Warren Spahn, the Hall of Fame pitcher who won more games than any other left-hander in history, died Monday. He was 82.
Spahn died at his home, family friend Gary Caruso said.
PHOTO: AP
Spahn was the mainstay of the Braves' pitching staff for two decades, first in Boston and then in Milwaukee. He pitched for 21 seasons, winning 363 games and posting 20 or more victories 13 times.
The remarkable part was that he was 25 before he got his first major league win.
"Warren Spahn was a fighter and a winner," said New York Yankees manager Joe Torre, a former teammate. "He made catching in the big leagues a lot easier for me because he took me under his wing along with Lew Burdette. One of my biggest thrills to this day was catching his 300th victory in 1961."
Spahn started his baseball career in his hometown of Buffalo, playing first base while his father played third for the Buffalo Lake City Athletic Club. He wanted to play first in high school but his team already had an all-city player at that position. So Spahn switched to pitching.
He signed with the Braves in 1940 for US$80 a month and injured his arm twice in his first season of D-level ball. But he won 19 games the next season and was invited to spring training with the Braves.
He started the 1942 season with the Braves but was sent down by manager Casey Stengel, who was angry because the left-hander refused to brush back Pee Wee Reese in an exhibition game. Spahn went 17-12 with a 1.96 ERA average at Hartford that season while the Braves finished in seventh place. Stengel called farming Spahn out the worst mistake he ever made.
In 1943, Spahn went into the Army. He served in Europe, where he was wounded, decorated for bravery with a Bronze Star and Purple Heart and was awarded a battlefield commission. He fought at the Battle of the Bulge and in the battle for the bridge at Remagen, Germany, where many men in his company were lost.
Spahn returned to baseball in 1946, and had an 8-5 record for the Braves.
The next season, he emerged as one of baseball's best pitchers with a 21-10 record. He led the NL with a 2.33 ERA and became part of a pitching partnership with Johnny Sain that took Boston to the NL pennant the next year. Because of the Braves' thin staff, Boston's pitching was described as ``Spahn and Sain and pray for rain.''
Starting in 1947, Spahn won 20 or more games in 13 of the next 17 seasons. Only Christy Mathewson had as many 20-win seasons in the NL. Strangely, one of the years he missed that plateau was 1948, when he was 15-12 as the Braves won their first pennant since 1914.
Equipped with a high-kicking delivery, Spahn became a dominant pitcher after that season, a consistent 20-game winner. Only once between 1953 and 1961 did he fail to win 20 games.
Spahn led the NL in victories eight times, including five in a row from 1957-1961, and led the league in strikeouts from 1949-1952.
He won the 1957 Cy Young Award and was second three times. He made 14 All-Star teams, threw two no-hitters and holds the NL record for home runs by a pitcher with 35.
Spahn was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1973.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier