Expert: Tom Schott - 5/8/2009

Question
Have any pitchers saved both games of a double header?  Won both? I was surprised that I could not find an answer to this using search engines. Thank you!

Answer
James,

 I just saw that you also asked for wins on the same day. The previous answer was for saves on both ends of the doubleheader. I can tell you that this has happened also, but I cannot provide much more data than that. In the dead ball era, it was not unheard of for a pitcher to start both ends of a doubleheader. I am able to verify that Joe "Iron Man" McGinnity of the NY Giants, won both games of a doubleheader three times in the month of August in 1903. Other pitching studs of that era such as Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, Pete Alexander, and Three-Finger Brown probably accomplished the feat also, but I cannot verify.

 As to how I find such information, there's a service you can get on baseball-reference.com that allows you to slice and dice statistics innumerable ways. That site also has game logs for every MLB game since 1954. Using the tool, I can run lists of every game that a closer got a save in, for example, in a certain year or in a career. That's how I found the dates I provided. I simply concentrated the search on seasons before 1980, when doubleheaders were much more common than since then.


James,

 This has happened many times, back when doubleheaders were common. I spent just a little time researching this, and here are just the examples I found:

Hoyt Wilhelm on May 12, 1957; June 15, 1958; Sep 4 1961; Jun 27, 1965
Sparky Lyle: May 21 & 29, 1972; May 20, 1973; Oct 2, 1976
Mike Marshall: Jul 6, 1973; Jul 7, 1974