Juan Marichal: The High Leg Kick and Consistent Excellence

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 11 min read

Juan Marichal's career in numbers: 243 wins, a 2.89 ERA, 244 complete games and the most victories of any pitcher in the 1960s, plus the bat incident, the late decline and the Hall of Fame wait.

Juan Marichal won 243 games, lost 142, and posted a 2.89 earned run average over 3,507 and one-third innings. Those are Hall of Fame numbers. They also hide the most unusual thing about his career: for a stretch of seven seasons, from 1963 through 1969, he was as hard to hit and as hard to beat as any pitcher alive, and he did it in an era that also contained Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson and Don Drysdale. In the 1960s, the decade in which he pitched most of his career, no one won more games than Marichal's 191.

He was the first player born in the Dominican Republic to be elected to the Hall of Fame, a point that matters beyond the plaque. Marichal came out of a small town in Monte Cristi province, pitched for the San Francisco Giants for 14 seasons and became a model for the long line of Dominican pitchers and hitters who followed. His high leg kick, in which his front foot rose almost to the level of his head before he threw, is one of the most recognizable deliveries in the history of the sport. The control that went with it was more remarkable still.

This article follows the career in phases, using the historical record for every figure, and says plainly what that database cannot tell you.

Origins: Laguna Verde and the road to San Francisco

Marichal was born on October 20, 1937, in Laguna Verde, in Monte Cristi province in the northwest of the Dominican Republic. The historical record lists him at 72 inches and 185 pounds, a right-hander who also batted right. He was not a large man by the standards of power pitchers, and he did not throw the hardest fastball in the league, though that fastball was good. What set him apart was a combination of command and variety. He could throw the ball from different arm angles, from overhand to sidearm, and he threw a fastball, a curve, a slider and a screwball with a steady tempo that left hitters guessing.

He made his way through the Giants' minor-league system and arrived in the majors on July 19, 1960. The historical record of his first season is 11 games, six wins and two losses, a 2.66 ERA and 58 strikeouts in 81 and one-third innings. Those are the numbers of a promising rookie. They do not convey how the debut was remembered: a one-hit shutout in his first game, an announcement of arrival that lives in game accounts and newspaper archives rather than in the historical record, which gives only season totals.

The Giants he joined were a team with one of the best young cores in the NL: Willie Mays, Willie McCovey and Orlando Cepeda, with Gaylord Perry arriving two years later. The pitching staff had few established stars, which meant that Marichal's early starts were a sizeable share of the innings. In 1961 he went 13-10 with a 3.89 ERA in 185 innings. In 1962, at 24, he was 18-11 with a 3.36 ERA in 262 and two-thirds innings and made the first of his All-Star teams. That was also the Giants' pennant year. His postseason record is tiny: the historical record gives him two starts across two postseasons, 12 innings with 10 strikeouts and a 1.50 ERA, and an 0-1 record, a reminder that a won-lost line is a poor guide to how well a pitcher threw.

The peak: 1963 to 1969

The seven seasons from 1963 through 1969 are one of the great sustained runs of the postwar period. Here is the line, year by year, from the historical data:

Add those seven rows together and you get 154 wins against 65 losses, 2,021 innings and 1,505 strikeouts. He averaged almost 289 innings a season, which is a figure modern starters do not approach. In that stretch the next-best total, Bob Gibson's, was 133. Over the whole of the decade, from 1960 through 1969, Marichal won 191 games and completed 197 of his starts, both marks the highest of any pitcher in the major leagues.

To see what the ERA numbers meant, put them beside the league. The National League as a whole had an ERA of 3.29 in 1963, 3.54 in 1965, 3.60 in 1966, 2.99 in 1968 and 3.60 in 1969, according to the team totals in the historical record. Marichal's 2.13 in 1965 was about 40 percent lower than the league's 3.54, and his 2.10 in 1969 was about 42 percent lower than the league's 3.60, before any adjustment for his home park. Candlestick Park, windy and cold, probably helped a pitcher, but so did a tight command of the strike zone, and he walked few batters. In 1963 he tied Koufax for the NL lead in wins with 25, and in 1968 he led the league outright with 26.

