Baseball's a funny old game. You can toil away at it with fair-to-middling and totally acceptable results for season after season and then, BOOM! - everything comes together like it has in the 1975 Eclipse League season for Cleveland's
Andy "Pullman" Porter.
Born in Little Rock AR in 1911, Andy spent 15 seasons in the NeL from the early 1930s thru the late 1940s, almost exclusively for the various iterations of the Elite Giants franchise that is most closely aligned with Baltimore, but was based in Columbus, Nashville and Washington prior to that. His was a career in three acts, really - an early stint with these proto-EGs, a three year sojourn in the Mexican Leagues with some time also spent in the Cuban Winter League, then back to Baltimore and the NeL during the pre- and WW2 years.
Seamheads allots him a career 81-75 record and an ERA+ of 110, with 43 of those wins coming in NeL games. With his MLEs, Eric Chalek extrapolates that to a 26 pWAR career with 178 wins.
Andy lived to the ripe old age of 99.
In the EL, the Red Sox drafted Andy 237th overall in the 1968 Inaugural Draft, and he stayed in Memphis thru 1971, going 59-70 and never really hitting any great heights. He was traded in the 1971 offseason to the ABCs and spent just the 1972 year with the ABCs (winning a TL ring with the Clowns) before signing as a FA with Cleveland in '73.
His improvement since joining the Buckeyes has been nothing short of remarkable, the sort of transformation that makes GMs lose both sleep and gainful employment. He joined Cleveland a 63-72 pitcher with an ERA+ under 90. As a Buckeye in 1973-74, he went 36-25 with nearly 10 pWAR and was a member of the '73 Championship squad.
This, it seems, was just the opening act for 1975. At the time of writing, Andy sits at a stunning 20-2 - three wins more than any other pitcher - with an EL-best ERA of 2.45. He, ShoTime and the "Pride of Havana" Dolph Luque give the Bucks arguably the best 1-2-3 pitching combo in the EL, and have been a major reason why Cleveland has utterly dominated the WC National to this point, with a 79-37 record that leaves them nearly 20 games clear and almost guaranteed of another playoff run. Andy has also earned his second All-Star appearance and notched his 1000th career strikeout in the EL.
His contract with the Bucks runs out after this season, and I'll be very interested to see what they do with him now that his stocks have risen astronomically.