To illustrate how rare this event is, Phil Humber of the Chicago White Sox recorded the 21st Perfect Game in major league history on April 21 of this year, making Immaculate Innings twice as common as that rare event.  On May 2, Jered Weaver of the Los Angeles Angels recorded the 274th recognized No-Hitter* in major league baseball, so there have been roughly six No-Nos for every I.I.

(*Joe Borden of the Philadelphia White Stockings of the National Association no-hit the Chicago White Stockings in 1875, but that league is not officially recognized as a “major league.”  I also always feel a bit sheepish about counting events in baseball history because, of course, the Negro Leagues are also not recognized, but the statistics are kept as they are, so I’m using what we have available – the numbers are sufficient to make the general point, anyway.)

So, Immaculate Innings…pretty rare.  As Muder noted, only three players have done it twice, and all three are in the Hall of Fame.  They are all players that someone with a decent knowledge of baseball history might be able to guess if you gave them ten or twenty shots at it – Nolan Ryan, Sandy Koufax and Lefty Grove.

Wikipedia is good enough to not only list the Immaculate Innings, but also the batters who fell victim.  It is not terribly surprising that 31 of the 46 were achieved by National League pitchers when you consider that for the last 40 years or so the American League pitchers haven’t been pitching to pitchers very much, but the list includes fewer pitchers than I would have thought.  In 1991, David Cone wiped out Herm Winningham, Randy Myers and Mariano Duncan, and really, that one should have an asterisk.

It’s far more interesting to discuss which set was the most impressive.  In 1984, Ron Guidry got HOFer Carlton Fisk, Tom Paciorek and Greg Luzinski, which is not bad, but would seem better had not Fisk and Luzinski each been victimized before.  In 1977, Bruce Sutter of the Cubs held a tie in the ninth inning by setting down the Expos’ Ellis Valentine, HOFer Gary Carter and Larry Parrish.  For my money, though, I think the most impressive was Jeff Robinson of the Pittsburgh Pirates who, in a tight ballgame against the Chicago Cubs in 1987, mowed down Leon Durham, HOFer Andre Dawson, and Rafael Palmeiro.  I’d be interested in hearing arguments for most impressive set – of course, the biggest hitters aren’t necessarily the hardest to strike out on three pitches, and Pedro Martinez deserves serious props for downing a set of Mariners in 2002 that included a contact hitter like Ichiro Suzuki.

I would like to close on this subject with the main reason I was propelled to write this: to provide a list of active pitchers who already have one Immaculate Inning on their resume, and are just one more glorious inning away from a one-way ticket to Cooperstown.  Here they are:

• Rich Harden
• Felix Hernandez
• A.J. Burnett
• Rafael Soriano
• Jason Isringhausen
• LaTroy Hawkins
• Buddy Carlyle
• Ross Ohlendorf
• Jordan Zimmerman
• Juan Perez

Other than King Felix, I bet you did not realize how close these guys are to immortality.

UPDATE (May 16):  By request, a little something about Three Pitch Innings.  These are not nearly so rare and are not as comprehensively recorded.   Walter Johnson is listed four times, and Christy Mathewson twice in the same World Series in 1912.  There are a few that include multiple pitchers, most recently by Francisco Rosario (2) and Scott Schoeneweis in 2006 with Toronto.  The most recent of these accomplishments in the post-season appears to belong to (not surprisingly) Mariano Rivera against the Seattle Mariners in the 2001 ALCS.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a list that differentiates between “clean” Three Pitch Innings and those that include a base runner and a double play (a far less impressive feat, in my opinion).

Among victims, it was interesting to note that the threesome of Larry Walker, Dante Bichette and Vinny Castilla made the list twice within a couple of weeks in 1998.  The most impressive list among “clean” 3Ps, I think, goes to Dodgers pitcher Burt Hooten in 1972, getting HOFers Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell followed by Al Oliver of Pittsburgh.  By contrast, the next listed incident is by Kansas City’s Jerry Terrell who somehow got through the Yankees’ Murderers Row of Fred Stanley, Bobby Brown and Len Randle.

Also of note, Al Leiter retired five batters on five pitches beginning in the eighth inning of his no-hitter in 1996.

