Hal Newhouser Marquee Hall of Fame 1992

He was 29-9 in 1944 and 25-9 in 1945, and no one in the American League won more games or struck out more men in either year. He took the pitching Triple Crown in 1945, with 212 strikeouts, eight shutouts and 29 complete games, and Detroit won the World Series that October.

The standing objection to those two years is that the war had taken the hitters he was facing. A heart condition kept him out of the service and in Detroit. In 1946, with the leagues restocked, he went 26-9 with a 1.94 earned run average and 275 strikeouts, and again nobody in the league won more games.

He finished 207-150 with 1,796 strikeouts in seventeen seasons. The writers never elected him, giving him 155 votes of 362 at his best, in 1975; the Veterans Committee put him in the Hall of Fame in 1992, thirty-seven years after his last game. He scouted afterward, and told Houston to spend the first pick of the 1992 draft on Derek Jeter.