Sports and Torts: Hall of Famer Jim Palmer

In 1990, Jim Palmer was accorded baseball\'s highest honor by his election into the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. He received 92.6% of the 444 ballots cast by eligible members of the Baseball Writers Association of America. Of the eight pitchers elected in their first year of eligibility, Jim received the third highest percentage of votes. Jim Palmer is the only American League Hall of Fame pitcher to win the Cy Young Award three times as well as four Gold Glove Awards

Jim Palmer

James Alvin "Jim" Palmer (born October 15, 1945) is a retired American right-handed pitcher who played all of his 19 years in Major League Baseball (MLB) with the Baltimore Orioles (1965–1967, 1969–1984) and was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1990. Palmer was the winning pitcher in 186 games in the 1970s, the most wins in that decade by any MLB pitcher. He also won at least twenty games in each of eight seasons and received three Cy Young Awards and four Gold Gloves during the decade. His 268 career victories are currently an Orioles record. A six-time American League (AL) All-Star, he was also one of the rare pitchers who never allowed a grand slam in any major league contest.

Palmer appeared in the postseason eight times and was a vital member of three World Series Champions, six AL pennant winners and seven Eastern Division titleholders. He is the only pitcher in the history of the Fall Classic with a win in each of three decades. He was also the youngest to pitch a shutout in a World Series at age 20 in 1966. He was one of the starters on the last rotation to feature four 20-game winners in a single season in 1971.

Since his retirement as an active player in 1984, Palmer has worked as a color commentator on telecasts of MLB games for ABC and ESPN and for the Orioles on Home Team Sports (HTS), Comcast SportsNet (CSN) Mid-Atlantic and the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN). He has also been a popular spokesman, most famously for Jockey International for almost twenty years. He was nicknamed Cakes in the 1960s because of his habit of eating pancakes for breakfast on the days he pitched

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