about the Yankees and Red Sox pennant race, and “The Last Good Season” as well as “Big Train” about Walter Johnson’s career, I have to go with =both= factors mentioned above: That enough innings in the minors usually caused those pitchers lacking the biology to endure all the way to the majors to be packing up and calling it a career early. Don’t forget, even major league players had off-season jobs, so the line between being a “professional ball player” and a typical working stiff was easy to pass through. Probably every third “athletic” guy played ball and was “on his way” but then was out, because they were hurt, or had a family to support. So if you retired at 21, you simply joined the path of tons of people. And never to be heard from.

Players played hurt, too, until they couldn’t play. Excerpt from “The Last Good Season” page 125 about pitcher Carl Erskine:
“He was bright and friendly and he could pitch—a quick overhand delivery that hurt him almost every time he threw. In the first start of his rookie season of 1948, he was pitching in the rain against the Cubs when, on a third strike, Erskine felt a sharp pain in his shoulder. The injury was diagnosed as a pulled muscle, the “cure” for which was generally keeping quiet and not losing a turn on the mound. Besides, his manager at the time, Burt Shotton, told him he was pitching well, so why sit? The injury never healed. Instead, a knot the size of a golf ball developed in his pitching shoulder, a marker so familiar to Dodger trainers that many years after he retired one of them approached Erskine, placed a hand on his should, pressed in, and said, “Right there?”
“Erskine did have some fine seasons. His best was 1953 when he won twenty games for the only time and struck out fourteen Yankees in a World Series game. He had pitched a no-hitter in 1952, against the Cubs at Ebbetts Field. Still, he spent his career trying to find a way to pitch with a tolerable degree of pain. He did not complain, or ask to skip a turn in the rotation. He was smaller than most of the other pitchers, wo marveled at how much he squeezed out of so slender a frame.
...page 128 (1956) “Carl Erskine, meanwhile, struggled. His arm hurt so badly he wanted to go to Doc Wendler, the team physician, but was embarrassed because he felt he had gone to him too many times before. So in Chicago he called the Cubs’ trainer, Al Scheunemann. Scheunemann, a generous man who’d once worked for the Dodger organization, came to Erskine’s hotel room, examined his right arm, and told him he would give him an injection of procaine and cortisone. Erskine had never had such a shot before, and Scheunemann wamed him it would hurt.”

The exceptional few did well. And stayed healthy.

Expansion has allowed for the less than Major league caliber of pitcher to secure jobs. Those who would be buried in the lower levels would never see the Majors. Therefore it is my belief that expansion has diluted true pitching talent thus why there are more homeruns and big innings. 30 years ago if you were down by four runs it was over. But what are you going to do? It is what it is.

I’m going to guess Gallagher didn’t say anything before his last start. That’s just how players are.

it’s because our GM has a big ego, that’s why bradley was so loved in montreal, cleveland, LA, san diego…