Immaculate: A History of Perfect Innings in Baseball

By John Cairney

Getting 3 batters out in order on nine pitches is one of the most remarkable feats in baseball. Since the late 1800s, only 71 pitchers have been able to do it. Yet, unlike other rare achievements in baseball, such as pitching a perfect game, the “immaculate inning” does not capture the same attention or consideration. In a game that is as unpredictable as baseball, perfection, when it occurs, should be cause for both reflection and celebration. In Immaculate, Cairney provides a short history of perfect innings through the stories of the pitchers who pitched them. Beginning with an brief overview of the numbers, the remaining chapters, one for each immaculate inning on record in major baseball, provides insight into the men, their careers and details of the inning itself, from the first recorded perfect inning in 1889 to the most recent string of innings last MLB season in 2014. The names include pitching greats such as Jim Bunning, Sandy Koufax, Nolan Ryan and Randy Johnson, but also many lesser known, if not colorful, pitchers like “Sloppy” Thurston and Bill Wilson. The teams include famous franchises like the Detroit Tigers and the New York Yankees, but also clubs now defunct like the Boston Beaneaters and the Montreal Expos. Using immaculate innings as benchmarks, the book provides an engaging and entertaining journey through the history of professional baseball that will delight both the serious student of the game, as well as the fan who enjoys reading about the game.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mosaic Press
• Release date: May 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781771611169

Book preview

Index

INTRODUCTION

An Immaculate Feat of Pitching:

3 Batters, Nine Strikes, 3 Outs

An immaculate inning refers to a situation in which a pitcher, facing the first three batters in an inning, retires all three on consecutive strikes. In other words, three batters are retired on only nine pitches. It is the essence of mathematical balance: Three-nine-three. While simple in its expression, in practice it is anything but. In the recorded history of professional baseball, only seventy-three pitchers have achieved this feat, and only seventy-seven times. When one considers how many Major League pitchers since the late 1800s have played, let alone how many innings have been pitched since the beginning of professional baseball, pitching an immaculate inning is astonishingly rare.¹ And yet, it is not so astonishing as to garner the same attention as pitching a perfect game, one of the rarest and most impressive achievements in all of baseball.²

There are many reasons why this may be so. To begin with, pitching an immaculate inning does not necessarily ensure victory in a game, whether that game is a regular season contest or game seven of the World Series; pitching a perfect game usually does (there are always exceptions, of course: Pedro Martínez and Harvey Haddix both saw perfect games evaporate in extra innings). Two, pitching a perfect game is a marathon achievement. The drama that unfolds is a direct result of the increasing realization of the improbability of the event. This places enormous pressure on the pitcher, the catcher, the rest of the players, and even the particularly superstitious fan who worries that even thinking a no-hitter is imminent will surely jinx it. It is not uncommon to hear pitchers and teammates utter the same sentiment after the fact.³ Conversely, an immaculate inning is quick. Retiring three batters in a row on nine pitches could easily be missed by a bathroom break or a trip to the concession stand. More often than not, the realization that an immaculate inning has occurred comes the next day in the pages of the sport section, and only because the writer has bothered to go back over the boxscore and realize something really rare has just happened. Sometimes, there is no mention of it at all. It is perhaps not surprising that even in comprehensive baseball sources, such as Peter Morris’s A Game of Inches, there is no mention of an immaculate inning, even though perfect games and no-hitters are part of that collection.⁴ This is more observation than criticism. I do think that given the rarity of the feat however, more attention and recognition is deserved. That is the reason for this book. There has long been a fascination with the rare and the extraordinary in baseball. It has been the subject of many books and articles by both pundits and serious students of the game. This is not hard to understand. In a game where greatness is achieved by being able to consistently hit the ball three times out of ten; where the very nature of the game defies consistency and makes perfection seem like a hopeless quixotic quest; perfect execution, when it does occur, is cause for celebration. It keeps us coming back to the park. It is part of the beauty of the game. This book is a celebration of the pitchers who achieved perfection, if only for a brief moment in time.

