Hall of Fame Pitcher Phil Niekro Dies

It seems that this year of 2020 couldn’t go away without taking one more Hall of Fame baseball player. Phil Niekro, a knuckleball pitcher who won 318 games over a 24 year major league career, died of cancer at age 81 on December 26th. He’s the seventh member of the Baseball Hall of Fame to die this year.

Niekro broke into the big leagues with the then Milwaukee Braves in 1964 at age 25; he retired at the end of the 1987 season at age 48. To say he was a workhorse would be greatly understating it. He’s fourth on the all time list for innings pitched at 5,404, which included four seasons where he pitched over 300 innings. A lot of this was possible because the knuckleball is not thrown hard; rather, a knuckleball pitch when thrown correctly (which isn’t easy) has a great deal of movement, so much so that it is unpredictable. It sure worked for him; he was 318-274 with a 3.35 ERA and 3342 strikeouts. He played for the Braves until he was released at the end of the 1983 season, then played for the Yankees, Cleveland, and Toronto. He returned to the Braves for one last appearance in 1987 before retiring.

Phil’s brother Joe also had a fine big league career as a pitcher, and he also threw the knuckleball. Joe, who died in 2006, won 221 games. Together, the Niekro brothers hold the major league record for pitching victories by a pair of brothers with 539. Phil was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1997.