It says something about baseball that a man went to the pitcher's mound Tuesday and piled up 20 strikeouts -- and we've spent the week debating whether it's a record or not.
We're not sure if that's a great commentary on how much we care about this sport and its precious history -- or whether it's a sure sign we've all lost our minds.
We just know this:
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It
was like Bugs Bunny and the Gas-house Gorillas.
That's what it reminded me of. It was: 1-2-3
strikes, you're out; 1-2-3 strikes you're out;
1-2-3 strikes you're out. It wasn't like he had to
set anybody up. He did it on 124 pitches. It was
just 1-2-3, sit down. ” |
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— Curt Schilling on Randy Johnson's 20-strikeout
masterpiece |
We'd rather dig a ditch across the entire Grand Canyon than hit against Randy Johnson on nights like Tuesday in the Arizona desert.
Not only did Johnson face 29 hitters in this game and strike out 20 of them. But he did it against a Reds lineup that hasn't been shut out since the late, great 1900s.
He struck out 10 of the first 13 hitters. He struck out eight of the last nine hitters. He struck out 18 swinging. He struck out two looking.
Of the 72 pitches the Reds swung at, they either missed or fouled off 63 of them. They hit nothing but the light air of downtown Phoenix on exactly half of those hacks (36).
The Unit struck out the side in the fourth, seventh and eighth innings. There was only one inning, in fact -- the sixth -- in which he didn't strike out at least two.
Aaron Boone struck out once. Every other Red who started against him punched out at least twice.
And oh by the way, his 124th and final pitch of the night was clocked by state-police radar at 98 miles per hour.
"You know how when you played Wiffle Ball as a kid," his fellow Diamondbacks whiffin' magician, Curt Schilling, told Week in Review, "and you had one ball with no holes that went straight and another ball with the holes on one side that blew all over the yard? It was like Randy had the ball with the holes. That's what it was like. They were Wiffle Ball swings."
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Wild, wild, wild
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Click here for Jayson Stark's Wild Pitches from the past week.
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The first inning went: strikeout, one-hopper to the mound, strikeout. He kicked off the second inning by blowing away Alex Ochoa.
"And right there," Schilling reported, "I said, 'The over-under is 16 tonight.' "
We'd have taken the over, incidentally. But no one asked.
Johnson's fastball routinely hit 98 mph. His plummeting two-seam fastball was an absurd 95 mph. His slider fell off the cliff like a boulder in an avalanche, at 88. And he threw a higher percentage of strikes (92 of 124 -- or 74.2 percent) than any 20-strikeout man ever.
Put all that together, and the hitters might as well have gone up there with a No. 2 pencil.
"Guys came back to the dugout," the great Reds statesman, Sean Casey, told Week in Review, "and said, 'What are you gonna do? That's unfair.' It felt like we were 12-year-olds, and he was 18."
"When you see Barry Larkin laughing after a swing and a miss, you know," Schilling said. "Guys at this level have a lot of pride. When they're in the middle of a strikeout and they're laughing, it tells you what it was like."
The swings and misses mounted at such a ridiculous clip that after a while, it almost didn't seem real anymore.
|  | | Randy Johnson has never been better than he was during his 20-strikeout performance. |
"It was like Bugs Bunny and the Gas-house Gorillas," Schilling said. "That's what it reminded me of. It was: 1-2-3 strikes, you're out; 1-2-3 strikes you're out; 1-2-3 strikes you're out. It wasn't like he had to set anybody up. He did it on 124 pitches. It was just 1-2-3, sit down.
"You know how Rob Deer used to swing at every ball at belt-high level and the ball would bounce in the grass? That's what this was like. You'd see swings that weren't even close."
Johnson's manager, Bob Brenly, described his slider as "invisible." But Schilling said even on the pitches no humans could see, "they knew it was going to be a strike. They heard it go by."
The only Reds safe on this night were the left-handed hitters -- because they didn't play.
"That bench was probably the safest place you could be," said Casey, who didn't pinch-hit until Johnson departed in the 10th. "I realized, when I was sitting there and he had about 15, 'Good thing I have the day off.' "
No kidding. To be an occupant of either dugout on this night meant you were an eyewitness to history. And nobody needed Bill James to explain that, either.
When the ninth inning began, with Johnson two whiffs away from 20 -- and the score tied -- even his teammates got their priorities so misplaced, they were rooting for history over outs.
"After he struck out the first guy in the ninth for 19," Schilling said, "Donnie Sadler came up and hit a ground ball in the hole, and I'm like, 'Don't make the play.' Then it's a bang-bang play at first, and I'm like, 'Safe.' Or, 'Call catcher's interference or something.' And it was a 1-1 game."
