Dutch Leonard Marquee

Washington's 1945 rotation was four knuckleball pitchers: Roger Wolff, Mickey Haefner, Johnny Niggeling and him. He went 17-7 with a 2.13 earned run average that year and the club finished a game and a half behind Detroit, which is the closest a rotation built that way has come to a pennant. Catchers of the period were entitled to their opinion of it.

Twenty seasons gave him 191 wins against 181 with a 3.25 earned run average, 3,218 innings, 192 complete games and 30 shutouts. He won 20 games in 1939 for a Washington club that lost 87, and 17 in 1947 for a Philadelphia club that lost 92, which is most of what there is to say about the clubs he pitched for. Five All-Star selections.

He is not the Dutch Leonard who pitched for Boston in the 1910s and threw two no-hitters; there were two of them, and this one came second. He finished with the Cubs in relief at forty-four. Seven writers' ballots between 1960 and 1973 never gave him more than six votes.