How I Got To “Know” Tom Filer

For the first time since joining Seamheads, I did not spend the week formulating my Saturday appearance on the site. Typically, I take a few ideas and play with them early in the week before narrowing the choices down to one or two. After research I settle on the one I feel Seamheads’ readers will be most interested in and write it up. This week was different.

Originally, I planned to continue my Theme team trend and tie it into my personal experience with my north of the border vacation to Niagara Falls and detour to a Blue Jays game on Wednesday for my first visit to the Rogers Centre (formerly the Sky Dome). After some consideration to an All-Canadian born theme team and a general feeling the idea of theme teams might be a bit played after three consecutive weeks, it was on to Plan B.

On Thursday, the decision was made to make a stop off at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown on the way home on Friday and knock off one of the many items on my own personal baseball bucket list. At that point, I made up my mind — a day at the Hall of Fame will surely fill up an article.

After a few hours at the Hall of Fame, any idea I came up with required a decent amount of research and with a four and a half hour ride ahead of me before finally getting home, there was little chance that anything pertaining to the Hall was going to happen — other than a fluff piece on how much I enjoyed my abbreviated first stop at Cooperstown.

Fortunately, I was a passenger on the ride home and was able to follow Friday’s baseball action on my Blackberry. As I did, I took notes of some things I wanted to look at on baseball-reference.com’s Play Index based on some of Friday’s results. With C.C. Sabathia catching fire and the Indians winning their fourth consecutive game when he takes the hill, it made me wonder what the longest streak of that kind was which solved two things:

1. It led me to this week’s topic.

2. It pushed the burning question of why a right fielder was never named in Abbott & Costello’s “Who’s On First?” routine right out of my head.

Unfortunately, baseball-reference’s Play Index only goes back to 1956 but I found 10 pitchers with 16 or more consecutive team wins when they started a game since ’56. Here’s the list of those 10 pitchers:

20 – Roger Clemens, New York Yankees (May 26, 2001 – Sept. 19, 2001)
19 – Aaron Sele, Seattle Mariners (Sept. 5, 2000 – June 12, 2001)
19 – Tom Filer, Cubs/Blue Jays/Brewers (June 23, 1982 – June 14, 1988)
18 – Chuck Finley, Anaheim Angels (July 1, 1997 – May 2, 1998)
17 – Chris Carpenter, St. Louis Cardinals (June 14, 2005 – Sept. 13, 2005)
17 – Brian Anderson, Arizona Diamondbacks (July 24, 1999 – May 23, 2000)
17 – Whitey Ford, New York Yankees (June 2, 1961 – Aug. 10, 1961)
16 – Randy Johnson, Seattle Mariners (Aug. 11, 1995 – April 26, 1996)
16 – La Marr Hoyt, Chicago White Sox (July 27, 1983 – April 10, 1984)
16 – Ron Guidry, New York Yankees (April 13, 1978 – July 2, 1978)

Tom Filer? TOM FILER??? There’s a Hall of Famer, six Cy Young Award winners, seven postseason game winners, eight former All-Stars and Tom Filer on this list. Not only is Tom Filer an oddity, his streak spanned nearly six years and three different teams:

1982

Filer, a right-handed pitcher from Philadelphia, finally made it to the Major Leagues with the Chicago Cubs. After being signed as an amateur free agent in 1978 by the New York Yankees and drafted and returned to the Yankees by the Oakland A’s in the 1980 Rule 5 draft, the Yankees traded Filer to the Cubs for Barry Foote in 1981.

On June 8, 1982, he made his Major League debut in his hometown of Philadelphia and was the losing pitcher in a 5-2 loss to the Phillies. The Cubs also lost his next two starts against the Expos before finally winning a game where Filer was the starter in a 6-5 win over the Pirates on June 23 where Filer got a no decision. Filer was roughed up in his next start but the Cubs made a comeback and beat the Pirates again, 6-4.

On July 3, Filer notched his first Major League win — his only win in a Cubs uniform — when the Cubs beat the Cardinals 2 to 1 behind Filer’s seven shutout innings. Filer struggled in his next two starts but the Cubs found a way to win and Filer returned to the Minors with a 1-2 record and a 5.53 ERA despite the Cubs winning in his last five starts.

1983-1984

Filer never made it back to the Major League roster with the Chicago Cubs over the next two seasons and at the end of the 1984 season was granted free agency. In late November, Filer signed with the Toronto Blue Jays organization and was invited to Spring Training for the 1985 season.

1985

The 28-year-old righty failed to make the Major League roster out of Spring Training but joined the team mid-season and made his first start on July 9 against the Mariners. Filer went just 3 1/3 innings and gave up one run on five hits and four walks but the Jays won 9-4. Then, Filer won his next seven starts extending his streak to 13. After a three-up, three-down first on August 27, Filer left with an injury but the Jays won 8-0 over the Twins. Filer made two more appearances as a reliever that season in losses by the Blue Jays but finished 7-0 with a 3.88 ERA and played an important role in helping the Blue Jays to an AL Eastern Division title, although he never appeared in a postseason game in their seven-game series against the Royals.

1986-1987

Filer had a decent shot of making the Blue Jays roster in 1986 but was sidelined by the injury that nagged him at the end of the ’85 season. By June, the decision was made for Filer to have surgery that would require him to miss the entire 1986 season, and Filer was unable to play his way back to the Blue Jays roster in 1987. With some glimpses of hope in the Minors in ‘87, the Milwaukee Brewers purchased Filer’s contract from the Blue Jays a few months before his 31 ^st birthday, thus finishing his Major League career with the Blue Jays with a 7-0 record.

1988

Finally, Filer would get an opportunity to continue his unusual streak of team wins when starting. He joined the Brewers Major League roster in May and made his first start — a complete game shutout — on May 24 against the Detroit Tigers. Filer followed that with three more wins in four starts and the Brewers won all five games he started, extending the streak to 19 and, at the time, the longest streak of its kind since 1956. Filer’s streak finally ended on June 19, 1988 — six years and one day after his last loss as a starter — when the Brewers lost 5-0 to the Chicago White Sox. Filer did go six innings in the loss and gave up three runs on eight hits and a walk.

POST-STREAK

Filer finished the 1988 season with a 5-8 record after starting out the season 4-0 with a 1.80 ERA in five starts. His ERA ballooned to 4.43 after Filer went 0-4 with a 5.97 ERA in his last seven starts of the season.

In 1989, Filer started the season in the Minors but was a call-up in July and went 7-3 with a 3.61 ERA in 13 starts to wrap up the season. At the beginning of the 1990 season, the 33-year-old Filer began the season with the Brewers in the bullpen but found his way back into the rotation and went 2-0 before landing on the disabled list. Upon his return from the DL, Filer struggled with recurring shoulder problems and was sent down. He finished the ’90 season with a 2-3 record and a 6.14 ERA inflated by his last outing where he gave up nine earned runs in 3 1/3 innings.

At the end of the 1990 season, the Brewers released Filer and he signed with the New York Mets. Filer did not make it back to the Majors in 1991 but did get one last stop with the Mets in 1992. As a Met, Filer went 0-1 with a 2.05 ERA in nine games and only made one start from July 4 to August 7.

Filer retired from baseball and began coaching in 1994. He spent nine years as a pitching coach at various levels in the Yankees system before becoming the pitching coach of Triple-A Syracuse in the Toronto organization in 2003. In 2004, Filer joined the Phillies organization and has been the pitching coach of the Double-A Reading Phillies since 2005.

A little more interesting than a recap of a trip to the Hall of Fame or a stale theme team, I hope.