Earl Whitehill Marquee

Only Tim Wakefield has won 200 games with a higher earned run average. Whitehill's 4.36 across 3,564 innings is a fact about the 1920s and 1930s American League, when the ball was lively and Detroit's ballpark was small; he won 218 games and lost 185 in it, with 226 complete games.

In 1933 he went 22-8 for a Washington club that won 99 games and the pennant, and then shut out the Giants in the third game of the World Series, the only game Washington won. It is the last World Series game that franchise won in that city.

He was famously bad-tempered — teammates and umpires both said so — and pitched seventeen seasons anyway, ten of them in Detroit. Four writers' ballots gave him no more than six votes. He died in 1954, at fifty-five, after a car accident.