"Finish what you start" - Jack Taylor's complete game streak

With all the talk about today's pitchers rarely throwing a complete game, the hurculean feats of a pitcher from a bygone era need to be recalled and given their due as one of the game's most impressive accomplishments. Over parts of six seasons, National League pitcher John "Jack" Taylor threw a string of 187 consecutive complete games for the Chicago Cubs and the St. Louis Cardinals. From midway thru the 1901 season to the middle of the 1906 season, Taylor completed every one of his starting assignments. During that same period, Taylor won 20 or more games for three straight seasons and was the league's ERA champion in 1902 when his 8 shutouts were also tops in the senior circuit. Taylor never tired of taking the ball every fourth day, evidenced by his racking up five straight years with more than 300 innings, peaking at 352 in 1904.

In an era when a club's starters were expected to go the distance, even Taylor's best known contemporaries never came close to approaching his mark. By comparison, the Giants' ace, Christy Mathewson, who completed 435 of his career 552 starts, never even had a single season where he completed every start. The great Walter Johnson, who led the American League in complete games six times, had only one year (29 starts in 1918) where he finished every one of his starts. Even Taylor's teammate with the Cubs, "Three Finger" Brown, managed to turn the trick only once(24 starts in 1905). Future Hall of Famers Eddie Plank, Rube Waddell and Joe McGinnity never managed to complete every start in any one season of their illustrious careers. Taylor did it for 4 straight seasons, never starting less than 31 games in any of them.

But Taylor's mind-boggling streak of complete games was not without it's peculiarities. In fact, it began with a loss, and ended with a victory. On June 20, 1901 the Cubs were visiting Boston, where Taylor took the mound against Vic Willis, who would eventually notch eight 20-win seasons during his 13 years in the big leagues. In Taylor's previous 11 starts, he had gone the distance in 10 of them. The only blemish had been his last start on June 8 against New York when he was pulled after four inning trailing 6-2 in a game Chicago eventually lost 9-7. Taylor held Boston to just six hits over nine innings, but Willis blanked Chicago on five hits winning 2-0. From that point on, Taylor threw a complete game in all 20 of his remaining starts that year.

In 1902, Taylor completed every one of his 33 starts and was 22-11 with an ERA of 1.33 as no other pitcher in the majors was below 1.75. For an encore, Taylor was 21-14 for Chicago and finished every one of his 33 starts. Traded to St. Louis for the 1904 season, Taylor's 39 complete games led the National League as he won another 21 games. In 1905, Taylor's win-loss record suffered as he was 15-21 for the hapless Cardinals, who lost 96 games and finished 47.5 games behind the champion New York Giants. But true to form, he finished all 34 of his starts. In 1906, Taylor made(and finished) 17 starts for St. Louis before being dealt back to Chicago on July 1. He promptly completed each of his first eight starts, winning six, for his new team before his record-setting achievement finally came to an end on August 13 at Brooklyn. When Taylor gave up two runs in the first inning and another in the bottom of the third, he was pulled from the game with the Cubs trailing 3-1. However, in an odd twist of fate, Chicago eventually tied the game in the sixth against Brooklyn starter Mal Eason and piled on another eight runs in the final three-plus innings for an easy 11-3 win. So despite the Cubs getting the win, Taylor's remarkable streak was over at 187 straight complete games, although he quickly completed all seven of his remaining starts for Chicago that season.

At a time in the game's history when a picher as talented as Toronto's Roy Halladay is singled out for having nine complete games in 33 starts in 2008, it is a very different game indeed. Here's a long-overdue salute to Jack Taylor and "going the distance". It may be one of the game's most overlooked achievements.