300-win club

In Major League Baseball, the 300-win club is the group of pitchers who have won 300 or more games. Twenty-four pitchers have reached this milestone. This list does not include Bobby Mathews who won 297 in the major leagues plus several more in 1869 and 1870 before the major leagues were established in 1871. Early in the history of professional baseball, many of the rules favored the pitcher over the batter; the distance pitchers threw to home plate was shorter than today, and pitchers were able to use foreign substances to alter the direction of the ball. Moreover, a schedule with rest days after most games allowed pitchers to start a far higher proportion of their team's games than modern pitchers do, typically every other game or even more (in the second half of the 1884 season Old Hoss Radbourn started 40 games out of 43). The first player to win 300 games was Pud Galvin in 1888. Seven pitchers recorded all or the majority of their career wins in the 19th century: Galvin, Cy Young, Kid Nichols, Keefe, John Clarkson, Charles Radbourn, and Welch. Four more pitchers joined the club in the first quarter of the 20th century: Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, Eddie Plank, and Grover Cleveland Alexander. Young is the all-time leader in wins with 511, a mark that is considered unbreakable. If a modern-day pitcher won 20 games per season for 25 seasons, he would still be 11 games short of Young's mark.