Bob Gibson: The 1968 Season and a Ferocious Competitor

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 9 min read

Bob Gibson's career in numbers, from the Omaha years to the Hall of Fame, with a close look at his 1968 season, the 1.12 ERA, and the rule changes that followed it.

In 1968 Bob Gibson made 34 starts for the St. Louis Cardinals, pitched 304 and two-thirds innings, and allowed 38 earned runs. That is a 1.12 earned run average, and it is the single number most often attached to his name. He also finished 22-9, threw 13 shutouts and 28 complete games, struck out 268 hitters and walked only 62. In the same season the National League as a whole had an ERA of 2.99, which means Gibson allowed about 1.87 runs fewer per nine innings than the average pitcher he shared a league with.

The season was so lopsided that baseball changed its rules in response. For 1969 the pitching mound was lowered from 15 inches to 10 and the strike zone was shrunk, and the National League's ERA rose from 2.99 to 3.60 in a single year. Gibson's own earned run average rose from 1.12 to 2.18 and he was still among the best pitchers in the league. This article follows the whole career, not just that one year: where he came from, how he learned the job, what he did in October, how his statistics read now, and what the historical record cannot tell you.

The career in one table

Every figure in this article comes from the historical record through the 2025 season. Gibson pitched from 1959 through 1975, all with the Cardinals. Innings in the year-by-year table use baseball notation, where .1 means one-third of an inning.

Two details in that table deserve a second look. The first is the complete-game total: 255 of 482 starts, more than half. Modern starting pitchers are managed with pitch counts, bullpens and the times-through-the-order penalty, and recent seasons have seen league leaders finish only a few games. The second is the ratio of strikeouts to walks, which is about 2.3 to 1 for the career. In 1968 it was better than 4 to 1.

Omaha, Creighton and the road to St. Louis

Gibson was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on November 9, 1935, and died there on October 2, 2020. He attended Creighton University, where he played both baseball and basketball, and the historical record lists Creighton as his college. He was also known for his basketball, and he spent time playing for the Harlem Globetrotters before settling on baseball. He signed with the Cardinals and made his major-league debut on April 15, 1959.

At 6-foot-1 and 189 pounds in the historical listing, he did not look like a power pitcher in the way that later generations would define one. What he had was a hard fastball, a slider, and a competitive streak that teammates and opponents described the same way for decades. He was not an overnight star. In his first two seasons he went 3-5 with a 3.33 ERA and then 3-6 with a 5.61 ERA. A pitcher with those numbers would be in danger of losing his place today; the Cardinals stayed with him.

1959 to 1961: learning to be a starter

The first three seasons were a lesson in patience. In 1960 he pitched 86 and two-thirds innings with a 5.61 ERA. In 1961 he became a regular starter, went 13-12 with a 3.24 ERA and 166 strikeouts in 211 innings, and the Cardinals found out what they had. Over the next three years the innings piled up: 233 in 1962, 254 in 1963, 287 in 1964. That is the pattern of a pitcher whose manager has made a decision.

There is a point worth making here about how good pitchers develop: the raw talent often arrives before the results do, and the manager's willingness to keep giving the ball is what turns one into the other. From 1962 through 1973 Gibson's ERA never rose above 3.39, a twelve-year run. The table below follows him from 1961 through his final year.

1964 and 1967: the October pitcher

Gibson's reputation as a big-game pitcher is built on three World Series, and the record backs it up. In 1964 the Cardinals beat the Yankees in seven games and Gibson, who won two games in the series, was named World Series Most Valuable Player. He pitched the seventh game on two days' rest, and the Cardinals won it. In 1967 the Cardinals beat the Red Sox, again in seven games, and Gibson won three complete games, including the deciding game. He was again the World Series MVP. In 1968 the Cardinals lost to the Tigers in seven games, and Gibson, who won two games in that series, took the loss in the seventh.

Taken together, those three Series give him a 7-2 record with a 1.89 ERA, nine starts and 92 strikeouts in 81 innings. That is a small sample, but it is a sample of the highest-stakes baseball available, and it was consistent. In October 1968, he struck out 17 Tigers in Game 1, a World Series record that has stood ever since. The game is one of the first things any history of the Fall Classic mentions.

His 1967 regular season was short because of an injury. A line drive struck him on the leg in July and broke a bone, and he missed about two months. He returned for the last weeks of the schedule and was ready for the World Series, which tells you something about how he approached the job. He finished that year 13-7 with a 2.98 ERA in only 175 innings, and the Cardinals still won the pennant.

1968: the numbers behind the 1.12

Almost every number in 1968 is a rate that borders on the absurd. The table below compares Gibson with the National League as a whole.

Divide his 198 hits and 62 walks by his 304 and two-thirds innings and you get a WHIP of about 0.85, which means that on average fewer than one baserunner reached against him per inning. He allowed only 11 home runs. He finished 22-9, which looks ordinary next to the ERA. A pitcher can lose nine games with a 1.12 earned run average, and that tells you how thin the margin was in a year when the average National League club scored about 558 runs.

