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August 10, 2016 Pebble HuntingSomebody Is About To Strike Out 25 Batters In Nine Innings“To the extent reliever performances get unequivocally awesome, it occurs only over time; but, excepting full-season or full-career stat lines, we don’t really have the infrastructure to easily put performances like Giles’ in context. … I don’t know how rare 23 Ks over nine innings is. If I had to guess, I’d say… it’s a record? If it is, it’s such a buried record that nobody has bothered to ask him about it.” —Me
Let's unbury this record.
We all know that pitchers have struck out 20 batters over the course of nine innings before. Those pitchers are, every child knows from school, Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens (twice!), Kerry Wood and Max Scherzer. The nine innings stretched from the start of one game to the end of the same game, and are thus visible and recorded cleanly. Twenty strikeouts in a game is, I guess, the
third most well-known record in baseball, if we’re saying “well-known” equals people knowing the record and knowing at least one of the holders of it. So that’s our starting point: 20 strikeouts over nine innings.
1. The record is broken!
Radatz at this point had been the best reliever in the game, a fourth-year “closer” who had never started a game but had twice led the league in saves (again, nobody probably knew this at the time), made a couple All-Star teams, and earned MVP votes in all three of his previous seasons. He struck out at least 10 batters per nine in each of his first three seasons; the only other pitcher in baseball to strike out 10+ per nine in any of those seasons was Sandy Koufax, who did it once. Radatz was 6-foot-6, which made him the second-tallest player in the majors in 1965; by listed weight, he was the heaviest pitcher in the game, and Mickey Mantle—who struck out 12 of the 19 times he faced Radatz—called him the Monster[2], a nickname that stuck. “His fastballs arrived at 95 miles an hour, and he commonly pitched multiple innings in a game in relief,” according to the obituary that ran in the New York Times. He was the Dellin Betances of his day.
So after the walk-off loss, Radatz strikes out 15 in his next 6 2/3 innings, covering five appearances, including an eight-out save in which Radatz strikes out seven and allows only a single hit. Over nine innings, he struck out 21, allowed two runs on six hits and two walks.
Oddly, he was never good again.
2. The record is tied!
Before 1999:
After 1999:
Why split it up? Well, before 1999 those pitchers were tying a record. Afterward, they weren’t.
3. The record is broken again!
(He was, to be fair, aided by a no-out appearance in the middle of it in which he allowed all five batters he faced to score, and his cumulative line wasn’t all that sparkly over those nine innings: six hits, four walks, five runs on 178 pitches.)
The next year, the record was tied. Here are the 22-K stretches, before and after 2011:
Before 2011:
After 2011:
4. The record is broken, once more!
For that, I’ll cautiously throw my vote to Aroldis Chapman, one of three pitches (along with Giles and Betances, 2015-2016) to match the 23. Chapman’s stretch, from June 26 to July 23 of 2012, included no runs scored, just two hits and two walks, only 135 pitches, and only 31 batters faced. He struck out 74 percent of the batters he faced. He inspired the first ever episode of Effectively Wild!
In the absence of a more definite way of determining the best relief-pitching performances, I am tentatively calling this the greatest nine-inning stretch of regular-season relief pitching ever.
It is not, however, a record.
5. The record is broken! It can hardly be broken many more times, now can it!?
But records of this sort aren’t hindered by sample sizes. They’re defined by them. And what we could have been saying about Edwin Diaz, with 100 percent confidence and definitiveness, is that he just broke the record for the most strikeouts over nine consecutive innings. And, again, I believe I’m the first person who has ever mentioned it.
One reason you haven’t heard of it is that this isn’t just “hidden” by covering multiple appearances, but because it covers parts of multiple appearances. On June 28th, Diaz entered the game with runners on in the seventh. He got a flyball to get out of the jam, then a flyball for the first out of the eighth. And then:
Nine innings, 24 strikeouts. It’s impressive enough, sure, but think about what this means for a minute: We are three batters away from 27 strikeouts in nine innings. That’s the sort of thing that only exists in Matt Christopher books. Edwin Diaz is either going to hold this record for a very long time, or somebody is soon going to strike out 25 batters over nine innings.
We have reached the future. Edwin Diaz’s nine innings are either our flying cars or our sentient AIs. Maybe you like it, maybe you don’t. Maybe it’s progress, maybe it’s the start of the sport’s death spiral. Either way, it’s not to be ignored. Thanks to Rob McQuown and John Choiniere for research assistance.
[1] not a real record, but somebody—maybe you!—would have complained [2] “I struck him out in Yankee Stadium with the bases loaded and boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, he started cussing and Monster came out about the tenth word. He was cussing so loud that the press heard it." [3] The active record-holder for starting pitchers.
Sam Miller is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @SamMillerBB
7 comments have been left for this article.
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How about calculating Game Scores for all these 9-inning stretches?
Diaz's run gave him a Game Score of 78. He allowed 7 hits, a walk and 2 ER in those 9 IP.