Bob Welch, a fine pitcher for both the Dodgers and the Oakland Athletics died yesterday. Heart attack. He was 57.

A personal aside: As you age, in relation to sports figures, you notice two things: one, when you are older than any professional athlete in one of the Big Four sports and, two, you notice when the professional athletes more or less from your own age cohort begin to die of natural causes.

Like most Dodgers fans, Welch’s death led me to think of one moment: When he struck out Reggie Jackson to win Game 2 of the 1978 World Series against the New York Yankees, an at-bat that can be seen at mlb.com.

But when I poked around a little more, I realized that the whiffing-Mr.-October thing was not really representative of Welch’s career. He was better than many of us remembered and, in some ways, not quite as good.

First, the “not quite as good” thing.

When Welch faced Reggie that night in Los Angeles (and I cannot remember if I was there; I would have to go to the archives; I think not) … the confrontation was cast in these terms: “young guy throwing gas against one of the great sluggers”.

Something about that episode has stuck in the memory, even though the Yankees eventually won the 1978 World Series. The kid and the superstar, perhaps. Or, back then, any pregnant moment in a Dodgers-Yankees World Series. Or maybe it shows how much bigger baseball was in 1978 than it is now.

(The other thing I remember from that series is Reggie-the-baserunner’s hip-check deflection of a throw that should have completed a double play. I was in the student union at Arizona State when that happened, in an afternoon game; I covered USC-Arizona State later that night.)

Dodgers fans left that Whiffing Reggie moment thinking Bob Welch was a power pitcher of the first order. And that reputation stuck with him when, in fact, his strikeouts-to-innings ratio was not particularly impressive. Trending later to “not impressive at all”. In modern baseball, we would have noticed this and would remark upon it. “Not bad, but he doesn’t strike out enough guys.”

Check his entry at the baseball reference site.

In that rookie year, which included the Reggie moment, Welch threw 111.1 innings … but struck out only 66 batters. Today, we would wring our hands at the lack of a punch-out pitch for a guy so young, and remember the Bill James caveat that a pitcher never strikes out more guys, as he ages, and if he can’t whiff people in his rookie year, he probably will not have much of a career.

Welch, eventually, pitched to contact. It makes perfect sense that Baseball Reference compares him to Scott Sanderson, Kevin Appier and Doug Drabek.

Welch was an innings eater, first and foremost.

But he was very good at it, and it makes you wonder if there shouldn’t be a little more room for that kind of guy, in the modern game. Besides Mark Buerhle and a handful of others.

Welch lasted 17 seasons and won 211 games. I wonder how many of today’s current pitching stars will win 211 games, and I’m thinking “just about none of them”. They throw too hard and leave games too early, and break down too often. Twenty years from now, winning 200 games might be enough to get you in the Hall of Fame.

Welch pitched more than 200 innings nine times and was over 165 another three times, and for three more years he was primarily a relief pitcher.

So, it wasn’t really that long ago that guys did not plan on having Tommy John surgery, and being hosts to two or three ulnar collateral ligaments.

He won 27 games for the 1990 Oakland Athletics, and no one has won more than 24 in a season since. And it was not a case of those Athletics working with a four-man rotation, which pretty much vanished by 1980 … it was Welch working deep into games. He got those 27 wins from only 35 starts. Which tells us that the five-man rotation was up and running, but the concept of situational relievers throwing the final three innings … had not fully developed yet.

Retro managers, like Tommy Lasorda, believed that a tiring starting pitcher was better than a fresh set-up man, and he probably was right. At least, in 1990.

I wonder how Welch will be seen, another decade from now. We keep trending towards more and more strikeouts, and pitchers with high K rates are prized even as modern statistical analysis tell us that “won-lost” is not a particularly useful statistic.

The Welch who won 27 struck out only 127 batters in 238 innings. These days, he would be derided as a soft-tossing righty, a species which is nearly extinct in ball, and his 27 wins would be credited to playing with a team that scored a lot of runs, probably had a very nice defense and, also, luck.

But there are those 211 victories (against 146 defeats), and more than a decade of Welch taking the ball every fifth day and working deep into a game.

It is a bit curious, then, that Welch is remembered most for a strikeout when he was 21 years old. When his career probably was more about jamming a guy and inducing a popout in the seventh inning of a 5-2 game.