The Atlanta Braves, Chris Martin, and the oddity of the Immaculate Inning

Baseball is such a wonderfully deep and often statistically nutty sport.  If you just pay attention you might find something that you’ve never seen before.

Statistics can show trends of how events can be expected to occur over time.  They can also surprise you – especially in short spurts.  The Atlanta Braves saw one of the latter on Wednesday night as one of their new relief pitchers shut down the Phillies in a special way.

It’s called the ‘Immaculate Inning’… a feat in which a pitcher toes the rubber to start an inning, throws 9 pitches, records 9 strikes, records 3 strikeouts, and then returns to the dugout.

One inning of perfection.

Chris Martin pulled off the feat during the 7th inning on Wednesday – silencing the bats of Cesar Hernandez, Jay Bruce, and Logan Morrison in succession.

There were a smattering of fouls balls and foul tips, but they all count as strikes, and that puts Martin’s name into some fairly rare company.

How Rare?

Honestly, you might think it wouldn’t be that rare a feat. Baseball’s been played for a lot of years… 9 pitches and 3 strikeouts?  Given that this is the job of a pitcher – to throw strikes – you’d think that it would happen quite a bit.

Guess again.

In the recorded history of major league baseball (back to 1871, by baseball-reference.com’s reckoning), there have been a total of 3,930,715 innings played… not counting last night.

Yet how many Immaculate Innings?  That might depend on who’s data you subscribe to.

Baseball Almanac lists 98 (before Martin’s feat makes it 99).

Wikipedia counts 100 of them.

Those who have done this are an interesting lot.  A lot of Hall of Famers.  A lot of average Joes, too. In general, there’s a bunch of “stuff” guys in the list… after all, to make this happen you pretty much need to have ‘swing and miss’ pitches in your arsenal.

Lefty Grove did it twice.  So did Chris Sale and Nolan Ryan.  Sandy Koufax has 3 to his credit.

Randy Johnson and Max Scherzer also have 2 apiece.  Like Martin, Max also got Cesar Hernandez to begin his terrific trio of K’s the first time he did it…

As an aside:  Hernandez has joined an even rarer fraternity: he’s a 2nd ‘double victim’ of an Immaculate Inning in major league history… along with Hall of Famer Carlton Fisk, former Red Sox Ellis Burks, Gregory Polanco, and Khalil Greene.  Polanco is the only ‘hat trick’ member – a 3-time “I-I” refugee.

Craig Kimbrel has one – as a Red Sox.  Stephen Strasburg did it earlier this year, as did Josh Hader.

Other names you’d recognize from recent years:  Cole Hamels, Wade Miley, Kenley Jansen, Rex Brothers (!), Orel Hershiser, Delan Betances, Brandon McCarthy, Felix Hernandez, Pedro Martinez, Ron Guidry, Roger Clemens, Rob Dibble, Bob Gibson, Ben Sheets, David Cone, Pete Harnish, Pedro Borbon, and Bruce Sutter.

Chris Martin may not quite be the first name you think of from those categories, but he is carrying a strikeout rate well above 10-per-9-innings this season… and it was precise location (a called third strike) rather than a swing that finished off his 7th inning on Wednesday.

The Braves Involved

Before we do that review of history… here’s Martin’s 9-pitch “mini gem”:

• 3 fouls
• 2 check-swing strikes (1 tipped into the glove for a K)
• 2 whiffs
• a called strike painted on the low outside corner

The very first time a Braves pitcher pulled this off was also the very first time the feat had ever been done – and documented – in a major league contest:  June 4, 1889 by John Clarkson of the Boston Beaneaters (the same franchise that became the Braves).

Like several others on the list, he’s a Hall of Famer, too.

The rest of the Braves’ history with this event is as follows:

• Joe Oeschger, Sept. 8, 1921 (also the 4th time ever)
• Tony Cloninger, June 15, 1963
• Joey McLaughlin, Sept. 11, 1979 (same date as last night… 40 years prior)
• Buddy Carlyle, July 6, 2007

The last times that Atlanta has been the victims of an Immaculate Inning as these:

• July 8, 2011.  Juan Perez of the Phillies [of course] struck out Jason Heyward, Nate McLouth, and Wilkin Ramirez in the 10th inning
• Sept 13, 1998.  Jesus Sanchez of the Marlins  K’d Tony Graffanino, Greg Maddux, and current Braves’ bench coach Walt Weiss.
• Sept 2, 1998 (what’s up with all of these September dates?).  Randy Johnson of the Astros  K’d Javy Lopez, Andruw Jones, and Greg Colbrunn.
• October 5, 1914.  Pat Ragan of the Dodgers struck out Possum Whitted, Butch Schmidt, Red Smith of the 1914 Miracle Braves.  Boston still won 15-2 that day.

Several other Braves or ex-Braves have been on the wrong end of this, including Matt Joyce, Fred McGriff, Mallex Smith, Emilio Bonifacio, Garret Anderson, and Terry Pendleton.

Oh, and the last pitcher to do this before tonight?  Kevin Gausman… as a Cincinnati Red.  Weird.

This event has definitely ramped up in frequency as strikeouts have been more the norm and not the exception in this sport… roughly 90% of these have occurred since 1953 started… and roughly 2/3rds or so since 1970.

Still:  it’s a noteworthy phenomenon, and Chris Martin now puts his name alongside some very interesting others in the history book… all because he threw strikes.