Virgil Trucks had a really good Major League Baseball career. The burly right-hander pitched in 17 seasons, amassed a 40.4 bWAR, won the 1945 World Series, and finished his career with a very respectable 3.54 FIP and 117 ERA+. Trucks also pitched five seasons in the minors where he was (surprise, surprise) very good. However, those accolades are not what I’m here to write about today. I’m interested in Trucks’ 1938 season with the Andalusia Bulldogs of the Alabama-Florida League.
I was reading a Bluesky thread from Adam Darowski a few weeks back when someone dropped a screenshot of Trucks’ Baseball Reference page with his 1938 season highlighted. To say that the right-hander’s stats pop out to the eye would be an understatement. He pitched in 273.0 innings and 38 games for the Bulldogs. In those appearances, he mustered a 1.25 ERA and 0.982 WHIP. If that was all he did, that wouldn’t be a heck of a lot to write about. A dominant year, sure, but to be honest, it’s what one would expect from a future major league playing in a D-level minor league in 1938.
418.
What does that number mean, well, it’s how many batters were sent to the dugout swinging by Trucks in his rookie professional baseball season. That’s 418 strikeouts in 273.0 innings, or a SO/9 of 13.7. What makes this stand out even more is that Trucks never amassed more than 207 strikeouts in any other season during his career. In totality, Trucks pitched 3618.2 innings and finished his career with 2201 strikeouts. (It’s been a while since I’ve had to explain this, but for the unfamiliar, this site does complete stats when talking about career stats, which includes all known professional regular season and playoff statistics). That leaves the son of Birmingham, Alabama with a career SO/9 of 5.4.
Let’s say we remove Trucks’ 1938 season from his career numbers. His innings pitched drops to 3345.2 while his strikeouts end up at 1783. That leaves him with a SO/9 of 4.7. While I didn’t do a deep dive, my cursory research didn’t reveal another season with that glaring of a discrepancy between a pitcher’s strikeouts in one season and the rest of their career. That’s why Virgil Trucks’ 1938 season stands out, he was literally never that pitcher again for the rest of his career.
The man known as “Fire” Trucks doesn’t hold the record for most strikeouts netted by a pitcher in a professional baseball season (we are missing Trucks’ playoff stats from 1938, so who actually knows where he ranks). However, everyone else on that list was a strikeout pitcher, while Trucks was a contact pitcher for the entirety of his career sans his 1938 season with the Bulldogs. Trucks had a solid and noteworthy career, he isn’t among the greatest to ever play the game but he’s definitely one of those players who was good enough for long enough that he’s easy to remember. But, for one season he was a strikeout machine in ways that he would never replicate. Trucks’ 1938 season, contrasted with the rest of his career is one of the things that makes baseball such an amazing sport!
Lead photo courtesy of Unknown – Facebook
