Johnny Sain, who teamed with Warren Spahn to pitch the Boston Braves to the 1948 National League championship in a pennant race that inspired an enduring baseball rhyme, died Tuesday in Downers Grove, Ill. He was 89.

The cause was complications from a stroke, said his wife, Maryann.

Sain was a 20-game winner four times, pitched on three World Series championship teams with the Yankees and was a renowned pitching coach. He was best remembered for the closing weeks of the 1948 season.

On Sept. 14, The Boston Post carried a four-line poem by Gerry Hern, the newspaper’s sports editor, calling upon Spahn, the Braves’ future Hall of Fame left-hander, and Sain, their outstanding right-hander, to bear the pitching burden, resting on off days and — if luck was with the Braves — when it rained.

The rhyme was shortened by Braves fans to “Spahn and Sain and pray for rain.”

Spahn and Sain each started three games and each won twice during the next 12 days. There were three off-days and one rainout. Two other pitchers also started games, in between, as the Braves captured the franchise’s first pennant in 34 seasons.

John Franklin Sain, a native of Havana, Ark., joined the Braves in 1942, pitching for Manager Casey Stengel. After three years in the Navy, he returned to the Braves and his career flourished at age 28.

“I wasn’t blessed with velocity, a fastball that you’d say, ‘Here it is, hit it,’ ” Sain remembered in “Pen Men” (St. Martin’s Press, 1992) by Bob Cairns. “I knew that I had to vary my motions and speeds and variations of breaking balls and sinkers.”

Sain was 20-14 in 1946 and 21-12 in 1947. Then came the season when the Braves emerged from decades of futility to win the pennant by six and a half games over the St. Louis Cardinals. Sain had a 24-15 record with a 2.60 earned run average in 1948 and led the league in victories, complete games (28) and innings pitched (315). Spahn was 15-12 that year.

Sain beat Bob Feller of the Cleveland Indians, 1-0, in the World Series opener. But the Braves lost the Series in six games.

After winning only 10 games in 1949, when he had a sore shoulder, Sain was 20-13 in 1950. But he fell to 5-13 in 1951 and was traded to the Yankees at the end of August for Lew Burdette, who became a pitching star for the Braves.

Pitching once more for Stengel, who had moved to the Yankees as manager, Sain bolstered the Yankees as a starter and reliever, winning 11 games in 1952 and 14 in 1953 and then leading the American League in saves, with 22, in 1954.

Sain was traded to the Kansas City Athletics in May 1955, then retired after that season with a record of 139-116 over 11 seasons and a reputation for durability. Except for the final weekend of the 1948 season, when he left a game after five innings to rest for the World Series, he had completed every game he won for the Braves from 1946 to 1948.

Sain had a successful second career as a pitching coach with six teams. He preached keeping batters off balance by changing speeds and using an assortment of deliveries, and he lugged around books and tapes advocating the virtues of positive thinking.

John Wyatt, one of his pitching pupils with the Tigers, once told The New York Times Magazine: “Sain lays it on the line. He says, ‘You’re in the business to fool people,’ and explains how you can do it.”

As the pitching coach under Manager Ralph Houk when the Yankees won three straight pennants, from 1961 to 1963, Sain taught Whitey Ford how to throw a pitch that alleviated pressure on his elbow and slid sharply. Ford, who had never won 20 games before, won 25 and 24 in two of his three seasons under Sain.

Sain moved to the Twins in 1965, molding Mudcat Grant, Jim Kaat and Jim Perry into a starting staff that brought Minnesota its first pennant. He became the Tigers’ pitching coach in 1967, and the next year, Denny McLain, Mickey Lolich and Earl Wilson headed a starting staff that helped bring Detroit a World Series championship.

In addition to his wife, Sain is survived by his sons, John, of Treynor, Iowa, and Randy, of Walnut Ridge, Ark.; his daughters, Sharyl Sain of Mesa, Ariz., and Ronda Ball of Blytheville, Ark.; a stepson, Richard Zaremba of Frankfort, Ill.; 11 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

In recounting his pitching philosophy, Sain recalled having teamed up with Spahn. “Spahn was smooth, orthodox,” Sain once told The New York Post. “I was all motion, change of speed, unorthodox. That’s when I got interested in the mechanics of pitching. There are just as many ways to pitch as there is pitchers.”

John F Sain