Note:  I have turned off comments on this blog because I really wasn’t getting any that weren’t spam.  If you’re reading this, you probably know how to reach me (including, unfortunately, the spammers).

Early in my period of employment with the Hall of Fame, toward the end of the last century, I attempted to start a discussion with a coworker about the Hall of Fame candidacy of a particular player.  His reply was that he didn’t really care about who did or did not get into the Hall of Fame.  The wealth of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum came from that last sometimes-overlooked part, he said, the preservation of the game’s rich and complex history, and all parts therein.  He recognized the value of the Hall of Fame as the institution’s hook and revenue-generator, but he didn’t put all that much stock into who was or was not in.  I was blown away by the response – as a visitor I had viewed the museum as a cool time-killer to justify the long trek to Cooperstown, but in my time of employment there I realized he was absolutely right.  The museum – it’s displays, collections and research resources – tell much more of the story of what I love about baseball than the Hall of Fame does.  I’m still not as indifferent as my friend seemed (seems) to be about who does or does not get inducted into the Hall, but my passion and perspective about who gets elected has been redirected by my experience as an employee there and my exposure to the greatness that surrounds the Plaque Gallery, for which I am very grateful.

So, my feelings about the election of a particular player boil down, I guess, to four ingredients.  The first two involve whether the honor of the election serves a) the institution and b) the player in a way that makes me feel good.  In the case of Ron Santo, his was a strong and passionate campaign.  Cubs fans embraced him as one of their own, through his careers as a player and as a broadcaster for the team.  I think that strength will be reflected in the turnout for his induction, though clearly not as strongly as it would have been a few years ago.  Posthumous awards are bittersweet for everybody, and certainly I would feel better for Ron Santo and his family and fan base if he had been able to receive the honor personally.  Certainly, the motivation to attend the ceremony in July would be bumped if Santo’s fans could see him smiling on the podium himself, and I long felt about his campaign, man, if you’re going to do it, do it now.  I join the throng in feeling like this is good, but it could have been better, and it’s a shame that events played out as they have.

Parts three and four involve the equation are the questions “Did he deserve it?” and “Why did he get it?”  In this case, the questions are intertwined.

In spite of its name, the Hall of Fame is not designed to reward or, necessarily, convey fame.  Plenty of very famous ballplayers are not in, and at least a few inductees have long been forgotten by any but the most ardent students of the game’s history.  The ideal, though, should be to house in the Plaque Gallery the images of players whose contributions to the game stand up over time.

I don’t remember seeing Santo play (although I have one or two of his baseball cards), and I don’t like statistics well enough to trust them to tell me the whole story of his career.  I put more trust in the baseball writers who provide the first filter of the election process to give me a telling response.  Santo received less than 4% of the vote his first year of eligibility in 1980 and was knocked off the ballot.  He was reinstated on the ballot in 1985 and over the next 14 years, although his vote total grew steadily, he never received more than 50% of the votes.  It took three permutations of the Veterans Committee, the last filter in the process, over 11 years before Santo finally got the version he needed to get the nod.  I’m not a fan of Hall of Fame “campaigns” or players getting elected by sheer voter momentum, and I’m having a very hard time convincing myself that Santo was the kind of player whose on field achievements will be remembered without being refreshed by words on a plaque or numbers in an encyclopedia.  His career is noteworthy, though, in that he was as good as he was (and he was indisputably very good) while dealing with an illness as serious as diabetes, and that is a story worth remembering and retelling.

What really rubs me wrong is the impression that the voter momentum that pushed him over the top came a good deal from Sabermetrics.  I have some respect for Sabermetrics, but I also have a lot of issues (which will likely appear in a dedicated blog post or two).  In the case of Santo, there appears to be a good deal of reconsideration of his career due to the increasing popularity of OBP (on base percentage) over batting average as a metric.  I do believe that OBP is a very good component in measuring the value of any given player in his lineup.  I do not believe, though, that a player’s ability to draw a walk should provide a swing response to a player’s Hall of Fame candidacy, and it certainly should not be given equal weight across the board.  A walk to Rickey Henderson or Tim Raines is a lot more valuable (and exciting and worth assessing in a Hall of Fame case) than a walk to Ron Santo*.