The handful of games that built the legend are well documented outside the historical data. The historical record does not carry individual games, but historians agree on a few. In 1963 he threw a no-hitter against Houston. On July 2 of that year he and Warren Spahn of the Milwaukee Braves each pitched through 15 scoreless innings at Candlestick, and Marichal, who threw well over 200 pitches before it ended, won it when Willie Mays hit a home run in the 16th. The number of pitches that day, usually given as 227, is the sort of workload that would not be asked of a modern starter, and it was not unusual then to see a manager send his ace back to the mound with the game still tied.

What the numbers meant in 1960s baseball

It helps to know what the sport looked like. In 1968, the National League's earned run average was 2.99, with only 3.43 runs scored per team per game. The mound was 15 inches high, the strike zone was generous, and pitchers threw complete games as a matter of course. After 1968, the sport lowered the mound and tightened the zone, which is covered in the 1969 reforms and in the expansion era and the Year of the Pitcher.

Against that backdrop Marichal's 2.43 ERA in 1968 looks good but not historic, and in fact it was overshadowed by Gibson's, which was far lower. That is part of the reason Marichal's reputation sometimes lags his record. He pitched in the same league as Koufax, who won the Cy Young Award in 1963, 1965 and 1966, and in 1968 as Gibson. The Cy Young Award was a single award for both leagues through 1966, and splitting it by league began in 1967, when his teammate Mike McCormick won the NL version. Marichal never won it. In an age of one award for the entire majors, a pitcher with a 25-6 record had to be better than the best pitcher in the other league and his own, and that was a hard ask.

His complete-game numbers are the clearest sign of how pitchers were used. Over a career he started 457 games and completed 244 of them, more than half, and 52 of those were shutouts. Those are marks that will not be matched in the modern game, partly because of the way teams use pitch counts and bullpens. To compare an ERA from 1965 with one from today, adjust for the league and park, as explained in ERA and ERA+.

Control as the signature skill

Marichal's walks and strikeouts tell the story of a pitcher who threw strikes. Over 3,507 and one-third innings he issued 709 walks, or 1.82 per nine innings, and struck out 2,303, or 5.91 per nine, which works out to roughly 3.25 strikeouts for every walk. His WHIP, walks plus hits per inning pitched, was 1.10 for his career.

The strikeout rate looks modest to a modern reader, and that is worth a moment. In the 1960s strikeouts were less common than they are now, and a rate near six per nine was solid without being elite. The highest rates in the league belonged to power pitchers like Koufax and Gibson, who struck out batters at a much higher clip. Marichal's game was command more than power. To understand how rates have moved since, see the article on strikeout and walk rates.

Home runs were the weakness that came with the style. Marichal allowed 320 over his career, roughly 0.82 per nine innings. For a pitcher who threw strikes with few overpowering pitches, that is a fair price, and the fact that half his games were played in cold, windy Candlestick Park may have helped. The database cannot tell you how much, because it has no park-adjusted figures for individual games or pitch locations.

August 1965: the bat

No honest account of Marichal can skip August 22, 1965. In a game between the Giants and the Dodgers at Candlestick Park, with the two clubs locked in a tight pennant race, Marichal came to bat against Koufax. The Dodgers' catcher, Johnny Roseboro, threw back to the mound in a way that Marichal felt came too close to his head. Marichal hit Roseboro on the head with his bat. A brawl followed, and Roseboro was left bleeding. The NL president suspended Marichal for eight days and fined him $1,750. The suspension cost him roughly two starts during a pennant race the Giants lost by two games.

The incident has shaped how many people remember him, and it is part of the reason that some observers have linked his delayed election to the Hall of Fame to that moment, although no voter ever said so on the record. The two men later made peace. Roseboro later forgave him publicly, and the two became friends. The incident is a reminder that a career can be defined in an instant by something that no statistic records. It is also a reminder not to judge a player only by his worst moment. The same season he was named the Most Valuable Player of the All-Star Game, the one individual award in the historical record of his career, and he finished 22-13 with a 2.13 ERA.

The decline: 1970 to 1973

After 1969 the numbers changed. In 1970 Marichal went 12-10 with a 4.12 ERA, and his strikeouts fell to 123 from 205 the year before. He rebounded in 1971, with 18 wins and a 2.94 ERA in 279 innings, and made his last All-Star team. The league's ERA in 1970 was 4.05, so the 4.12 was about average for the time, which is a long way from the 2.10 of the season before. It was the sharpest change of his career.