But he'll be pardoned by the proper baseball authorities -- or by us, anyway -- for that transgression. There are some nights when trivialities like the score are transcended by other developments. This was one of them.
Schilling saved five game balls, and he didn't even pitch. Casey sent a ticket stub over to have Johnson autograph it, and his team lost.
"Obviously, I wish we'd won," Casey said. "But I'm never going to forget that. The electricity was unbelievable."
The biggest crisis of the whole evening, actually, wasn't the fact that the game went extra innings, sending Johnson's 20 strikeouts into an asterisked portion of the record book. It was The Great K Shortage on the scoreboard.
The good news was that the board at the BOB has its own K corner. The bad news was: It only went up to 16. And Johnson blew by that in the middle of the eighth inning.
So as the whiffs mounted, there was serious speculation about what would happen if he collected more strikeouts than the scoreboard had K's.
No problem. They just tacked more K's onto the side of the board.
"They were ready to start bringing in paint," Schilling said. "If he'd gone out for the 10th, they would have started painting the stadium.
"We knew there were 16 on the board, and Randy and I have been kidding each other about it. I said, 'I want to fill up that board one time.' I didn't realize that if we did, they'd bring out the scaffolding crew. The next day, I said to him, 'Dude, I guess it's not that big a deal, filling up that board, huh?' "
Even the Reds found The Great K Shortage pretty hilarious.
"They should have known when they signed him this could happen," Casey said. "Next offseason, they better put a few more K's up there."
And by next offseason, we're assuming people will stop arguing about whether this feat should be listed in the same paragraph of the record book with Roger Clemens' two 20-K games and with Kerry Wood's, or whether it will require a footnote or an asterisk or a special commemorative foreword by Tom Cheney.
Here's how we'd sum up the correct stance we all need to take on this: Take a deep breath. Clear your brain. And get a life.
This was a momentous game. And a historic one. And an unforgettable one. And none of that will be altered by the way it's printed up in anybody's record book.
We're happy to report that Curt Schilling, historian and strikeout factory in his own right, figured out in a hurry that this was one furious debate over just about nothing.
"I don't care," Schilling said. "They don't hand out trophies for it. There isn't some crown for it. It doesn't matter how they rank it. Everyone knows what happened. Twenty years from now, it won't be just Clemens and Wood who struck out 20. It will be Clemens, Wood and Johnson. It was a special night. That's what matters to me."
And with any luck, to the rest of us.
20-20 club of the week
If you didn't punch out 20 on your lottery card this week, you weren't paying attention. Because 20 was definitely baseball's magic number of the week.
The Big Unit struck out 20. The Cubs scored 20. In a span of three days.
There were so many 20-20's flying around that, given the big ESPN-ABC cross-promotional bent of the times, it's amazing at least one edition of "Baseball Tonight" wasn't hosted by Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters.
Going into their game last Saturday at Wrigley Field, the Dodgers' pitching staff was second in the National League in ERA. Three hours later, after a 20-1 loss to the rampaging Cubbies, the Dodgers' ERA wasn't even under 4.00 anymore. (It went from 3.66 to 4.09.)
It was that kind of day. Among the tremendous factoids manufactured by this blowout were these:
The Dodgers gave up 20 runs for the first time since May 20, 1967 (in a game started by Claude Osteen, who has been retired since the Gerald Ford administration).
The Cubs scored 20 for the first time at Wrigley since June 3, 1987 -- even though the wind was blowing in.
The Dodgers lost by 19 runs for the first time since they bailed out of Brooklyn.
The Cubs had a larger margin of victory (19) than the Bears have had in any game since Dec. 20, 1998 (24-3 over the Ravens) and larger than in any game the Bulls have won since that Jordan guy retired.
Dodgers reliever Terry Adams got no outs and gave up seven runs on 12 pitches -- and called it the worst game of his entire life.
And Jose Nunez, who relieved Adams, had one of the most bizarre outings of the year -- getting all five outs on strikeouts but still allowing nine runs in 1 2/3 innings (meaning, in other words, that every Cub who just put a ball in play against him reached base).
|  | | Sammy Sosa and the Cubs had a field day with Dodger pitching in a 20-1 victory last Saturday. |
It was only a 4-1 game heading into the bottom of the seventh, too. But 24 Cubs hitters later, the Dodgers still hadn't gotten the final out of the eighth inning yet.
After a while, it started looking like one of those baseball arcade games, where the runners just keep running around the bases and no one can stop them.
"I'm sure it felt that way for the Dodgers," Cubs utility-humorist Ron Coomer told Week in Review. "I've played third base in games like that, and after a while, you feel like tripping a guy when he comes around the bases."