(*If you really want to get into the numbers, Santo batted fourth in the lineup for over half his career plate appearances, which means he spent a good deal of time – nearly 25% of his plate appearances actually – leading off an inning, and in those plate appearances he had a .337 OBP, 25 points below his career average.  So, it’s not like he was using those walks to get the engine started.)

On the other hand, part of Santo’s momentum was built upon a reassessment of his defense.  Although I have little use for many defensive metrics, I do think that defense is abysmally under-utilized in assessing players overall, and I am willing to give the anecdotal evidence, along with the Gold Gloves, their due weight in the argument if they were, in fact, overlooked in his case.

To sum up, the Hall of Fame’s obvious stock in trade is Hall of Famers, and a regular influx of new inventory is necessary to keep the institution vibrant, relevant and solvent.  To that end, the addition of a popular candidate like Ron Santo, a player who succeeded through adversity and who provides a new and compelling thread to the Plaque Gallery’s tapestry, should be good for the institution.  The timing of his election is quite unfortunate, to say the least; otherwise, although he is not likely to be etched among the Mount Rushmore of HOFers, and despite my reservations about the way in which his election came about, I feel fine about the selection.  Not that you asked.

This one was among those sealed in envelopes, which I finally opened with the hope that I would not face federal charges for tampering with Sandy Alomar’s mail.  I have now read all of the letters, and I have to say this one is far more complimentary than most of the others.

Alomar was the Yankees’ starting second baseman in 1974 and 1975 until he was supplanted with the acquisition of Willie Randolph in 1976.  Ironically, I probably had more room to demonstrate some of my patented criticism to Alomar than to pretty much any other player I had attempted to contact.  At the time I wrote this letter, Alomar was batting .182 with zero home runs, six runs batted in and 12 runs scored.  Maybe they should have tried Bob Oliver at second for a while.

Obviously, my spelling skill was a work in progress.  Especially on my own name.  Geez.  At least my stationery improved.

I was going to take this letter to Cooperstown this past weekend and give it to Sandy, but there’s a policy against people working for the Hall of Fame asking for autographs, and even though I technically asked for the autograph 36 years ago I wasn’t sure if the rule applied retroactively.

I say “presumably” because the majority of them are still sealed in their envelopes.  It is unclear why these were never sent to their intended destinations – a question for my dad at my next seance.  I have been struggling with what to do with the sealed letters; I feel an odd invasion of my own privacy by reading them at all, let alone busting open an envelope to do so.  But then… I read the following, a letter to Yankees player Bob Oliver, which sat in pristine condition within a previously-compromised envelope:

Clearly the grace and tact with which I express myself now are traits from birth.  There is no way, having read this letter, that I can possibly avoid reading the others.  And so, this series begins…

So, my plan was to wait for #3,000, then go to the next game, which would be an easier and cheaper seat to get (and it was) and a CERTAIN opportunity to celebrate Jeter (and he did get the first inning standing ovation that I had anticipated).  To boot, the day was gorgeous and the matchup was exciting – Yankees ace C.C. Sabathia vs. Rays ace James Shields.  As it turns out, the game did not disappoint, and while I didn’t see my first ever “3,000th hit,” I did see three things I believe I have never seen before:

1. Both starting pitchers tossed complete games.

2. The final score was 1-0.

3. No earned runs were scored in the game.  The lone run scored by way of a combination of throwing errors by Rays center fielder B.J. Upton and Shields.

I cannot say with great certainty that I have never been in attendance for any of these events before – I’ve seen a lot of games, and my memory for them is pretty bad overall – but it feels like I haven’t.  They are the kinds of things of which I would make a note if I saw them, that’s for sure.

Thinking about how cool this game was, and the seeming rarity of these events, I decided to look up how often these kinds of things happen.  I’m not particularly adept at finding this kind of information, but I got a great deal of help from baseball-reference.com, which is a fantastic online resource.

Before I reveal what I discovered, I want to say that the order in which I listed the three events above was no accident – they are arranged by what I guessed were the increasing likelihood of the events in my baseball-attending lifetime, which is to say that I thought two complete games was the rarest event, and each one following was slightly more likely than the one before.