The next two years were worse. In 1972 he went 6-16 with a 3.71 ERA in 165 innings and 72 strikeouts, and in 1973 he went 11-15 with a 3.82 ERA. The historical record cannot say why. It does not record injuries, treatments or the reasons for a pitcher's decline. Accounts from the time speak of physical problems and wear, the usual toll of heavy workloads, and any claim beyond that would be a guess. The numbers simply show that the same pitcher who had averaged almost 289 innings a year from 1963 through 1969 was done as an ace by 1972.

The Giants sold him to the Boston Red Sox after the 1973 season. In 1974 he pitched 11 games for Boston, going 5-1 with a 4.87 ERA in 57 and one-third innings. He signed with the Dodgers, of all clubs, for 1975 and made two appearances: an 0-1 record and a 13.50 ERA in six innings. His final game was on April 16, 1975. His line at the end of the career: 243 wins, 142 losses, a .631 winning percentage, 471 games, 457 starts, 244 complete games, 52 shutouts, 2 saves, 320 home runs allowed.

Hall of Fame and after baseball

Marichal first appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot in 1981. He received 233 of 401 votes that year, short of the 301 needed. In 1982 he received 305 of 415, which was seven short of the 312 needed for election. In 1983 he got 313 votes of 374 cast, well above the 281 required, and was elected. He went in that year along with Brooks Robinson. Election on the third ballot is not a long wait, but for a pitcher with a 243-142 record and seven consecutive seasons like the ones in the table above, it was a notable delay, and the argument over whether the 1965 incident caused it has never been settled. For the rules governing such votes, see how Hall of Fame voting works.

After baseball Marichal remained a public figure in the Dominican Republic and in the Bay Area. He held a government post as the Dominican Republic's minister of sports. Readers who want to set him beside the other great starters of the period will find profiles of Tom Seaver, Steve Carlton, Bob Gibson, Nolan Ryan and Sandy Koufax on this site.

What the historical record cannot tell you

Several limits apply to any account that depends on the historical record. It has no WAR, so it cannot rank Marichal against pitchers of other eras on a single scale. It has no Statcast, so it says nothing about the velocity of his fastball or the movement on his screwball. It lacks the pitch counts that would show how many pitches he threw in the 16-inning game against Spahn, and it does not list no-hitters. And Negro Leagues coverage is partial. For the years 1920 to 1948 it includes those leagues' statistics as major-league data, and the coverage is partial, which matters when you compare Marichal with pitchers from earlier eras.

What the data can do is show the shape of the career. Marichal's ERA stayed under 2.50 in six of his seasons, his innings pitched exceeded 260 in eight, and his wins reached 20 in six. The pattern holds across a decade, which is the best argument for his greatness: not one extraordinary year but a long run of excellent ones. The league leaders pages let you rank any pitcher in a given season against his peers, which is the best way to test a claim like that for yourself.

Common questions

Did Juan Marichal ever win a Cy Young Award? No. He finished with a 25-8 season in 1963 and a 25-6 season in 1966, but Koufax won the award in both years, and in 1968 Gibson's season overshadowed his 26 wins. His teammate Mike McCormick won the NL award in 1967.

How many times was Marichal an All-Star? The historical record lists nine selections: 1962 through 1969 and 1971. He was also the 1965 All-Star Game MVP.

What was Marichal's best season? The data supports several choices. His 25-6 record and 2.23 ERA in 1966 and his 26-9 mark in 1968 gave him the most wins, while his 2.10 ERA in 1969 and 2.13 ERA in 1965 were the best of his career. In 1963 he threw 321 and one-third innings and struck out 248, the most strikeouts of his career.

Why did his career end so early? The historical record shows the numbers, not the reasons. His ERA rose in 1970, he lost 16 games in 1972, and he was gone by 1975 at age 37. Accounts at the time point to the toll of a heavy workload, but the record does not settle it.

Who was the first Dominican in the Hall of Fame? Marichal, elected in 1983.

Where to go next

For other pitchers of his era, read the profiles of Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson. To see how he fits among the Giants, see the Giants franchise history, and for current rankings visit the players section.