Former major league relief pitcher Mike Marshall turns 70 today. Mike Marshall’s 1974 season continues to amaze me. No one has ever had a season like Iron Mike Marshall’s 1974 season with the Los Angeles Dodgers. In 1974 for the third season in a row he led the league in games pitched. 1974 though was a record year- he pitched in 106 of the Dodgers 162 games. All the games he pitched in that year were in relief. He pitched 208.1 innings. Today a team brings in a closer to pitch one inning and no closer pitches anything close to 106 games. Marshall averaged nearly 2 innings an appearance. Marshall won 15 games that year and lost 12. He had 21 saves and a 2.42 ERA. His big pitch was a screwball. Mike Marshall was a late bloomer. If you look at his career record he didn’t do much until the age of 29.

Marshall is a very intelligent man. He has 3 degrees from Michigan State including a PhD in kinesiology. He was also a member of the 1969 Seattle Pilots {who were in Seattle just one season} and was a character that Jim Bouton wrote a lot about in his classic baseball book “Ball Four.” Marshall ended up pitching with nine different teams during his career. My guess is he travelled so often because he was a smart man who had different ideas and management didn’t like that kind of thing. As Warren Zevon wrote in his song about pitcher  Bill Lee called “Bill Lee”- “You’re supposed to sit on your ass and nod at stupid things, man that’s hard to do” The impression I had of Marshall from Bouton’s book is- Marshall wasn’t someone who sat by quietly and went along with the flow.