Pitching Stamina

By Lew Freedman

The pitcher shifts into his motion, rears back and fires. Presumably, the ball flows out of his hand and flies to the plate, where the hitter swings and misses at air and the catcher gloves it.

For the mortals in the stands who wear glasses, the ball was never seen from the moment it left the hurler’s hand to the moment the catcher dug it out of his mitt. A glance at the scoreboard tells watchers that the pitch traveled 95 mph.

A couple more of those rocket throws and the hitter walks slowly back to the dugout. He has waved his bat at a mirage and waved bye-bye to the fans.

Fans love the Ks. As strikeouts mount, eyes widen. Strikeouts are taken as evidence that a fast pitcher has his good stuff going. Radar gun readings confirm what the eye doesn’t see. Helpless batters provide additional evidence.

Sports fans revel in demonstrations of power. In football, it might mean a tackler separating a ball carrier from the ball. In hockey, it might mean checking a winger into the boards. In basketball, it might mean a slam dunk.

Strikeouts do impress. We acknowledge that many of Major League baseball’s hallowed career pitching feats will never be approached. No one will match Cy Young’s 511 victories (or, for that matter, his 316 losses). The record for complete games will stand as long as relief pitchers live.

What seems inexplicable is how modern-day pitchers not only have climbed up the all-time list for strikeouts, but how they have taken it over. This seems counterintuitive. If pitchers throw fewer complete games and fewer innings, shouldn’t they strike out fewer batters?

From Nolan Ryan (5,714) to Roger Clemens (4,672), from Randy Johnson (4,636-plus) to Steve Carlton (4,136), the top men on the strikeout list are basically of our time. The Braves’ John Smoltz earlier this season became the 16th pitcher to surpass 3,000 Ks. The guy who held the strikeout record for decades, Walter Johnson, has faded into the pack. Johnson’s 3,508 career strikeouts are now ninth on the list. The long-deceased Johnson retired in 1927, but the other 15 pitchers on the 3,000-strikeout list are still alive and five are active players.

Clearly, Nolan Ryan was a singular phenomenon, but how to account for the crowd that has surrounded and supplanted Johnson?

Veteran major leaguer Billy Pierce, who won 211 games in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, has one theory. Pierce, now 81, in person or on TV, watches dozens of games each season.  What’s the explanation, Billy? Pierce laughed and placed an imaginary bat in his hands, then mimicked swinging wildly for the fences. Translation: Modern hitters will swing at anything. Swing and miss, that is.

Perhaps. Of the top 15 single-season strikeout totals by a batter, nine of them belong to active players, and the record of 199 Ks was set in 2007 by Philadelphia’s Ryan Howard.

Certainly, the pitchers who have fanned the most hitters are also pitchers who won a lot of games and stayed in the game a long time. Strikeout capability could be just one hallmark of their greatness (in Greg Maddux’s 3,200-strikeouts-and-counting case, even a byproduct) and we simply have been blessed with a unique run of terrific pitchers whose careers overlapped.

It might very well be that no pitcher will ever challenge Nolan Ryan’s strikeout total and Ryan will keep company with Cy Young forever.

(Lew Freedman is a Chicago-based sportswriter and the author of the forthcoming “Chicago White Sox Game of My Life from Sports Publishing LLC.)