine that he described as “a system of my own idea. I took my right elbow in my left hand and kept pulling my right arm around my neck. I felt something crack once in a while, but when I started to throw, there was no pain and my arm felt good.”
If things aren’t working out for Kyle Wright when he reports this spring, maybe he should try the basketball and cracking method. Riddle went 12-10 in 1948 and made the only All-Star team of his career.
Stage 7: Major League Single-Season Win Leaders (1871-2024) with <25 wins that season and no other seasons as Single-Season Win Leader, excluding split titles, Hall of Famers, known 24-win pitchers, and other pitchers known to exceed the career total
7 eligible seasons remaining
At this point, all that’s left is to check, right? We’ll look at each of the 7 seasons, in order of what I blindly assume the pitcher’s career win total is.
1989 Bret Saberhagen (23 wins) (167 career)
1979 Mike Flanagan (23 wins) (167 career)
I had them in this specific order, but in the same tier of “obviously not” without any rule to eliminate either from consideration. The fact that both have 167 career wins and compiled 23 in that season is a lovely coincidence. For the next three guys, relative order was something of a guess.
1938 Bill Lee (22 wins) (169 career)
This became a lot dicier when I realized it couldn’t possibly be the same Bill Lee. Big Bill Lee already had 65 career wins entering the season where he led the majors. He debuted for a Cubs team that had a 26-year World Series curse (just 18 years short of the Cubs’ current drought).
1947 Ewell Blackwell (22 wins) (82 career)
Ewell “The Whip” Blackwell graduated from Bonita High School and spent a semester at La Verne College before leaving to join the Reds. He had a cup of coffee in 1942, then spent three years in the military before returning to pick up 9 wins in the 1946 season. The sidearming Blackwell had an incredible 1947 season that included a streak of 16 victories, during which time he nearly threw back-to-back no-hitters. But in what seems to be an ominous trend for single-season win leaders, Blackwell left a May 1948 start with “a stabbing pain in his shoulder,” eventually accompanied by surgeries to remove his kidney and appendix. Despite all this, he still put up 51 more wins after his league-leading season.
1929 George Earnshaw (24 wins) (127 career)
Earnshaw was described as “a social register Johnnie” who “knows what to do in case of lobster and artichokes,” and once you read enough supporting details, you understand that to mean that his family was rich. Earnshaw had a delayed start to his baseball career after initially working in a family business and didn’t reach the majors until age 28, when he joined a strong Philadelphia Athletics team. In every other year with the team he trailed ace Lefty Grove in wins, but finished ahead of him this year despite pitching worse.
2023 Spencer Strider (20 wins) (32 wins)
Our runner up is perhaps the most interesting parallel to Wright. Strider was drafted in 2020 and already made his way to the majors by 2021, following Wright’s accelerated path. In 2022, while Wright was leading MLB in wins, Strider was breaking out with a 200-strikeout season that earned him a second place finish in Rookie of the Year voting. That gave him a firm foundation of 12 wins entering the 2023 season, when he had a breakout 20-win season. His 2024 was almost immediately derailed by Tommy John surgery, but he should also return to action in 2025.
2022 Kyle Wright (21 wins) (24 wins)
3,500 words to tell you something we both already knew — Kyle Wright stands alone in history.
Kyle Wright’s next MLB win will separate him further from this particular strain of immortality. Spencer Strider and Tarik Skubal should accumulate many more wins and set a difficult pace (knocking furiously on wood), but Ron Bryant serves as a stationary target at 57 career wins. Bryant had a superstition of keeping a number of pieces of bubble gum in his pocket that corresponded to the victory number he was going for, which sounds like something you’d come up with when you’re used to single-digit win totals. After leading the league with 24 wins in 1973, he went 3-15 during a calamitous 1974 season. He threw 8.2 innings for the Cardinals in 1975 (0-1), and then Bryant’s career was over.
42.1% of Bryant’s career wins were in his 1973 season, with just 33 wins outside that year. On a percentile basis, Wright will break through the Bryant ceiling when he picks up his 50th career win (at which point only 42% of his career wins will be in 2022). This is going to be a close one as long as Wright returns to pitching – the Steamer projection system expects Kyle Wright to throw 95 innings in 2025 with a 5-6 record, which would get him up to 29 wins. Averaging 5 wins per season would put Wright on pace to break the record during the 2030 season, but would he still be given the opportunity to pitch in 2030 if he were only that effective? Even if Wright roars back with another 20-win season in 2025, he’ll still only be at 44 wins and reliant on continued shoulder health to break out of his historical position. This will be a multi-year watch.
I may not have learned much, but I’ve now developed a rooting interest in Kyle Wright winning 26 more MLB games. That’s a significantly more impressive accomplishment if you ask me. Also, I did learn much, it just wasn’t about Kyle Wright.
great article!!