Walter Johnson Threw 110 Shutouts and Nobody Else Has 100

Walter Johnson threw 110 shutouts, the most in baseball history and a record no pitcher has come within ten of. He won 417 games with a 2.17 ERA for a Washington team that was usually terrible, and his 3,509 strikeouts stood as the record for 55 years.

Johnson pitched 21 seasons, all of them for the Senators, a franchise so consistently bad that the joke about Washington was first in war, first in peace, last in the American League. He finished 417-279. Nobody but Cy Young has won more games, and Young pitched for contenders. Johnson lost 279 times largely because his own team could not score.

That context is what the shutout record measures. He was not compiling those in blowouts. He threw 110 games in which the opposition scored nothing, because on many nights nothing was the number he had to hold them to. He lost 65 games in which Washington was shut out behind him, and he went 38-26 in games decided 1-0, both halves of that the most in major league history. Those are statistics about a team, not a pitcher.

The strikeout total is the other era-proof number. He retired in 1927 with 3,509, in a period when strikeouts were unfashionable and hitters choked up and put the ball in play. That mark survived until 1983, when Nolan Ryan, Steve Carlton and Gaylord Perry passed it in the same year, all of them pitching in a game that had been rebuilt around the strikeout.

Roger Clemens won seven Cy Young awards and Randy Johnson won five, both against integrated, fully professionalized competition that Johnson never faced. Pedro Martinez had the greatest peak: his 1999 and 2000 seasons produced the highest single-season ERA+ figures ever recorded, in the middle of the biggest offensive era in the sport's history. Cy Young won 511 games and has the award named after him.

Pedro is the strongest short-run argument and the era gap is a genuine mark against Johnson. But Johnson leads every pitcher in career wins above replacement, which already adjusts for the era he threw in, and the shutout record is the kind that will simply never be touched.

The verdict: Walter Johnson on the career. Pedro Martinez on peak. This debate never fully closes.