Vic Willis Marquee Hall of Fame 1995

He won 25 games as a rookie for the 1898 Boston pennant winners, then 27 the next season. In thirteen years he went 249-205 with a 2.63 earned run average, completed 388 of his 471 starts and threw 50 shutouts. He finished 45 games and pitched 410 innings in 1902, and led the league in strikeouts that year.

Boston fell apart around him. The club lost 98 games in 1904 and 103 in 1905, and he was the pitcher who kept taking the ball: 18-25, then 12-29. No pitcher has lost more in a season since. Pittsburgh bought him after that and he won at least twenty-one games in each of his four years there.

He was through at thirty-four, after a season in St. Louis, and his overhand curve, which hitters of the day called a drop, went with him. The Veterans Committee looked at his record more than a dozen times, beginning in 1957, and elected him in 1995, forty-eight years after he died.