The Main Event
- August 11, 1970 – Jim Bunning beat the Astros 6-5 to become the second pitcher ever to win 100 games in each league, after Cy Young.
On August 11, 1970, a 38-year-old Jim Bunning took the mound at Connie Mack Stadium for the Philadelphia Phillies against the Houston Astros and walked away with a 6-5 win that had nothing to do with the standings. The Phillies were buried in last place in the National League East that summer, and Bunning himself was in visible decline, working his way through a season in which he’d finish just 10-15. But the victory made him the second pitcher in major league history, after Cy Young, to win at least 100 games in both the American League and the National League. It was a milestone that took nearly a decade and a half, three franchises, and one of the more unusual late career odysseys in baseball to complete.
A quiet, hard-earned number
Bunning entered the 1970 season sitting on 91 career National League wins, built up over parts of seven seasons with the Phillies, Pittsburgh Pirates, and Los Angeles Dodgers. He needed nine wins in 1970 to get to 100, and the Astros game supplied the ninth. It wasn’t a signature pitching performance in the way his no-hitters had been — the Phillies needed all six of their runs to hold off Houston’s five — but the box score mattered less than the arithmetic. Add it to the 118 wins he’d piled up in nine seasons with the Detroit Tigers, and Bunning had reached 100-plus victories in each league, a feat so demanding that six decades of major league history had produced only one other pitcher who’d done it.
Detroit made him a star
Bunning signed with the Tigers as an amateur out of Xavier University in Cincinnati and made his major league debut in July 1955. By 1957 he was Detroit’s ace, a workhorse right-hander who threw a sharp sidearm slider and pitched inside without apology. He made seven All-Star teams as a Tiger, led the American League in strikeouts twice, and no-hit the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park on July 20, 1958 — three years to the day after his major league debut. Over nine seasons in Detroit he went 118-87, establishing himself as one of the American League’s most durable starters even as the Tigers themselves rarely contended.
The trade that remade the Phillies’ rotation
On December 5, 1963, Detroit traded Bunning and catcher Gus Triandos to Philadelphia for outfielder Don Demeter and pitcher Jack Hamilton — a deal that quickly became one of the most lopsided in franchise history. Bunning won 19 games in each of his first three Phillies seasons and, on Father’s Day 1964, threw a perfect game against the New York Mets at Shea Stadium, retiring all 27 batters he faced in a 6-0 win. It was the first National League perfect game of the 20th century, and it made Bunning the second pitcher ever, again trailing only Cy Young, to throw no-hitters in both leagues. That 1964 season ended painfully for Philadelphia, which blew a 6½-game lead in the final two weeks in one of baseball’s most infamous collapses, with an exhausted Bunning pressed into starts on short rest down the stretch. He remained the Phillies’ top starter through 1967, finishing second in the inaugural separate National League Cy Young Award voting that year.
A journeyman’s detour
The Phillies traded Bunning to Pittsburgh after the 1967 season, and what followed was a itinerant stretch unusual for a pitcher of his stature. He struggled through 1968 with the Pirates, was dealt to the Dodgers in a late-season 1969 trade, and finished that season in Los Angeles before signing back with Philadelphia for 1970 — his third tour with the only National League team where he’d ever truly starred. By then Bunning was well past his peak, his fastball diminished, but he was still chasing a number that mattered more to baseball history than to that year’s standings.
A club that’s grown, slowly
Cy Young had gotten there first, of course, piling up 511 career wins split roughly 291 in the National League and 221 in the American League across a 22-year career that bridged the game’s dead-ball transition and the formation of the American League itself. For 59 years afterward, no one matched him. Bunning’s 1970 milestone opened the door, at least symbolically, to a small group of pitchers who managed the same feat in the decades since: Gaylord Perry, Ferguson Jenkins, Nolan Ryan, Dennis Martinez, Kevin Brown, Randy Johnson, and Pedro Martinez have all since joined the 100-100 club, most of them helped by the expansion-era shuffling of free agency that Bunning himself had a hand in bringing about.
It needs to be noted that some baseball historians have also credited a lesser-known turn-of-the-century swingman, Al Orth, with clearing the same bar. However, there is some discrepancy about parts of Orth’s career. It is generally accepted that Young and Bunning were the first two to achieve the mark. Orth also spent time with the Phillies during his MLB career.