Where does the term immaculate inning come from? It is not clear who first coined (or penned) the phrase, but beyond the more common linking of immaculate to conception in religion, the word simply means perfect or free from mistakes. A nine-pitch, three-strike inning is obviously perfect execution for a pitcher. It is probably true, however, that because perfect was already used in conjunction with pitching (a perfect game which occurs when there are no hits, walks or bases given on error), the synonym immaculate became the preferred way to describe when the side in an inning is retired on nine strikes.⁵

Aside from the name, what we can be certain of is summarized in the table below. It shows the names of all seventy-three pitchers who achieved this feat, at least to the time of the writing of this book. In the pages that follow, I will provide greater detail on each immaculate inning. There are, however, a few observations that can be made by just studying the list. For example, National League pitchers have pitched more immaculate innings than American League pitchers (46 versus 28).⁶ Right-handed pitchers outnumber lefties more than three to one (56 versus 17). There have only been two recorded instances (so far) of an immaculate inning occurring after the 9th inning—Sloppy Thurston’s perfect 12th; and Juan Pérez’s 10th inning. To date, only one perfect inning has been pitched during the post-season. Only four pitchers have accomplished this feat more than once (Lefty Grove; Sandy Koufax; Nolan Ryan; Randy Johnson). Of the twenty-three pitchers on this list who are eligible for election to the Baseball Hall of Fame, less than half (nine in fact) are members.

Table 1. Immaculate innings pitched, 1889-2014

While these facts describe specific aspects of immaculate innings, they only hint at why they occur in the first place and they tell us nothing about if, or why, perfect innings have changed over time. Therefore, to begin to answer these questions, I have graphed where and how often an immaculate inning has occurred, and compared that against another rare feat, the perfect game (see Figure 1).

The first thing that stands out in this graph is that the overall trend for both events is similar: over time, the occurrence of both has generally increased. However, the occurrence of immaculate innings has risen more dramatically relative to perfect games, especially in the last thirty years. There is also a curious, shared period of time (1930s and 40s) when no perfect games or immaculate innings occurred. If we focus just on the trend line for immaculate innings, there are some other interesting things to note. First, the line is punctuated by three prominent spikes: the first occurs during the 1920s, the second during the 1960s, and then again in the 2000s. This means that there are specific periods in time where there are sharp increases in the number of immaculate innings pitched. Why this is so we can only guess, but here are some interesting possibilities. During the first spike in the 1920s, two of the three pitchers to achieve the feat went on to be Hall of Famers—Dazzy Vance and Lefty Grove.

Figure 1.

The number of immaculate innings and perfect games pitched from 1889 to 2014

Grove actually recorded back-to-back immaculate innings (the only pitcher to do this) in just over a month. In the 1960s, the time of the second spike, four of the six pitchers that decade are also Hall of Famers—Sandy Koufax, who became the second pitcher to pitch two immaculate innings consecutively (though not back-to-back), Nolan Ryan (the third to pitch more than one perfect inning) and Bob Gibson. It remains to be seen if this trend will also define the most recent peak. Certainly Randy Johnson and Pedro Martínez are legitimate contenders for the Hall, both of whom recorded immaculate innings during that last spike period in the 2000s (Randy Johnson by the way, also pitched two immaculate innings, becoming the fourth pitcher to do so in history). In other words, there is at least some evidence for the claim that great innings come from the arms of great pitchers. There clearly appears to be an increase in the occurrence of this event during the periods when these great pitchers played the game.

What else can we make of these trends? It is interesting that two of these three time periods—the 1920s and the period from 2000s—are also known for facets (and controversies) of the game other than pitching. Stephen J. Gould has examined batting averages in professional baseball overtime since the turn of the 20th of century.⁷ He was interested in trying to explain the disappearance of the .400 hitter. His analysis showed that beginning in 1920, league batting averages rose significantly, into the .270s-.280s, and remained this high until the 1940s. He described the transition from the early 1900s to 20’s this way: "Scrappy, one run, slap-hit, grab-a-base-at-a-time play retreated and home run power became the name of