I kind of like the idea that once a week I’ll come at you with some kind of fact I learned about baseball.

I don’t know if I will - I know that is only interesting to a certain audience - but it’s early in spring training and I’m excited that we’re on the verge of a new season so maybe bear with me as we get through these final weeks of winter.

This fact - like last week - dates back to a recent Immaculate Grid. I think the category must have been 20-game winners, and one of the teams was the Baltimore Orioles.

I remembered there was some sort of piece of trivia about the Orioles and 20-game winners, but I wasn’t entirely sure. So I looked it up to cement it in my brain and learn something new:

The 1971 Orioles had four pitchers who won 20 games.

So, a few things, for those of you who might not know why this is a big deal: There have been only two teams in baseball history that had four pitchers who each won 20 games, and the other team was the 1920 White Sox.

So in the modern game, it’s the 1971 Orioles and no one else.

And, for those of you who don’t know - wins are hard to come by in today’s game. Pitchers don’t hang around for the minimum of five innings often enough to compile a lot of wins. So having just one 20-game winner on a staff is hard enough - let alone the entire rotation. (Nowadays teams have at least a 5-man starting rotation. In 1971, the Orioles 4 20-game winners was their entire 4-man starting rotation - they started all but 16 games for the 1971 O’s.)

Also, while looking this up I realized this stretch by the Baltimore Orioles was incredibly dominant:

1969: 109-53

1970: 108-54

1971: 101-57

Those three years, though, resulted in just one World Series title. The ‘69 Orioles famously lost to the New York Mets (at least as far as I’m concerned it was famous), and the ‘71 team lost to Pittsburgh. 1970 was the lone winner, over the Cincinnati Reds.

As for the 4 20-game winners? As you probably already saw in the picture above, they were Jim Palmer, Dave McNally, Mike Cuellar, and Pat Dobson. (Big credit to McNally, who started just 30 games…and won 21 of them!)

A lot of people like to talk about records that won’t be broken - Cal Ripken’s consecutive games played streak, Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak…

I think it’s pretty safe to say we won’t see another team have four pitchers win 20 games in the same season.