Tom Glavine: The Left-Hander of the Braves Rotation

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

Tom Glavine won 305 games, two Cy Young Awards and a World Series MVP with a changeup and command of the strike zone instead of a big fastball. Here is his career in numbers, phase by phase.

Tom Glavine won 305 games without ever being the pitcher who made hitters look helpless. He struck out 2,607 batters in 4,413 and a third innings, about 5.3 per nine, a modest rate for any era and a very modest one for the years in which he pitched. What he did instead was throw strikes to the edges of the plate, change speeds, and keep the ball in play for a defense that was usually excellent. The results were two Cy Young Awards, five seasons of 20 or more wins, a World Series MVP award and election to the Hall of Fame in 2014.

The pitcher is also a useful test of how to read a career. If you want a single number, 305 is it: that is the 21st-highest win total in the historical record, and the fourth-highest among left-handers, behind Warren Spahn, Steve Carlton and Eddie Plank. If you want to understand how a man with a 5.3 strikeout rate got there, you have to follow the pitches, the teammates and the years. This article walks through his career in phases and uses the historical record through the 2025 season for every figure.

From Massachusetts to Atlanta

Glavine was born on March 25, 1966, in Concord, Massachusetts, and he was a two-sport star before he was a baseball pitcher. He was a hockey prospect good enough to be drafted by the Los Angeles Kings of the National Hockey League in 1984, and he was also drafted by the Atlanta Braves the same year. He chose baseball. He debuted for the Braves on August 17, 1987, and pitched in nine games that season, going 2-4 with a 5.54 earned run average.

The next three years were hard. In 1988 he went 7-17 with a 4.56 ERA over 195 and a third innings, in 1989 he improved to 14-8 and 3.68, and in 1990 he slipped to 10-12 and 4.28. These are the numbers of a young left-hander with a good arm and uneven command pitching for a bad team: the Braves lost 97 games in both 1989 and 1990. The 1990 season is a decent measure of the distance he traveled. He struck out 129 batters in 214 and a third innings, and the next year the strikeout total was 192.

1991: the club turns around

In 1991 the Braves went from 65-97 to 94-68 and won the National League West, the first of a run of division titles that would last through 2005. Glavine went 20-11 with a 2.55 ERA over 246 and two-thirds innings, led the league in wins (tied with John Smiley at 20), and won the Cy Young Award. He was 25. The team lost a seven-game World Series to the Minnesota Twins, but the core of the staff had arrived.

He repeated as a 20-game winner in 1992 (20-8, 2.76 ERA, tied with Greg Maddux for the league lead), and in 1993 he was 22-6 with a 3.20 ERA, which remained the most wins of his career. The Braves won 98 games in 1992 and 104 in 1993, with Maddux arriving in 1993 as a free agent to join a rotation that already included Glavine, John Smoltz and Steve Avery. Smoltz's career is the natural companion piece to this one.

The Braves' run of success is unusual enough to state in numbers. Between 1991 and 2005 they won 14 division titles in 15 seasons played, the exception being the strike-shortened 1994 season, which ended with no postseason. The historical record shows them with 94, 98, 104, 90, 96, 101, 106, 103, 95, 88, 101, 101, 96 and 90 wins in those title years. Pitching, with Glavine at the front of the rotation, was a large part of the reason.

What a changeup pitcher actually does

The pitch most associated with Glavine is the changeup. A changeup is thrown with the same arm speed as a fastball but comes out slower, so the hitter's timing is disrupted. When it works, the batter swings early and makes weak contact. It is a pitch built to induce outs on balls in play instead of strikeouts, which is exactly the profile in the record: 305 wins, a 3.54 ERA, 1,500 walks and 2,607 strikeouts.

Several numbers show how it worked. His career WHIP, the number of walks plus hits per inning pitched, is 1.31. He allowed 356 home runs in 4,413 innings, about 0.73 per nine. He completed 56 of his 682 starts and threw 25 shutouts. None of these are dominant figures, but taken together they describe a pitcher who gave up few homers and a moderate number of baserunners and who got deep into games.

Context matters, and the best way to see it is through the run environment. The league scored 4.31 runs per team game in 1991, 4.79 in 1998 and 5.14 in 2000. His ERA in those seasons was 2.55, 2.47 and 3.40. In 1998 he went 20-6 with a 2.47 ERA and won his second Cy Young Award in a year when the average major-league team scored almost five runs a game. The comparison is loose, because the team figure counts both leagues and all runs, not just earned ones, but the direction is clear: he suppressed scoring in an era when scoring was high.

Glavine was also widely credited with getting strikes on pitches just outside the plate. The claim is widely repeated and impossible to check in the historical record, which has no pitch locations. What can be said is that a pitcher who lives on the edges needs both control and a catcher who sets a good target, and the walk rate of about 3.1 per nine suggests that the control was real.

The peak in numbers

The table gives his best seasons for Atlanta. The columns are wins and losses, ERA, innings pitched and strikeouts.

He won 20 or more games in 1991, 1992, 1993, 1998 and 2000, and he led or shared the National League lead in wins in each of those five seasons. In 1993, John Burkett also won 22, and in 1991 and 1992 he shared the top spot with Smiley and Maddux. He was an All-Star ten times, in 1991, 1992, 1993, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004 and 2006.

One detail makes the table more human: he also won four Silver Slugger Awards as the best-hitting pitcher in the National League, in 1991, 1995, 1996 and 1998. His career batting line is .186/.244/.210 in 1,323 at-bats, with one home run, which is poor for a hitter and good for a pitcher. A pitcher who can bunt and put the ball in play helps a team in small ways that the historical record does not measure.

