Jesse Orosco pitched yesterday, and set a record.

Of course, Jesse Orosco sets a record every time he pitches.

Most games pitched, career Jesse Orosco - 1,137 ... and counting.

It's tempting to think that Jesse Orosco, who will be 45 years old on April 21, is still pitching in the major leagues because he throws with his left hand, and in fact that is exactly why Jesse Orosco is still pitching in the major leagues.

That said, it takes a lot more than a left arm to pitch in the majors when you're 45 years old. If that was all it took, everybody nicknamed "Lefty" would be doing it. And how many are? One. Jesse Orosco. How many have, before Orosco? None. That's right, he's the first man his age to last so long in the majors because of a specific ability to retire left-handed hitters.

There have, of course, been a few pitchers as old as Orosco, who's about to become the 14th 45-year-old pitcher in major-league history (technically, we're considering seasonal age only, which means all pitchers who turned 45 before July 1). The other thirteen?

                 Ages   Innings  
Phil Niekro     45-48     785    Knuckleballer
Jack Quinn      45-49     418    Spitballer
Charlie Hough   45-46     318    Knuckleballer
Satchel Paige   45-46     258    Methuselah
Tommy John      45-46     240    Young Elbow 
Nolan Ryan      45-46     224    Freak of Nature
Hoyt Wilhelm    45-48     205    Knuckleballer
Hod Lisenbee       46      80    Wartime Stopgap
Ted Lyons          45      43    Knuckleballer
Buck Newsom        45      39    Pro Pitcher            
Fred Johnson       45      14    Mystery Man       
Kaiser Wilhelm     47       8    Summoned self?
Nick Altrock       47       2    Crowd-pleaser         

The names at the top of the list do not, I think, demand elaboration (though I should probably mention that Satchel Paige also pitched three shutout innings in 1965, when he was something like 59 years old). Some of the names at the bottom, on the other hand, were a surprise, so I it's worth taking a closer look at them.

Hod Lisenbee's 80 innings came in 1945 for the Cincinnati Reds; that same season, the Reds employed 40-year-old Boom-Boom Beck and 43-year-old Guy Bush. The year before, the Reds had given 15-year-old Joe Nuxhall a one-inning tryout. Yes, those were strange times.

Ted Lyons, the greatest pitcher in White Sox history, could have gone out on a wonderful note. In 1942, the 41-year-old Lyons started 20 games, completed all 20 games, and won 14 of them. Despite his advanced age, Lyons enlisted in the Navy and spent the next three seasons wearing a different kind of uniform. He came back in 1946 and completed all five of his starts, but went just 1-4 (despite a 2.30 ERA) before retiring for good.

Buck Newsom was a bit like Mike Morgan, peripatetic to an almost absurd degree. But whereas Morgan has pitched for a dozen teams and only one of them more than once, Newsom pitched for nine teams and four of them more than once. Newsom was a better pitcher than Morgan, but he was harder to get along with. The all-time champ-eens of the Bobo Newsom Sweepstakes were the Washington Senators, who employed Newsom five different times.

The last of those came in 1952. Newsom had pitched a few games for the New York Giants in 1948, but he turned 41 that season, and after the Giants released him, nobody else called. So Newsom did what a lot of old ballplayers did back in those days: he went to the minors; specifically, the Senators' farm club in Chattanooga. In Newsom's two seasons there, he led the Southern Association in earned runs allowed, which even then wasn't exactly the point of the game.

But in 1951 he joined the Red Sox's Birmingham club in the same league, and won 16 games with a 3.07 ERA that ranked fourth in the league. And so in 1952, at the ripe old age of 44, Buck Newsom was back in the majors, again with Washington. He struggled in 10 games and was passed along to the Philadelphia Athletics. Newsom did better for the A's, and got invited back for 1953. And in September of '53, just a few weeks after his 46th birthday, Newsom beat the Tigers for his 211th victory, the last of his career. Like Orosco, Newsom played in four different decades.

(By the way, one could write one hell of an interesting book about Buck Newsom. I don't know that more than a few hundred people would read it, but I'd be one of them.)

If there's a Fred Johnson expert reading this, I'd love to hear from you. Because about all I know about "Cactus" Johnson is that after going 0-2 for the New York Giants in 1922 and then 2-0 in 1923, he went missing from the majors for 15 years before coming back with the St. Louis Browns in 1938. He got hammered that season, posting a 5.61 ERA, but that was actually better than the team ERA (5.80), so Johnson got invited back for another season. It may also have helped that nobody knew how old he actually was; until a few years ago, Johnson was thought to have been born in 1897, rather than 1894. He didn't last long in '39, though, and was apparently dumped after posting a 6.43 ERA in five games. He returned to the minors for two more seasons and was 47 when he pitched his last professional game. He won only five games in the major leagues, but 252 in the minors.

Looking at Kaiser Wilhelm in the encyclopedia, one wonders why on earth he would have been pitching for the Philadelphia Phillies in 1921. After all, in a six-season major-league career that began in 1903 and ended in 1910, Wilhelm went 44-88, and in only one full season might did he pitch well ... and that was 13 years earlier, in 1908. (In 1914, Wilhelm did go 12-17 in the Federal League, which is considered a "major" league but really wasn't.)

It doesn't make sense ... until you find out that Wilhelm managed the Phillies for nearly two months that season. As David Jordan tells the story in his new book, Occasional Glory: The History of the Philadelphia Phillies, in early August of 1921, Phillies owner Bill Baker sent manager Bill Donovan on a "scouting trip." With Donovan safely out of town, Baker fired him and hired coach Kaiser Wilhelm as manager. Now, I don't know if all four of Wilhelm's relief appearances that season were at his own behest, but it certainly would make sense. It's worth noting, though, that he managed the entire 1922 season (after which he was fired) without once summoning himself from the bullpen.

Nick Altrock wasn't really a pitcher; rather, he was a clown, and I mean that almost literally. In 1924, he pitched only two innings, but 20 years earlier he'd been a star. From 1904 through 1906, Altrock went 62-39 for the Chicago White Sox, and posted the lowest ERA in the 1906 World Series as the Sox knocked off the heavily-favored Cubs. That wasn't the end of Altrock's career as a pitcher, but it was certainly the end of his career as a good pitcher. He hurt his arm not long afterward and won only 14 games over the rest of his career.

It was a long career, though. He joined the Washington club as a coach in 1912, and became famous around the American League for his antics in the coaching box (at that time, coaches were expected to help entertain the crowd). He also occasionally took the mound as a stunt: once each in 1912, 1913, 1914 and 1915, five times in 1918 (when he actually won a game and lost two), once in 1919 ... and finally, one last time in 1924.

(Altrock wasn't quite finished as a player, though. He batted once in three different seasons, the last of those appearances coming on the final day of the 1933 season, when he was 57 years and 16 days old.)

And now we've got Jesse Orosco, who seems to get younger every day. Wednesday, he recorded four outs, more outs than he'd gotten in a game since September 9, 1999, 45 outings ago. And just last week, he scored his first run since 1986!

The next time you have a chance to watch Jesse Orosco pitch, do it. Because there haven't been many like him, and there won't be many more.