Twenty-game winners are a rare breed and, in 1971, Baltimore had four of them. Dave McNally, Mike Cuellar, Jim Palmer and Pat Dobson rang up win after win as the team took the American League East title with the best rotation in baseball. McNally finished 21-5, followed by Dobson (20-8) and Cuellar and Palmer (both 20-9).
“For the first time since man learned to walk on his hind legs, an honest team has four 20-game winners,” New York sports columnist Red Smith wrote at the time. (In 1920, the Chicago White Sox did it, after having thrown the World Series the year before.