Pitcher of record is a baseball term that refers to a pitcher who is credited with the win or charged with the loss in a particular game. These pitchers are known respectively as the winning and losing pitchers and collectively as the pitchers of record; thus, there are always two pitchers of record in a baseball game. For a completed game these pitchers are the ones who have earned a decision. When discussing a game that is still in progress, the term "pitcher of record" is sometimes used to refer to a pitcher who potentially could become either the winning or losing pitcher.
Some baseball fans include a pitcher credited with a save (if any) as a third pitcher of record, but this is not the official definition of the term.
For example, the Major League Baseball game played between the Colorado Rockies and San Francisco Giants on May 28, 2006 resulted in a 6-3 win by the Rockies. The starting pitcher for the Rockies, Byung-Hyun Kim, was credited with a win and denoted as the winning pitcher, and the starting pitcher for the Giants, Jamey Wright, was charged with the loss and denoted as the losing pitcher. Kim and Wright were the pitchers of record for the game.
Famous quotes containing the words pitchers and/or record:
“Little pitchers have big ears.”
—Unknown (20th century)
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)