Off the mound, a different kind of influence
Bunning’s importance to baseball extended well beyond his statistics. He was the American League’s pension representative for years and sat on the four-man committee — alongside Robin Roberts, Harvey Kuenn, and Bob Friend — that in 1966 recommended hiring Marvin Miller as the first full-time executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, a decision that transformed a toothless fraternal group into the sport’s most powerful labor union. He pushed hard, and publicly, for a fairer players’ pension system years before free agency existed.
Bunning retired after the 1971 season with a career record of 224-184, 2,855 strikeouts, and 40 shutouts. The win total, modest by Hall of Fame standards of the day, kept the writers’ vote just out of reach for years; the Veterans Committee finally inducted him in 1996. He went on to a long career in Kentucky politics, serving in the state legislature and then 22 years in Congress, first in the House and later in the U.S. Senate. But the afternoon in Philadelphia on August 11, 1970, remains one of the cleanest measures of what made him valuable in the first place: a pitcher good enough, for long enough, in two different leagues and across three different decades of the game, to stand alongside Cy Young in a category almost no one else has ever reached.
Philadelphia Baseball Events for August 11
- [Phillies] 1961: Signed minor-league free agent Bill Wilson.
- [Phillies] 1970: Jim Bunning beat the Astros 6-5 to become the second pitcher ever to win 100 games in each league, after Cy Young.
- [Phillies] 1979: Closer Tug McGraw gave up his fourth grand slam of the year — to Pittsburgh’s Ed Ott — setting a new NL record and tying the MLB record.
- [Phillies] 1981: Signed minor-league free agent Greg Jelks.
- [Phillies] 1983: Announced the fan-selected Centennial Team: Bob Boone (C), Pete Rose (1B), Manny Trillo (2B), Mike Schmidt (3B), Larry Bowa (SS), Richie Ashburn/Garry Maddox/Del Ennis (OF), Robin Roberts/Steve Carlton (SP), Jim Konstanty/Tug McGraw (RP), Dallas Green (Mgr).
- [Phillies] 1992: Traded Steve Scarsone to Baltimore for Juan Bell.
- [Phillies] 2004: Randy Wolf homered twice and pitched 7 innings, and Jim Thome also hit two homers, in a 15-4 win over Colorado at Citizens Bank Park.
- [Phillies] 2019: A fan was removed from the ballpark in San Francisco after directing negative comments at manager Gabe Kapler‘s dugout.
- [Phillies] 2020: Lost 10-9 to Baltimore after allowing the first two-run leadoff home run in extra innings in MLB history.
Philadelphia Baseball Birthdays for August 11
- Danny Murphy (born 1876) — Second baseman/outfielder for the Philadelphia Athletics from 1902–1913, and a key member of Connie Mack’s famed “$100,000 infield,” helping the club win the 1910 and 1911 World Series.
- Red Causey (born 1893) — Right-handed pitcher who spent two seasons with the Phillies (1920–1921), going 10-17 in 42 appearances, part of a five-year career that also included stops with the Boston Braves and New York Giants.
- Frank Brazill (born 1899) — Infielder who played his entire two-year major-league career (1921–1922) with the Philadelphia Athletics, primarily at first and third base.
- Gordon Rhodes (born 1907) — Right-handed pitcher who closed out his eight-year career with the Athletics in 1936 after stints with Boston and the Yankees, making 35 appearances in his lone Philadelphia season.
- Bobo Newsom (born 1907) — Colorful journeyman right-hander who pitched for the Athletics in five separate seasons (1944, 1945, 1946, 1952, 1953) during his 211-win, 20-year career; his final major-league appearance came with the A’s on September 17, 1953, a year before the franchise left Philadelphia.
- Lefty Hoerst (born 1917) — Left-handed pitcher who spent his entire five-season career (1940–1942, 1946–1947) with the Phillies, working as a starter and reliever on some lean Phillies clubs.
- Bobby Wilkins (born 1922) — Shortstop who played both of his major league seasons (1944–1945) with the Philadelphia Athletics, seeing his heaviest use in 1945 with 62 games at short.
- Leroy Reams (born 1943) — Appeared in a single game for the Phillies in 1969, his only major-league appearance.
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