The Card in the Shoebox

There's a reason that card never made it into your spokes.

Six straight 20-win seasons, 1967 through 1972, averaging 306 innings a year. No Cubs pitcher has done it before or since. In 1971 he went 24-13 with a 2.77 ERA and completed 30 of his 39 starts. He struck out 263 and walked 37. Thirty-seven walks in 325 innings. He won the Cy Young that year, the first Canadian and the first Cub ever to get one, and he hit six home runs on the side.

He finished with 284 wins and 3,192 strikeouts against 997 walks, the first pitcher in history to reach 3,000 strikeouts with fewer than a thousand walks. He lost thirteen complete games by a score of 1-0, because he pitched for the Cubs. He never threw a single postseason pitch.

Delores Jenkins never saw any of it. She lost her sight around the time her only child was born in Chatham, Ontario, and she was the one who pointed him toward the mound before he had any idea himself. When he pitched in Chicago she came to the ballpark and listened on a transistor radio, putting the picture together in her own mind. She died of cancer in 1970 at 52, the year before the Cy Young.

Twenty years after that, standing in Cooperstown as the first Canadian ever inducted, he said his mother knew before he did what he was supposed to be.

That's the card that went in the shoebox.