That’s Willis v. Guidry. When you look at the boxscore, it’s almost unfathomable. Here’s Guidry, in one of the most dominating seasons by a pitcher in MLB history, getting his ass kicked by the worst team in baseball. And Mike Willis, in probably the most memorable game of his brief and otherwise uneventful major league career, shutting down the World Champs in a complete game effort and delivering Guidry his 3rd and final loss of 1978.

Second, I recall an obscure trivia question making the rounds in 1978 (probably from a note in a Sunday Globe Peter Gammons column) that the only 3 pitchers to beat Ron Guidry in 1978 were all named Mike: Caldwell, Flanagan, and…Willis. Which meant that when the Red Sox sent Mike Torrez to the mound on October 2nd, my “karma uber statistical sampling” brain was convinced the Sox were going to win.

Absolutely, that’s Yankee Stadium in the photo. Willis appeared in one day game there in 1978 – the first of a doubleheader on May 28. He came on in the seventh, in a tie game with the go-ahead run on third. Chris Chambliss singled to put the Yankees ahead, then Willis got out of the inning. But he came back out for the eighth, gave up a single, a double, then hit the showers. Rough day indeed.

That could be, not sure. Very strange an ugly lettering on the ’79 set. I remember the Mets were Brown with yellow letters, the Dodgers were a pink color I think, The Royals were brown and yellow like the Mets, very strange.

I noticed that the only pitchers to escape the overwhelming 89er tendency toward defeat (i.e., they had winning records) were the only fellows with profiles on this site: Willis, Brusstar, and Bahnsen.

Also, the 89ers provided quite the intersection of pro careers, with Bahnsen, who started playing pro ball in 1965, sharing bus rides with young Julio Franco, who played professionally in Mexico last year (and played in the majors in ’07).

Willis was drafted by the Reds in ’68 but decides to go to Vanderbilt instead. Who knows what would have happened if signed with the Reds.

He gets drafted by the Orioles in ’72. The Orioles are the best place for a pitcher to pitch in the 70′s basically for 3 reasons: Pitcher’s park, Great Defense, Good offensive team. The only problem is baseball overrated all of the Oriole pitchers back then because there was no way to adjust for this advantage. So even league average pitchers tended to stay on the team longer because they were perceived as better than they really were.

Willis never gets his chance because of the pitcher log-jam which in reality he probably could have pitched as well as a lot of pitchers on the Orioles staff. Instead, he is unprotected by the Orioles and drafted by an expansion team that plays in a hitter’s park with bad defense with horrible hitters.

You look back on those ’76 Orioles that came in second place and you really wonder what Weaver was doing:

Cuellar-66era+
May-87era+
Grimsley-83era+

Willis could have pitched just as good if not better than those 3 guys.

Willis would have ended up with Orioles without the expansion draft and probably would have been good enough to play in the ’79 & 83 series.

Also, like Mike Beard, Willis was victim of bad timing. If he had come up in the 80′s or 90′s he could have played forever and made a ton of money as a left handed relief pitcher.