100 Greatest Phillies: 72 – Jimmy Ring

Jimmy Ring
Starting Pitcher
1921-1925, 1928

Career w/Phillies: 1499 IP / 68-98 / 4.34 ERA / 553 K

Jimmy Ring might have had a 4.34 ERA, but at the start of the live-ball era, this ERA wasn’t so bad after all. In fact, Ring was better than a league-average pitcher through his entire Phillies career, only slipping up when he returned to Philadelphia for a one-year coffee break in 1928. Then he lost 17 games, and overall he lost a wealth of games for the Phils. But don’t be fooled – Ring played for some of the worst Phillies teams of all time. The Phils acquired him from Cincinnati, by dealing a young pitcher named Eppa Rixey to the Reds. Oops.

Comment: Ring is another of those better-than-average pitchers that are pretty scarce in Phillies history. Though he lost a lot of games, he was never too bad an arm. He’s just a product of a hitter-friendly era, and a player of a really, really bad baseball team.

Tim Malcolm

Tim first found the Phillies as a little infant at Veteran’s Stadium, cheering on a Juan Samuel game-winning home run in his very first game. With the pinstripes in his blood, he witnessed Terry Mulholland’s 1990 no-hitter, “Steve Carlton Night” at the Vet, game three of the 1993 World Series, countless games during the charmed 2008 championship season and various road excursions. Since November 2007 Tim’s been writing about them daily at Phillies Nation, becoming one of the world’s most popular Phillies scribes. You can catch him on Twitter and Facebook, as well. When he’s not talking about the Phils he’s relaxing with a St. Bernardus ABT 12 or one of his many favored brews.