An
obscure, but worthy, baseball record

It's not every day that a 101-year-old record gets broken, but one of the
great things about baseball is that there are some days like that. Sunday was
one of those days.
Rookie Oakland A's reliever Brad Ziegler pitched two shutout innings in a
6-5 win over the Texas Rangers Sunday, along the way breaking the record for
the most scoreless innings at the start of a career. Ziegler, who made his
big-league debut May 31, has tossed 27 frames without allowing a run. The old
record of 25, which Ziegler had tied Friday, was set by George McQuillan of the
Philadelphia Phillies in 1907.
It's not exactly 756 home runs or a 21-strikeout game or a 56-game hitting
streak, but it's also not the kind of obscure, made-up record that has become
fashionable in the age of the easily accessible database. My all-time favorite
along this line is the flurry of news stories two
years ago about Albert Pujols setting a record for the fewest games to hit
his first 19 home runs in a season.
I still can't get over that. Fastest man to 19 home runs in a season. Not
even 20. Nineteen. That was news.
Unlike with that "record," it's at least imaginable that someone,
somewhere, at some idle moment in the last 101 years, actually had the thought
"I wonder what the record is for consecutive shutout innings at the start
of a career?" It might have happened on a long bus ride in 1953, or maybe
in a dentist's waiting room in 1968, the year of the pitcher, when some rookie
began his career with a shutout and was taking the hill for his second start.
Rollie Fingers, Andy Messersmith, Jack Billingham and Dock Ellis all made
their debuts that year. Four pretty good pitchers. None of them made it to
seven shutout innings to start their career.
Ziegler is a 28-year-old side-armer who has survived two skull fractures and
a stint in independent
baseball with the Schaumberg Flyers. A 20th round pick in 2003 -- by the
Phillies! Irony, TV people! -- Ziegler's never been anyone's idea of a hot
prospect, which is another great thing about this record and about baseball. A
guy can struggle along in the minors for a long time, be an afterthought, and
then all of a sudden, he can get hot and do something nobody's done for 101
freakin' years.
Think of all the guys who've started their careers in the last 101 years,
which includes about a dozen years of the deadball era as well as the current
era of the flame-throwing relief specialist who can just let it fly an inning
at a time and never have to see the same batter twice in a game. Ziegler's
beaten 'em all at this one thing. A nobody. Baseball's not unique in having
that quality, but it has more of it than any other sport.
A long shutout-innings streak is a little bit like a long hitting streak. There's
skill involved, of course, but there's also a lot of luck necessary.
Ziegler has hardly been dominant, striking out only 13 and walking six in
those 27 innings. Opposing hitters have an absurdly low .216 batting average on
balls in play -- fair balls that aren't home runs -- against him. The league
average hovers around .300 -- it's .295 in the A.L. at the moment -- and large
variations from that are mostly a matter of luck.
Ziegler also hasn't been perfect. It's not as though he hasn't allowed any runs
to score at all. They just haven't been his own runs. In fact, on Friday, the
night he tied the record, he came into the game and promptly gave up an RBI
single to the first man he faced. That run was charged to the previous pitcher.
There have been a total of 16 men on base when Ziegler has entered games during
the streak. Four of them have scored.
And the streak might not mean much of anything. In other words, sell high,
fantasy players who play in leagues that use middle relievers!
Pitchers with unusual deliveries, like the side-arming Ziegler, often baffle
opposing hitters the first time or two around the league. But major league
hitters catch up. They adjust, and then they talk to each other. Oddball types
have a way of crashing back down to earth.
Unlike Ziegler, who only has to face hitters once per outing, George
McQuillan put together his shutout-innings streak as a starting pitcher. He was
also only 22, not 28, and kind of a hotshot. He won 23 games the next year,
though he lost 17, and then settled in to a career as a journeyman with the
Phillies, Reds, Pirates and Indians.
He was finished at 33 and largely forgotten until this past week, when his Baseball-Reference
page, available for sponsorship for just $5, probably started getting
multiple hits per day for the first time ever.
See what baseball can do? It can wake the dead. A hundred and one years from
now, some three-handed lefty from the planet Tralfamadore will use his
cold-fusion slider to toss 30 straight shutout innings at the beginning of his
career, and we -- well, you -- will say, "Brad Ziegler? Never heard of
him, but damn, something nobody's done for 101 years. That's one of the great
things about baseball, right there."
Then you'll GoogleYahooMicrosoftStarbucks Ziegler, find this story and
think, "Wow, writing's a lot better now."

― King Kaufman