This game got so nutty that Cubs relief pitcher Courtney Duncan got to bat for the first time in his career -- and, of course, walked with the bases loaded. ("I was just hoping I didn't get hit," Duncan said.)
And it got so nutty that Coomer, who spent 6½ innings lounging around the dugout on what he thought was a day off, arose to pinch-hit for the pitcher in the seventh -- and wound up getting three at-bats in two innings, on his day off.
"I almost played a full game's worth of at-bats in two innings," Coomer said. "We're not working by the hour, right? So by the box score, I worked a normal baseball day."
Coomer, in fact, got two at-bats before he even wore a glove. And that made him either a trivia answer or a technicality. He wasn't sure which.
"What they told me was that the second time I hit in the inning, I came up as a Nothing," he said. "I was a pinch-hitter the first time, but you can't pinch-hit again. So actually, I was a Nothing. But that's OK. I've been called that before."
Before this game, the Cubs had scored as many as eight runs in a game exactly four times all season. Then, of course, they scored eight runs in back-to-back innings (the seventh and eighth).
Not to suggest that was rare or anything. But the last team to score eight runs or more two innings in a row was the 1928 Indians (against the Yankees, on July 29).
And the last National League team to do it was the old Philadelphia Quakers (not coached by Fran Dunphy), on June 16, 1887, against the extremely defunct Washington Nationals (not coached by Red Klotz). The starting catcher on that Washington team: Connie Mack.
We were just asking Coomer what he knew about those 1887 Washington Nationals when Cubs coach Rene Lachemann wandered by.
"Did Lachemann play on that team?" Coomer quipped. "I'll have to ask him about it."
We needed a perfect capper to this extravaganza, however. And naturally, we got this one:
After the real Dodgers relievers gave up 16 runs in the seventh and eighth innings while allowing 19 baserunners, the Dodgers had to bring in infielder Chris Donnels to try to get the final out.
And it took him precisely three pitches. (Gary Matthews Jr. was cooperative enough to ground out.)
Donnels -- the first position player to pitch for the Dodgers since Jeff Hamilton and Mickey Hatcher both pitched in a 22-inning game on June 3, 1989 -- said he hadn't been on any kind of pitcher's mound in 18 years, since he was 7. But even though he emerged with a 0.00 ERA, he came away with "no delusions of grandeur," he said.
"I never thought pitching was easy," Donnels said. "This reinforced that thought."
Smooch of the week
A kiss is but a kiss. We know that. But a 100th win only comes along once in a career.
So if Indians pitcher Dave Burba felt motivated Tuesday to plant a big smooch on the cheek of the man who made his 100th win possible, that lovable Omar Vizquel, who are we to pass judgment on that?
"Hey," Burba told Week in Review, "I love my teammates."
And he particularly loved them Tuesday. He was making that big quest for victory No. 100. He then fell behind, 4-0, in the first inning. But this is a team that can make a four-run hole disappear faster than David Copperfield. So of course, they'd tied this game up within two innings.
But then, five innings later, there was Burba, one strike away from a no-decision, when Vizquel, who isn't quite running neck to neck with Mark McGwire in career home-run trots, thumped a game-winning three-run homer over the scoreboard. On a 3-2 pitch. And two outs. And the bullpen pumping.
"I was sitting next to Jim Thome," Burba reported. "And right before the pitch, I said: 'Here's the 3-2 pitch to Omar. And it leavvveesss the building.' I was doing the old radio home-run call. Then he hit it, and I was, like, 'No way.' It was amazing. It was chilling.
"I was so excited," Burba said, "it just happened."
"It," naturally, being the kiss Burba deposited on Vizquel when he returned to the dugout. As intimate romantic moments go, it wasn't exactly a moonlight stroll on Kapalua Beach. But then again, intimate romance wasn't what Burba had in mind.
"It's not something I want to do on a daily basis," Burba assured the ESPN.com cyber-surfing audience. "But I kiss my son, right? And I consider Omar like one of my boys."
Meanwhile, Vizquel, who hadn't homered since Aug. 27, was a euphoric guy himself, by the way. "I'm happy," he said, "any time I drive the ball over the infield." But this was the first time he'd ever gotten a game-winning homer and a kiss from the starting pitcher in the same game.
"He was pretty excited, too, so I don't think he minded," Burba said. "Although he might have told me I needed some Scope."
Now any time you're a ballplayer and you do something as outrageous as lay a kiss on one of your teammates, there's about as much chance of it going unnoticed by the troops as there is of a hurricane going unnoticed by the National Weather Service.
So let's just say Burba has heard a few remarks.
"A couple of guys said they think Omar would rather have had a thousand bucks," Burba said, "because last week, Chuck Finley offered anybody who drove in the game-winning run $1,000. But just getting a kiss -- that's worth a thousand bucks, don't you think.
