The Professor and the Pupil
This story was left in our comments by
Ed Vize, via Facebook
The 1974 Dodgers had the rare problem of two MVP candidates in the same clubhouse. Steve Garvey hit .312 with 111 RBIs and anchored an infield that would define the franchise for years. Down in the bullpen, Mike Marshall was doing something nobody had done before and nobody has done since.
Marshall pitched in 106 games that season. He threw 208 innings without making a single start. He finished 83 games and once pitched 13 days in a row. His deal with Walter Alston was simple: if he warmed up, he was going in. No reliever had ever won the Cy Young. Marshall won it by a mile.
106 games, 0 starts
Mike Marshall, 1974 — 208 innings, 83 games finished, and the first Cy Young for a reliever
And here's the part that makes it a baseball story: six years earlier, Marshall had been a kinesiology instructor at Michigan State. One of his students was a young Steve Garvey. The professor and the pupil ended up on the same roster, chasing the same award.
Garvey took the MVP. Marshall finished third. Both answers are defensible, which is exactly why this one is still fun to argue about fifty years later.