2 Complete Games Pitched in a Single Game

So I started with two complete games.  Baseball-Reference allowed me to pick a timeframe for my search, and I picked 1973 as my start point.  I can’t say for sure when I attended my first game – it was probably 1975 – but ’73 seemed as reasonable a starting point as any, being the first year of the designated hitter, and it might make my findings more significant to readers who probably don’t care about my attendance-era as end points.

(Note: I don’t claim to be good at math, and I don’t claim to be good at using the B-R tools and databases.  You are welcome, even invited, to check my work and let me know that I screwed up.)

I had a hard time with my first task.  I couldn’t figure out how to get B-R to only count games that had two complete games.  I could, though, get this much:

a) Since 1973, there have been 18,423 games in the major leagues in which at least one pitcher had a complete game.  That’s roughly 480 per year over 38.5 years, which seems incredibly high (and would be, I say intuitively, heavily weighted toward the early part of the range).   There are, currently, 2,430 games played in a season, so 480 would be one in every five games at this level of expansion – and there were six fewer teams in 1973.

Remember, though, that I am only counting games here in which at least one pitcher went the distance, not necessarily both.  I should also note that I wanted to exclude games that failed to go nine innings, so I set a minimum number of innings for a complete game to 8 (the number a losing visiting pitcher would have, as Shields did in the game I saw).  This didn’t remove games that ended after eight innings, sadly, but I wasn’t sure how to include only games of nine innings or longer.

b) There are over 1,500 instances of dual complete games since 1973.  It could be any number between 1,500 and 18,423, but it’s at least 1,500.

c) There were 65 instances of both pitchers going wire-to-wire at the Old Yankee Stadium beginning with the re-opening of the renovated Stadium in 1976 until it was put down after 2008.  That’s roughly 2-per-season.  The game I saw with C.C. and Shields was the first incidence of matching complete games at the New Yankee Stadium in its 3 1/2 years.  It’s hard to say what the odds are of my having ever seen one of these, but the chances of seeing one in this era of specialized pitchers and stringent pitch counts are really small.

The Final Score Was 1-0

Since 1973, there have been 1,593 games in the major leagues in which the final score was 1-0, about 41 per year or one every 60 games in the current schedule.  The Yankees have played 54 of them at home, less than 1.5 per year.  (They are 25-29 in 1-0 games at home.)  The game I saw was only the second 1-0 game at the New Yankee Stadium.  1-0 games are really, really rare.  This ain’t soccer.

No Earned Runs Scored In A Game

There have been 265 major league games played since 1973 in which no earned runs were scored.  The Yankees have been involved in 16 of them, less than one every two years.  The game I saw was the first in which no earned runs were scored in a game at the New Yankee Stadium.  This is actually, easily, the most rare event of the three, it would seem.  Looks like I had my list in complete reverse.

Still, these are, individually, three clearly pretty rare events to witness in person.  The odds of seeing all three together?  Three times in the entire history of the New York Yankees ball club have they played a game, at home, in which they won 1-0 on the benefit of an unearned run and both pitchers hurled complete games.  The first was April 21, 1922 against the Washington Senators; the second was September 15, 1929 versus the Cleveland Indians.  It’s also occurred three times in which the Yankees were on the losing end, and only once before in my lifetime – on July 27, 1975, at Shea Stadium, in which Catfish Hunter fell victim to Bill “Spaceman” Lee of the Boston (ugh) Red Sox.

That game was on a Sunday, the first game of a doubleheader.  There’s actually a small but existing possibility that I was in attendance at that game, as we often sought out doubleheaders.  What are the odds?

