Baseball fans who grew up on 20-game winners understand -- sometimes with much chagrin, sometimes with more emphatic degrees of horror -- that the expectations for a starting pitcher are much different in 2025 than 10 years ago, let alone 20, 30 or 40 years ago.

The complete game is all but dead -- no pitcher has more than one nine-inning complete game this season. One hundred pitches is now viewed as the top limit for a pitch count, with pitchers rarely exceeding 110 -- Randy Johnson had more 110-pitch outings just in 1993 than every starter combined in 2025. Pitchers get more days off between starts. And the list goes on.

Forty years ago in 1985, 20-year-old right-hander Dwight Gooden went 24-4 with a 1.53 ERA while leading the National League with 16 complete games and 268 strikeouts;

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