Warren Spahn; high-kicked and hurled way into baseball record books, Braves lore
Warren Spahn, the winningest lefthander in major league history, whose exploits for the Boston Braves helped inspire the catchphrase "Spahn and Sain, and pray for rain," died yesterday at his home in Broken Arrow, Okla. He was 82.
"Life's funny, huh?" Mr. Spahn said in a 1985 interview. "I used to think that rhyme was silly, but I guess it's how I'll be remembered."
Mr. Spahn is remembered for much more than the one-two pitching punch he and Johnny Sain provided during the Braves's pennant-winning 1948 season. Voted into the Hall of Fame in 1973, he played 21 seasons and recorded 363 wins, the fifth-highest total in major league history. (In a baseball oddity, Mr. Spahn's hit total for those 21 seasons was also 363.)
Mr. Spahn, who threw 63 shutouts and two no-hitters, holds the National League career mark for innings pitched. He won three earned run average titles and led the league in victories eight times.
Fourteen times an All Star, he won the Cy Young Award in 1957, a doubly impressive feat as only one winner was selected at the time for the major leagues. He also finished second in the award balloting in 1958, '60, and '61.
Notably durable, Mr. Spahn pitched 5243 2/3 innings, the most by any lefthander. He holds with Christy Mathewson the record for most 20-win seasons, 13.
The last one came when he was 42.
"I don't think Spahn will ever get into the Hall of Fame," joked St. Louis Cardinal slugger Stan Musial. "He'll never stop pitching."
Anything but a fresh-faced phenom, Mr. Spahn didn't record his first major league victory until he was 25 and won more than 300 victories after turning 27. He pitched in the majors until he was 44.
Mr. Spahn got a late start because he missed three seasons to Army service during World War II. Although it's been estimated he otherwise might have reached 400 career wins, Mr. Spahn dismissed such speculation.
"I matured a lot in those three years," he said. "If I had not had that maturity, perhaps I never would have pitched until I was 45."
One man's maturity is another's wisdom. "Spahnie was more than a student of pitching," said Musial. "He was a scientist." Mr. Spahn was widely considered the craftiest hurler of his era. "He makes my job easy," said Braves pitching coach Whitlow Wyatt. "Every pitch he throws has an idea behind it."
Sain, who went on to a distinguished career as a pitching coach, called Mr. Spahn "one of the smartest men ever to play the game."
According to Mr. Spahn, the science of pitching might be reduced to a seven-word equation: "Hitting is timing. Pitching is upsetting timing." Good as he was at upsetting others' timing, Mr. Spahn knew how to protect his own. He holds the National League record for home runs hit by a pitcher, 35, and is the only major league pitcher to have hit a home run in every park he played in.
Mr. Spahn, who'd begun his career relying on a standout fastball and curve, added a slider and screwball to his repertoire as he aged -- which gave him twice the number of pitches he felt were necessary for success. "A pitcher needs two pitches," Mr. Spahn liked to say, "one they're looking for and one to cross them up."
The veteran sportswriter Al Silverman wrote during Mr. Spahn's early days with the Braves: "Watching Spahn for the first time go into his delivery was an aesthetic experience. . . . The Spahn windup was the most picturesque, most graceful, the most beautiful windup I had ever seen."
"I never had an arm problem because I knew how to take care of myself," Mr. Spahn said of his longevity in a Wall Street Journal interview. "I always threw a lot because I figured that was the best way to keep my arm strong. Runners run a lot, don't they? Between starts, I'd take fly balls with the outfielders in practice and make the long throws in. That was my version of distance work."
Warren Edward Spahn was born on April 23, 1921, in Buffalo. Named after President Warren Harding, Mr. Spahn began his baseball career as a first baseman under the tutelage of his father, Edward, a wallpaper salesman. "Everything I've gotten out of baseball, I certainly owe directly to my father," he once said.
Mr. Spahn's high school team had a star first baseman when he tried out, so he switched to pitcher. His success drew the attention of a Red Sox scout, who tried to interest the team in signing Mr. Spahn. It was the other Boston team, though, that acquired his services.
Within two years of signing with the Braves, Mr. Spahn was pitching in the majors. "That Warren Spahn can become one of the best pitchers in baseball if nothing happens to him," Casey Stengel, then the Braves's manager.
Mr. Spahn became one of the best pitchers, but something did happen to him: World War II. Mr. Spahn served in the combat engineers and saw action during the Battle of the Bulge. Wounded at the Remagen bridgehead, he was one of only two Hall of Famers to earn a Purple Heart (the other was Hoyt Wilhelm). Mr. Spahn also won a Bronze Star, was the only major league player to receive an individual battlefield citation during the war, and was given a battlefield promotion to lieutenant.
Back with the Braves in 1946, Mr. Spahn quickly made up for lost time, posting an ERA of 2.93.
He went 21-10 in 1947, and the following season joined with Sain in leading the Braves to their first pennant in 34 years. Mr. Spahn downplayed the import of the jingle bearing their names. "We got it because it rhymed," he said in a 1993 Boston Herald interview. "But guys like Vern Bickford and Nelson Potter had good years and they're not remembered."
Notwithstanding Mr. Spahn's modesty, the rest of the Braves's starting rotation could not match the standard set by him and Sain, a fact borne out by the team's losing the World Series in six games to the Cleveland Indians. He won one game and lost another.
It was the first of three World Series in which Mr. Spahn appeared. The other two came with the Braves in their Milwaukee incarnation. The team moved after the 1952 season, adding Mr. Spahn's name to Babe Ruth's on the list of legendary lefthanders lost to Boston baseball. In both series, the Braves played the New York Yankees, beating them in 1957 and losing in 1958. Mr. Spahn went 1-1 in '57 and 2-1 in '58.
Mr. Spahn liked to say he was responsible for two Hall of Fame careers, his own and that of Willie Mays. "He was something like 0 for 21 the first time I saw him," Mr. Spahn explained. "His first major league hit was a home run off me, and I'll never forgive myself. We might have gotten rid of Willie forever if I'd only struck him out."
Mr. Spahn's wife, Lorene (Southard), was an Oklahoma native. Early in his career, he purchased a cattle farm there. "I stayed in shape over the winter and went to spring training with less weight than I finished the season with," he'd say, "because I fed those cattle and worked on my ranch."
He spent his final season, 1965, with the New York Mets and San Francisco Giants. On the Mets, he rejoined his first manager.
"I'm probably the only guy who worked for Casey Stengel before and after he was a genius," Mr. Spahn said.
Refusing to give up his career, Mr. Spahn briefly pitched in the Mexican League and minors. "I didn't quit baseball," he later said, "but it quit me!"
He spent four years managing in the minor leagues for the St. Louis Cardinals and had stints as pitching coach with the California Angels and Cleveland Indians. He also worked as a pitching instructor in Japan.
"I never dreamed that I would accomplish what I did," Mr. Spahn once said, "but hunger accomplishes a great many things."
In August, the Atlanta Braves unveiled a statue honoring Mr. Spahn in the plaza outside Turner Field. The 9-foot-high bronze monument, built in Oklahoma, captures the left-hander's famous high leg kick. Mr. Spahn, in a wheelchair, traveled from Broken Arrow to attend the dedication.
Mr. Spahn leaves a son, Greg; and two granddaughters.
