Jayson Stark on JJ and The More Homers Than Losses Club

Nevermind the fact that he had a career .167 slugging percentage (4 doubles) going into the season.  At 11-2 with 3 homers and maybe 10 more starts to go, the question is whether he can make it stick.

Besides being the official Best Pitcher in Baseball Whom Nobody Would Recognize if He Sat Next to Them at a Diner, Marlins ace Josh Johnson can also swing that Louisville Slugger.

And because of that spectacular multi-tasking acumen of his, he has put himself on the verge of entering one of the most fun baseball clubs ever invented -- the More Homers than Losses Club.

OK, so Three Strikes just invented that club about 30 seconds ago. But it's still one fun group.

Johnson is 11-2 on the mound this season. But the really big news is that he also hit his third homer of the year last week. So if you're calculating along at home, you'll see that really is more homers (3) than losses (2).

The Three Strikes Research Task Force spent way too long this week looking at all starting pitchers in the live-ball era who pitched 150 innings or more in a season to see how many of them had more homers than losses. And here's what that task force discovered:

If Josh Johnson can just keep going deep, or -- if that home-run-trot part of the act isn't working for him -- keep from losing for another couple of months, he would become only the third full-time starting pitcher since 1920 to enter that prestigious MHRTL Club.

The last man to do it: Don Newcombe in 1955 (7 homers, 5 losses).

The previous man to do it: Art Nehf in 1924 (5 homers, 4 losses).

And that's it. No Mike Hampton. No Carlos Zambrano. No Don Drysdale. No Wes Ferrell. They came. They pitched. They swatted up a storm. And it still wasn't enough to get them into the More Homers than Losses Club. You can look them all up.

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