Randy Wells has made five starts, never giving up more than three runs and lasting at least five innings each time out. Yet, he has not earned a single win. That tells you something about the utility of Wins as a pitching stat.

Anyone else go through such a streak? Yep, as a matter of fact, even another Cub.

I used Baseball Reference’s Play Index tool to find streaks that are similar to Wells’:

Longest Streak with W=0, ER<=3 From 1954 to 2009, Playing for CHC, as Starter, To start the season

You can find the report here, but what I’m using is whittled down with these additional criteria:

• Minimum 5 IP per start
• Starts must be consecutive without relief appearances in between or before the streak

One other Cubs pitcher had such a streak, back in September of 1988, shortly after the lights were turned on at Wrigley Field.

If you view the full report, you can see lots of other pitchers who passed the initial filters. I stopped checking after streaks of four to find qualifiers based on the second filter.

Harkey would go on to finish 5th in the Rookie of the Year voting in 1990. His strong, but winless, September call-up turned into 27 starts and 12 wins in his official rookie campaign.

After that, well, Harkey made just 11 starts in 1991 and 1992 combined. When I moved to Chicago, in 1993, Harkey was back on the bump for 28 starts. It was his final year as a Cub, and the first of three straight years with an ERA over five. Harkey left for Colorado as a free agent, where his bloated ERA fit right in.

In case you’re wondering, Mike Harkey isn’t the only point of comparison we have for Wells’ streak. Same report, all teams, same manually applied filter for the second pass.

The “record” holders:

The tie for fourth place:

• Bob Veale’s streak started with a 12 inning no-decision, which was followed by an 8.2 inning complete game loss.
• Fritz Peterson, of the ‘72 Yankees, got truly hosed, losing all five decisions.
• Bill Laskey, Cal Eldred, Veale, Kevin Appier and Mark Langston match Wells with a sub-2.00 ERA.
• Rick Krivda’s 3.90 is the highest ERA of the entire group.

Wells doesn’t want to go any further up this list, so hopefully he’ll keep pitching like this until the bullpen and offense catch-up.