"People just don't realize," said Dave Burba, sentimentalist that he is, "the value of a kiss."
Shutout of the week
Mike Hampton may have gone to Denver for the schools, the scenery, the oxygen, the Broncos, the John Denver ambiance or possibly the $123.8 million.
But whatever reason he may have had, let's just say that so far, that particular decision hasn't quite been the biggest disaster since the Hindenberg.
First, he threw 8 1/3 shutout innings against the Cardinals on Opening Day. Then he really ran amok Wednesday, when he threw a real, live complete-game shutout, at shutout-proof Coors Field, against his old pals, the Mets, no less.
"It was like an apparition," Rockies coach-witticist Rich Donnelly told Week in Review. "It was like you saw a flying horse. You go, 'Wow, I've never seen that before. What was that?' "
OK, so it wasn't the first shutout every by a Rockies pitcher at Coors. It was the fourth. But not only was it a shutout, it was over in two hours and 25 minutes. At Coors Field. That's the equivalent of playing a game in about 35 minutes at a real park.
"I actually saw Jay Leno last night," Donnelly said. "He's still on. That was the first time in Coors history I saw Jay Leno. He comes on every night. That's what they tell me. He does a monologue. Then he has guests. It's gonna be neat. I think that show could catch on.
"I even had dinner with my wife," Donnelly went on. "A candle-lit dinner. She's had candles in the house for 12 years, and the only time we ever used them was when lightning hit. Every time I tell her I'll be home for dinner, the game lasts till like 12:30 (a.m.), and I wind up picking up McDonald's on the way home."
Imagine the shock not just of Donnelly, but of the 35,952 paying eyewitnesses to this amazing event. There they were at 9:30, trying to figure out what to do with the rest of their evening, when normally, they'd be watching -- what? -- the third inning?
"All the restaurant owners around the ballpark ought to send Mike a check, because all those people at that game had dinner at those restaurants," Donnelly said. "He did a lot of good for a lot of people, and he didn't even know it."
We're figuring the odds of anybody sending a check to a man about to collect $123.8 million aren't real good. But if Mike Hampton could pitch a shutout at Coors Field in 2:25, just anything in this world is possible.
Rundown of the week
If you closely perused your daily box scores from Tuesday night, you might have run across this listing of the two double plays turned by the Astros in their game against the Phillies.
The first one looked 100 percent normal:
C. Hayes-Bagwell.
Then there was the second double play of the night, which looked more like the credits at the end of a major motion picture. Here is the actual description, from the actual box score:
Ausmus-Vizcaino-Bagwell-Biggio-Lima-Biggio-Bagwell-Biggio-Ausmus-Vizcaino.
Or, if you're scoring at home:
2-6-3-4-1-4-3-4-2-6.
"I called that phone number today," Astros broadcast-quipmaster Jim Deshaies told Week in Review. "But there's no 263 area code. I was a little disappointed. I was hoping I was going to dial this number and hear, 'You've reached Barnum & Bailey Circus.' "
Technically, this play would be described by baseball experts as a "rundown" in which numerous Astros attempted to retire Phillies baserunner Jimmy Rollins between first and second. In real life, though, it was more like a Harlem Globetrotters routine.
The baseball kept going back and forth. Rollins kept going back and forth. But for a minute there, it was hard to tell if the Astros were trying to tag Rollins out or hope that after about 200 throws, he'd just announce his retirement.
"It was like a game of Hot Potato was going on with the Astros' infielders, and Jimmy Rollins was in the middle, but they were playing two different games," Deshaies said. "He was out there changing directions, and they were throwing the ball back and forth, but they had nothing to do with each other. They made no attempt to tag him. They were just making sure the ball was going in the same general direction he was headed in.
"Biggio, Bagwell and Vizcaino are all veteran guys. But they were like: 'I'm not chasing him. You chase him.' "
What made this a true classic, ready for immediate airing on the Epic Blooper Network, was that not just the infielders got involved. The pitcher (Jose Lima) took a throw. The catcher (Brad Ausmus) started the play with a throw to second, then ended it -- about a half-hour later -- with another throw to second.
And who knows who might have gotten involved had this marathon lasted another few tosses?
"You know how in the Airplane movie, everybody wanted to slap that lady, and they all got in line to slap her, including the nun?" Deshaies reminisced. "It almost came to that -- people coming out of the stands to take a throw, the umpire taking a throw, the popcorn guy.
"It was baseball's version of the Cal-Stanford game, with the band coming on the field during the play.
"Where," wondered Jim Deshaies, "was the tuba player, anyway?"
Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com. Week in Review appears each Friday.
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