The National League gave him both the Most Valuable Player award and the Cy Young Award. The American League had its own giant that year: Denny McLain of the Tigers won 31 games, and Luis Tiant led the AL with a 1.60 ERA. Major-league clubs scored 3.42 runs per game that year, among the lowest figures since 1920. Carl Yastrzemski won the American League batting title at .301. It was a season in which a .300 average was a rarity.

What baseball did about it

The sport did not ignore 1968. Before the 1969 season the rules committee lowered the mound from 15 inches to 10 and reduced the strike zone to the space between the armpits and the top of the knees. The 1969 expansion that added four clubs also thinned the pitching. The combination did what it was designed to do. The National League's ERA went from 2.99 to 3.60 and Gibson's own earned run average rose by a run, but he still went 20-13 with 269 strikeouts, and his innings pitched rose to 314.

It is worth pausing on what the rule changes mean for evaluating Gibson. Cross-era comparison is hard, and the usual method is to compare a player with his own league. By that standard 1968 is among the greatest pitching seasons ever. By the standard of the raw earned run average it is the lowest since 1914, when Dutch Leonard of the Red Sox posted 0.96. By any standard it is the performance that the mound adjustment was designed to prevent. You can read more about the other great pitchers of the era in the profile of Sandy Koufax, whose five-year peak ended in 1966, and Juan Marichal, who led the 1968 league in complete games.

1969 to 1973: the other great seasons

If 1968 were the only year, Gibson would be a historical oddity. It was not. From 1969 through 1973 he won 90 games and posted ERAs of 2.18, 3.12, 3.04, 2.46 and 2.77. In 1970 he went 23-7 and won his second Cy Young Award, and he also hit .303 with 33 hits, which is the best batting average of his career in a season of any size. In 1971 he threw a no-hitter against Pittsburgh on August 14, a game that is not recorded in the historical record but is part of the standard history of the era.

Gibson also won nine consecutive Gold Gloves from 1965 through 1973, which is evidence of something that does not show in ERA: he fielded his position well. He was a useful hitter for a pitcher, too: 24 home runs in 1,328 at-bats, including five in 1965 and five in 1972.

His career overlapped with several other great pitchers. Tom Seaver and Steve Carlton were rising as Gibson peaked; Carlton, in fact, debuted with the Cardinals in 1965 and pitched alongside Gibson for several seasons.

Decline and 3,000 strikeouts

The decline was gradual. In 1974 Gibson went 11-13 with a 3.83 ERA, the first time his ERA had exceeded 3.50 since 1960. That year he struck out his 3,000th batter, which at the time made him the second pitcher in history, after Walter Johnson, to reach the mark. His last season, 1975, was a hard one: 3-10 with a 5.04 ERA in 109 innings, and his final game came on September 3.

The Cardinals retired his number 45, and he was elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot in 1981. He received 337 votes on 401 ballots, with 301 needed for election, which is a share of about 84 percent. His career total of 3,117 strikeouts was, when he retired, among the highest ever recorded.

What the statistics miss

The historical record cannot answer several of the questions a modern reader might ask. It has no WAR, so we cannot tell you how many wins above replacement he provided; it has no Statcast data and no pitch velocities, so we cannot say how hard he threw; and it does not record how often he threw inside. His reputation for pitching inside and for his intensity is part of baseball's oral history rather than the database, although the database does count 102 hit batters across his career.

There is also a context problem. Gibson began his career in 1959, twelve years after Jackie Robinson, and he pitched at a time when Black players in the major leagues were still fighting for equal treatment in spring training and in hotels. The Negro Leagues, whose best players never had that chance, appear in the historical record only for 1920 through 1948 and only in part; for that history see the profile of Oscar Charleston. Gibson's numbers should be read as one of the great accomplishments of his era, not as the whole of it.

Common questions

How good was Gibson's 1968 season? The 1.12 ERA was the lowest since 1914, he threw 13 shutouts, and he won both the MVP and the Cy Young Award. He lost nine games.

Did the 1968 season cause the mound to be lowered? It is the main reason usually given. The sport lowered the mound from 15 inches to 10 and shrank the strike zone for 1969, and the National League's ERA went up by more than half a run.

How many World Series did he win? Two, in 1964 and 1967. He pitched in a third, in 1968, which the Cardinals lost to Detroit.

How many wins did he have? 251, with a 2.91 earned run average. He pitched 255 complete games.

When was he inducted into the Hall of Fame? In 1981, in his first year on the ballot.

Where to go next

See where Gibson and his contemporaries rank on the site's leaders pages, or look up any pitcher in the players section. For the broader story of pitching in the decade, the history and the Hall of Fame topic page collects articles from across the site.