All-Time Best Winning Percentage Records for Major League Baseball Pitchers

The Major League Baseball record for the best winning percentage among pitchers all-time belongs to a man named Al Spalding, the same Spalding who would also become famous for his sporting goods chain. Spalding had one season where he went 55-5, and while I am in no way belittling what he accomplished, one can obviously see that the game was very different during Spalding's time than it is currently. The modern day record for the top winning percentage for a hurler with at least one thousand innings pitched and one hundred career decisions is the Yankees' Spud Chandler, who went 109-43 in his eleven years for a .717 rate of success. The best single season ever in terms of winning percentage for a pitcher belongs to Elroy Face of the Pirates, who in 1959 went a magical 18-1 as a reliever.

Chandler never lost more than eight games in any one of his eleven campaigns, as he pitched for the Bronx Bombers while they were very, very good- from 1937 until 1947. New York won six world titles during Chandler's tenure with the club, and he was more than happy to pitch for them during the war years before he left for his own military service. Chandler went a combined 36-9 in 1942 and 1943 while many of the game's stars were in the service, including a 20-4 record in 1943 when he was named the American League's Most Valuable Player. Chandler had two twenty-win seasons, possessed a lifetime earned run average of 2.84, threw 26 shutouts, and had a career walks to innings pitched ratio (WHIP) of 1.205. Yet he has not been inducted into the Hall of Fame, possibly because of the fact that three of his seasons were made up of just a handful of outings.

One player that does not have to worry about exclusion from Cooperstown is Pedro Martinez, who is all alone in third on the career win percentage list at .693. Pedro has won a trio of Cy Young Awards and has two twenty-win campaigns on his resume; Martinez has not lost more than nine games in a season since 1996, when he tied his career high with ten defeats. Pedro is still at it on the hill, so he is also the active leader for pitchers' winning percentage. In fourth on the lifetime roster is the fine lefty, Ed "Whitey" Ford, the Yankee ace who went 236-106 for a .690 final number. Ford helped these numbers with an incredible 1961 season, as in the shadow of the Roger Maris pursuit of Babe Ruth's home run record he went 25-4! Ford went 20-22 in his final three seasons, costing him a much better winning percentage overall.

Face could do little wrong in 1959 when he posted his remarkable 18-1 standard, as he was simply in the right place at the right time again and again. His ERA was a respectable 2.70, but he gave up almost a hit per inning and struck out only 69 in 93 frames. In 1937, Cleveland's Johnny Allen went 15-1 in just 24 games, most of them ebing starts. Allen had been a sparkling 17-4 as a rookie with the Yankees in 1932 and was traded to the Indians in 1935. He was 20-11 the following year before he went into the record books the next season with the second best winning percentage for one year. Behind Allen comes Phil Regan, nicknamed the "Vulture". Regan had a habit of swooping in and winding up the winner no matter what happened in 1966, when he was 14-1 for the Dodgers even though he had a rather mundane 3.28 earned run average. Greg Maddux at 19-2 in 1995 and Randy Johnson's 18-2 standard that same year were the most recent additions to this role call, as they are sixth and seventh all-time respectively, behind a pair of Nineteenth century hurlers.

Martinez is one whole percentage point better in the active pitcher category than the Twins' Johan Santana, who is 93-43 in seven seasons for a .684 mark, at the age of 28. Third in arrears of these two modern day greats is 112-54 in seven years for a clip of winning that figures out to .675. In 2007, Brad Penny of the Dodgers has won eighty percent of his decisions for the best winning percentage in the sport, followed by Justin Verlander of Detroit at .773.