My dad was a chiropractor who had a home office, which allowed him to spend a lot of time with his kids during the work day.  I remember him always being available to us, and he would often spend any break he had in the day with us in the backyard tossing around whatever ball was in season – baseball, football, basketball.  I still have some copies of baseball lineups I made out on his office note paper, and my backyard role in getting the Yankees to the pennant was ever changing – one day I was Doc Medich or Ed Figueroa setting down the Orioles’ lineup (due, in large part, to a pretty generous strike zone); the next I was “Chicken” Stanley, Graig Nettles or Bobby Murcer making diving play after diving play to erase every A’s scoring threat.  My favorite was getting into Roy White’s pigeon-toed stance or Mickey Rivers’s pronounced crouch and swinging for the fences.  My dad relished these fantasies, and embraced his role as the Washington Generals of baseball.  Every doomed Ken Singleton ground ball and ill-fated Vida Blue fastball was met with comic disgust, but he made me make every play, properly called me out on every called third strike, and always gave his runners an extra base or two when the ball clanked off my glove or squibbed through my legs.  Most games would take a full day to complete, often played out in seven-minute intervals as Dad waited for his next patient.  I don’t know that I ever lost a game (coughselectivememorycough), but it often worked out that the Yankees needed late inning heroics to pull out the “W.”  It took me years to figure out how Dad could endure such woeful, seemingly excruciating losing streaks.

On August 22, 1976 (a thank you to Baseball-Reference.com), Dad took me to my first game at the “new” Yankee Stadium, a match-up against Frank Tanana and the California Angels.  I was eight-years-old, loved baseball, loved the Yankees, hated losing.  When the Angels tacked on two runs in the top of the eighth inning against some scrub rookie reliever named Ron Guidry, they had an 8-0 advantage and the Stadium was clearing out fast.  I was cranky and disgusted and wanted to go home, having taken all the abuse I could endure.  My dad, though, always held onto a tired Yogiism that it ain’t over ‘til it’s over, or some silly thing, and he forced me to watch every out.  At the end of my rope by the bottom of the ninth, the still-scoreless Yanks started to string some hits together.  With one out, eight consecutive Yankees reached base, capped by a Roy White two-run home run, and the eight-run explosion forced extra-innings.  The Yanks would go on to lose 11-8 in 11 innings, but the point was well made – that game still rates among the best games I have ever attended, and certainly the greatest (only?) Yankee loss I have ever enjoyed.  And to this day (save some very few exceptions in unavoidable circumstances) I have never left a ballgame early.

It was particularly fitting that White hit the game-tying home run in that game, as he was my dad’s favorite player.  Although I loved the funky batting stance and his relative eccentricity as a switch-hitter, I respectfully disagreed with that choice, continually waffling among the flashier power-hitters, glove men and speedsters like Murcer, Nettles, Mickey Rivers. and the shortstop du jour, or the guys who had brilliant spotlights on them for a time, like Chambliss.  Guidry made the list when he started making headlines in ‘78.  White never seemed to make headlines, never made the All-Star team, never led the league in anything exciting.  I guess he was always among the leaders in walks.  Woo hoo.  Now, I missed most of the peak of White’s career, which began around the time I was born, so I didn’t really get a chance to fully appreciate what he was capable of doing on the field, but even that was only a piece of my dad’s rationale for his choice.  In an era that was full of outspoken “superstars” like Reggie Jackson (whom Dad and I both hated in equal agreement), Dad emphasized to me the greatness in White’s quiet dignity, his steady approach, and his willingness to do what was in the team’s interest.   After White retired, Dad transitioned to Don Mattingly (he hated Dave Winfield and his all-or-nothing swing), then Randy Velarde (the Yankees’ first real “SuperSub,” with whom I shared a birthdate), and finally Derek Jeter.  As I matured, our respective measures of the value of individual players came more in line, and I eventually learned the virtues of being a team-oriented situational player and letting your bat do the talking, the values that Dad had been championing all the while.

When I was 13, my mom justly moved my sister and I with her to Connecticut, two hours from Dad.  He was understandably upset, but he resolved to making himself every bit as present in our lives as he was when we were home.  As my baseball pursuits advanced, through every year and every league, Dad made every possible sacrifice to attend as many of my games as he could.  Through Babe Ruth League, high school, and American Legion ball, it was a rare game that I couldn’t look up and see my father’s attentive eye in the stands.  He adjusted his work schedule, which included evening office hours, moved patients around, and logged untold driving hours to catch games even in the most remote parts of the state.  Even when I was a junior member of a team and my playing time was often limited, his commitment never wavered, and his encouragement never ceased.  Throughout my life, as I look back at that time, I cannot fathom having the fortitude that my dad – and my mom, who bore an equivalent strain – demonstrated in support of me and all of my pursuits.

