In One-Win Wonders, we meet 78 players whose time in the major leagues included only a single pitching win. One-Win Wonders is a companion book to the 2021 SABR book One-Hit Wonders, which included biographies of players who had gotten only a single hit.
The 78 players whose biographies are presented here are among the 915 players who completed their major-league career with just one win. An astonishing 229 of those never lost a game, ending with a career record of 1-0. Some simply had very brief stays in the majors, like Bill Ging "With the Wonderful Wing" who joined the Boston Beaneaters at the tail end of 1899 and secured a 2-1 complete game victory over the New York Giants, but found himself without a team when the National League contracted from 12 teams to eight in 1900. Then there's Nick Adenhart, whose career was tragically cut short by a drunk driver hours after securing his win for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.
Others, like catcher Brent Mayne, were position players who wound up on the mound and left with a victory. Mayne's win came in an epic extra-innings contest between the Colorado Rockies and Atlanta Braves, after the last pitcher on the roster was ejected after a brawl.
Each of the current 30 major-league franchises is represented by at least one such wonder, as are a number of other teams, some dating back to the nineteenth century. One-Win Wonders represents the collaborative work of nearly 60 researchers, authors, and editors from the Society for American Baseball Research.
