Quote:
Originally Posted by Aquarian Sports Cards
Hard to call it his prime when he'd only had an unsuccessful cup of coffee before his service. Maybe he was a late bloomer, there's too many ifs to quantify his missed years.
Did it cost him some kind of counting numbers? Most likely. but it's not like Ted Williams or Pee Wee Reese or some other established player that has a baseline of numbers that you can extrapolate.
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I don't think so, not when you look at how well he did in the minors after getting sent down by Stengel, and then again looking at how well he did right out of the gate after getting out of the service and back to pitching in the majors. He seems to have been on somewhat of a par with Felller in that he was good right from the start, and/or it didn't take him long to get really good. I would find it extremely hard to believe that had he not gone off to the war that he would have floundered in the majors all those missing years. With 363 victories in his career, he was only 37 short of 400 wins. Assuming he missed just 3 years due to the war, that means he would have only needed to average 12-13 wins for each of those three seasons to reach 400 wins. Starting in 1947, Spahn had 17 straight seasons where he topped that and never had less than 14 wins.