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Kansas City Star and Sports Illustrated sports columnist Joe Posnanski offers some statistics and thoughts on what it takes to be a 300-game winner in major league baseball.

The 300 mark is considered pretty much the tiptop of achievement for modern pitchers, given the increasing use of relief pitchers, which tends to trim the win counts, and the five-man rotation, which limits the number of appearances. Warren Spahn's 363 wins is tops among pitchers of the modern era, and even Spahn is left looking way way up at the peaks represented by legends like Cy Young and Christy Mathewson (Not to mention the immortal Pod Galvin, who was the first pitcher to ever reach the 300 mark, in 1888. Rumor has it the Washington Nationals are interested in conducting a seance in order to give him a look). Tom Glavine's 305 wins (the chart at Baseball Almanac needs a little updating) is tops among active pitchers. If he finishes out his rehab well, he could add to that total. He'd have to win 20 games a year for three years to catch Spahn, when he'd be 46.

Massive win totals like Young's 511 or Walter Johnson's 417 occurred during the so-called "dead-ball" era, which heavily favored pitchers. At 20 wins a season, Glavine would be 48 before he caught Johnson and 53 before he matched Young. Not likely, unless he figured out the perfect way to combine Phil Niekro's knuckleball, Gaylord Perry's spitter and Roger Clemens' training regimen.

Posnanski's number games show that the pitchers who reach 300 wins were not necessarily those who started out winning large numbers of games. By the time he was 25, Dwight "Doctor K" Gooden had won 119 games. But injuries, drug problems and legal issues dogged him, and in the 11 years following, he only won 75 games to finish six games shy of 200 wins, let alone 300.

The key to winning 300 is success in pitching after a player turns 35, according to the numbers. Which buttresses any number of sports clichés that follow along the lines of "It ain't how you start, it's how you finish." Randy Johnson should earn win No. 300 in the next few weeks and after him, Philadelphia's Jamie Moyer has a shot sometime in 2011 if he stays healthy and manages at least 17 wins a season. I'm rooting for them both; they're the rare major leaguers actually older than me so I want to see them do good.

And Moyer is a good example of Posnanski's findings; he has double-digit win totals only twice in the first ten years of his career (1987 and 1993). By the time he was 25, he had played only three seasons and had 28 wins. The next few years featured a two-win season with the Rangers (1990), a no-win season with the Cardinals (1991) and a no-play-at-all season (1992). But between the ages of 34-40, Moyer earned 113 wins and had two 20-win seasons (2001 and 2003).

Hey. It ain't how you start, it's how you finish.