Someone beat me to it...

Last week as Tom Glavine prepared to make his start at Miller Park against the Brewers in his first attempt at career win #300, USA TODAY and several other media outlets began with a familiar story.

Tom Glavine was a teenager when pitchers Gaylord Perry and Steve Carlton notched their 300th career victories in 1982 and 1983. Two years later, Tom Seaver and Phil Niekro reached the milestone. A year later, so did Don Sutton.

Five 300th victories in five years.

"You would have thought every year, another guy makes it," Glavine says.

Now Glavine, and everybody else, knows better.

Since that parade of pitching greats joined the 300 club in the 1980s, only three other hurlers have accomplished the increasingly rare feat — Nolan Ryan in 1990, Roger Clemens in 2003 and Greg Maddux in 2004.

The theme of this story and others is that after Glavine, there will be no more members of the 300 win club.

I'm pretty sure that I remember the 300 club was laid to rest after Sutton in 1986, after Ryan in 1990, and after Maddux in 2004. I'll see if I can dig through some web archives after the Maddux milestone to find a similar story.

The mistake some make is they only focus on pitchers over 200 wins. I saw a list that included Randy Johnson, Jamie Moyer, and Mike Mussina. What about the younger pitchers?

My post was going to be about how there may be a gap, but there will always be pitchers that have the talent, longevity, and luck to get to 300 career wins. Then, I was going to go through a list of the most likely candidates.

As is usually the case, I waited too long and someone beat me to it. On top of it, did better than I could have...

Vegas Watch has the post I wanted to write HERE.

In case you somehow missed it, Tom Glavine won his 300th game on Sunday night.

This caused various people to talk about how Glavine might be the last 300 game winner.

Now, I think some of this talk is simply shortsighted. People look at the active players with the most wins, and don't see much hope in the near future. Randy Johnson is only 16 away, but he's 43 and out for the year. After him is Mike Mussina at 245, but he's 38 and hasn't won more than 15 games since 2003. And after that it's a bunch of guys who are 40+ and still a long way away.And that's fine. It's reasonable to say that we might not have a 300 game winner in the next decade.

But to say that there will NEVER be a 300 game winner again? Olney was on ESPN after the game talking about this, and said something to the effect of "Well people are so careful with pitchers now, they're more likely to go on the DL and miss time".

Well, yeah, I guess that's true, but isn't this a point for there being another 300 game winner. Isn't the more advanced medical technology helpful for these guys? It seems to me that missing a few starts now is helpful if it tacks on another year at the end of your career.

Over at AA, OMDQ also had a problem with this argument, disagreeing with ESPN's use of a stat showing the demise of the complete game.

Anyway, I thought I'd take a look at which of the younger guys (under 32) have the best chances of getting to 300 wins.

Follow the link for the list.

AA-Awful Announcing
OMDQ- One More Dying Quail