Dad was a pretty good athlete, too.  He played all sports in his youth, and though he was on the smallish side growing up he stuck on most of his high school teams in football, basketball and baseball.  He was a reasonably talented tennis player and an avid golfer, and as he aged he gave up these activities begrudgingly, though often gracefully.  He would humorously recall his final attempt at tennis – he was hitting some volleys with me and my sister when we were in high school, when he took a swing and whacked himself in the face, splitting his forehead open above the nose.  He played rec league basketball until I was into my teens, and he golfed until an ironic spinal condition caused him to retire from his practice and most athletic efforts just as he was turning 65 (a very convenient way to end my unsuccessful bid to ever beat him on the course).

When I graduated from college, my first job was in Manhattan, and I would spend weekends playing softball on the Great Lawn in Central Park.  One weekend, Dad came down from Poughkeepsie, and I convinced him to come out with me to the Park to check out the scene.  It had been a long time since our days of having a catch in the backyard, and I wanted to grasp one more opportunity to share the field with him and throw the ball around.  These were all pick up games, very casually organized, and it did not take much cajoling to get him to agree to pitch a game or two.  We ended up on opposite teams, and Dad, then in his late-50s, really let his competitive nature come to the forefront.  A lefty hurler, he frustrated hitters with spins and curves that I had never seen before from him.  I don’t think I got a hit off of him all day.  I couldn’t say when he had last played softball before that day (neither could he), but he looked like a regular on the hill.  His iconic moment came at a critical time late in his last game (maybe the last game he ever played – certainly the last one he and I played in together).  With a runner on third and two outs, the batter hit a ground ball that the first baseman fielded to his right.  Dad instinctively ran over to cover first.  The toss from the first baseman was terrible – high and far to the infield side of the bag.  In one deft motion, Dad leaped high in stride, grabbed the ball behind him with his bare hand, landed on the bag, tumbled, rolled, and popped up with a grace that belied his years.  Runner out, inning over.  He looked over at me with a “that’s how you do it” wink, and I can only list a handful of times that I was ever as proud to be his son.

Dad’s generosity to his kids rarely wavered.  When I became old enough to go to baseball games regularly, he started buying a Saturday season ticket package to Yankee Stadium, two seats together.  One of the benefits he promoted regularly was the ability to acquire post-season tickets if and when the Yankees ever made it into October.  It was years before we were able to take advantage of that perk – by 1995, I was living in Washington, DC, and my brother, 13 years younger, had become his regular companion.  They got to see an unforgettable extra-inning playoff game against Seattle in which Mattingly hit his first and only playoff home run, and Jimmy Leyritz smacked a two-run walk-off shot in the 15th..  When the Bombers finally made it to the World Series, Dad coaxed me to come up for the one game to which he had tickets.  He insisted that my brother and I take the seats, resigning himself to watching in a nearby bar and meeting up with us afterwards.  He would accept no argument.  Fortunately, I was able to corral a bleacher ticket from a nearby scalper for the then-unheard-of price of $90, and we got Dad into the game.  He was terrified, never having sat with the Bleacher Creatures before in his life, but he ended up having a blast.  I really missed having him with us for that game – a 4-0 defeat to the Braves at the crafty hand of Greg Maddux – but there was no way he was going to let one of his sons sacrifice for his benefit on that day.

I spent Sunday thinking about all these events, and the lessons and values of my dad’s that I absorbed in the process.  Sometimes I think I take some of them too much to heart.  Sometimes, in an impossible pursuit to be Dad’s Roy White, I think I let go of my personal interests too easily for the imaginary benefit of some self-architected team.  It feels good, though, anytime I believe that I am somehow following the path laid by my dad.  They are big shoes to fill, and a bar higher than I can hope to hurdle, but the effort to do so is well worth it.  And it occurs to me now, as it has throughout my life, that I owe an enormous debt to baseball.  Baseball taught me a lot about my dad.