Iron Mike, the human pitching machine
Mike Marshall, the tireless one, becomes the first relief pitcher to win the Cy Young Award 49 years ago today as the National League award winner is announced.
The 31-year-old Marshall is coming off a 1974 season in which he sets major league records for relief pitchers with 106 appearances and 208 innings pitched for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
He also posts a National League-leading 21 saves, along with 15 victories and a 2.42 earned-run average.
The Dodgers pick up Marshall – the player others aptly call “Iron Mike” – before the 1974 season in a trade that sends longtime Los Angeles center fielder Willie Davis to the Montreal Expos.
The Dodgers have a fairly good idea what they are getting with Marshall, who in his last season with the Expos in 1973 tops the National League with 31 saves while again leading all relievers with 91 appearances and 179 innings pitched.
Over his final three seasons with the Expos, Marshall works 406 innings over 223 appearances out of the bullpen with 72 saves and 33 victories out.
When he is not busy in baseball, Marshall is taking classes at Michigan State University, where in 1978 he earns his doctorate in exercise physiology.
Mike Marshall with the Expos
During and after his playing career, which ends in 1981, Mike Marshall – now Dr. Mike Marshall – teaches at five colleges, including his alma mater at Michigan State.
Along the way, Marshall annoys pro baseball coaches everywhere with his unconventional training tools for pitchers and his approach to the mechanics pitchers use in their deliveries.
“Pitching coaches are like the medicine men of the distant past,” Marshall later tells Sports Illustrated. “Some don’t have a clue, and they don’t have a clue that they don’t have a clue, which is worse.”
Marshall’s early theories are consider heresy by baseball’s old guard.
Concepts such as weight training for pitchers, soft tossing with iron balls, analyzing videos of pitching mechanics and applying kinesiology to everything involving throwing a baseball.
You know, stuff that is commonplace in today’s game.
Instead, Marshall is ostracized for his intellect.
“I was that smart-ass college kid,” Marshall says. “You did not get any respect for your education within baseball. In fact, you were considered a danger. That you could actually understand what they’re saying was bullshit. They didn’t like that too much.”