October: the 1995 World Series and the postseason record

Glavine pitched in 12 postseasons, and his playoff record is the part of his career that confuses people who look only at wins and losses. In 35 postseason starts he was 14-16 with a 3.30 ERA, 143 strikeouts and 218 and a third innings. Losing more games than he won is an accident of run support and bullpen luck, not a sign of poor pitching, and an ERA of 3.30 is close to his regular-season mark of 3.54.

The high point was 1995. The Braves, who had finished 90-54 in the shortened season, beat the Cleveland Indians four games to two in the World Series, the club's only title in the 1990s. Glavine started Game 6, pitched eight innings of one-hit ball and won 1-0, and he was named the World Series MVP. It was the Braves' first championship in Atlanta and a performance that still defines him.

The Braves reached the World Series five times with Glavine on the roster, in 1991, 1992, 1995, 1996 and 1999, and won only in 1995. The other four were losses, to Minnesota, Toronto, New York (in 1996) and New York again (in 1999). Such a record can look like failure for a team that won so often in the regular season. It is better read as the nature of short series: even the best team loses most of the time if a small number of games decide it.

The Mets years

Glavine left the Braves after the 2002 season, signing with the New York Mets as a free agent. He had won 242 games by then, all with Atlanta. The Mets were a poor team when he arrived. They lost 95 games in 2003, and Glavine went 9-14 with a 4.52 ERA, then 11-14 in 2004 and 13-13 in 2005. The 2006 Mets won the National League East with a 97-65 record and Glavine went 15-7 with a 3.82 ERA, the best of his New York seasons.

In 2007, during his fifth season in New York, he won the 300th game of his career, becoming one of the small group of pitchers to do so. He finished the year 13-8 with a 4.45 ERA, but the Mets, at 88-74, missed the postseason after finishing second, and Glavine's start in the last game of the season is remembered by Mets fans as part of the collapse. He had 303 wins when he left New York.

He returned to Atlanta for 2008 and won two more games against four losses before an injury ended his season. His last game was on August 14, 2008, and he finished with 305 wins and 203 losses, a .600 winning percentage. The Braves released him in 2009 before he could return, and he retired in 2010. He then took a role with the Braves in the front office.

A union man

Glavine was also an important figure off the field. During the 1994-95 labor dispute he was an active voice on the players' side. The strike began on August 12, 1994, ended that season and cost baseball its World Series, and the 1995 season that followed was cut to about 144 games per club. The historical record shows the Braves at 68-46 when play stopped in 1994, in second place behind Montreal in the East.

The dispute is one of the main threads of the 1990s, and Glavine's career ran straight through it. It is a reminder that the numbers in a player's file were produced under working conditions that the players themselves bargained over.

What the record leaves out

The historical record cannot answer several questions. It has no Wins Above Replacement, so it cannot say how many wins Glavine added over a replacement pitcher or compare him with Maddux on that basis. It has no Statcast measurements, so there are no spin rates, pitch speeds or locations for the changeup. It cannot show defensive support: the Braves of the 1990s had strong defenders, and a pitcher who allows many balls in play benefits from that. It has only partial coverage of the Negro Leagues, which matters less here than for older players, because Glavine pitched decades later.

The record also cannot say how much of the strike-zone story is real. Glavine's 3.54 ERA is good for his era despite the low strikeout rate, and a pitcher who gets that outcome has excellent defense, excellent control, a favorable strike zone, or some mixture. The database cannot divide the credit among them, so treat any claim about the size of each effect as an opinion.

Hall of Fame and standing

The Baseball Writers' Association elected Glavine to the Hall of Fame in 2014, his first year on the ballot, with 525 votes of 571 cast. The threshold was 429, so he cleared it with room to spare, at about 92 percent. He was elected alongside Greg Maddux and Frank Thomas, and the three were among a class of six that also included managers Bobby Cox, Tony La Russa and Joe Torre.

Maddux's historical line is 355-227 with a 3.16 ERA, four Cy Young Awards and 18 Gold Gloves. Glavine's is 305-203 and 3.54, with two Cy Young Awards. The comparison shows that Glavine was not the best pitcher of his time, even on his own team, but he was among the most durable. He pitched more than 195 innings in every season from 1991 through 2002 except the strike-shortened 1994, when he threw 165 and a third.

Common questions

How many wins did Tom Glavine have? He won 305 games and lost 203, with a 3.54 ERA. He won 244 with Atlanta and 61 with the Mets.

What pitch did he throw best? The changeup is the pitch most associated with him. Statistics from the historical record cannot show how often he threw it, but the pattern of low strikeouts and low home runs is consistent with a pitcher who relied on changing speeds.

Did he win the Cy Young Award? Yes, twice: in 1991, when he went 20-11 with a 2.55 ERA, and in 1998, when he went 20-6 with a 2.47 ERA.

Was he a good hitter? For a pitcher, he was a useful one. He won four Silver Slugger Awards, even though his career average was .186.

Is 300 wins still possible? Pitchers now work fewer innings and rely on bullpens more, and no pitcher has reached 300 since Glavine did it in 2007 and Randy Johnson in 2009. Both are on the historical list above 300 wins.

Where to go next

For the rest of the rotation, read John Smoltz: Starter, Closer, Starter Again. For a pitcher who built a career on a single pitch from the bullpen, read Trevor Hoffman, the changeup closer. Two other players from the same era are in Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell. For the numbers behind the careers, the career leaders and player pages hold the full tables.