Bill Streicher-USA TODAY Sports
This all started because I hate losing. Especially to Ben Lindbergh. Just before the season started, I took part in the annual Effectively Wild preseason predictions game, in which Meg Rowley, the Bens (Lindbergh and Clemens), and I each made 10 bold predictions about the 2024 campaign. The listeners voted on which ones they thought would come true, and we’d be awarded points accordingly — the more outlandish the prediction, the greater the reward if it happened.
One of my 10 predictions was that Spencer Strider would strike out 300 batters in 2024. As my predictions go, this one felt pretty conservative. Strider had struck out an absurd (and league-leading) 281 batters in only 186 2/3 innings last season. I attended Strider’s Opening Day start in which he debuted a new breaking ball and punched out eight Phillies in just five innings. I was feeling good. Then Strider’s elbow started barking in his next start, and by mid-April it was announced that he’d need Tommy John surgery and would take no further part in the 2024 season. Scorekeeper Chris Hanel marked that prediction down as incorrect, and took 42 points from my score. Practically, he was correct to do so. Even at 13.5 K/9, Strider would need to throw at least 200 innings to reach 300 strikeouts, so missing even two or three starts would likely render my prediction incorrect.
Traditional Tommy John takes a year to come back from at an absolute minimum, and even the newfangled internal brace surgery would probably keep Strider out of action into the 2025 regular season. But I bristled at losing a prediction so soon. After all, wasn’t it theoretically possible — theoretically — to line up a game in such a perfect fashion as to allow a pitcher to strike out 300 batters in a single day?
I mean, practically, no. Modern starters get to double-digit strikeouts fairly routinely, but anything more than about 13 punchouts in a game is still noteworthy enough to lead MLB.com the next day. The season high across MLB this year is 15, by Blake Snell. Strider’s career high is 16, set in September 2022. There have been only 16 games of 19 or more strikeouts in all of major league history, and only one in the past 20 years.
And fair enough. There are only 27 outs in a game, right? Wrong. The all-time single-game strikeout record stands at 21, set by Washington Senators righty Tom Cheney in 1962. But he needed to throw 16 innings to do it. Remember, a baseball game can theoretically go on forever. The limiting factor now is no longer the number of available outs, but the number of strikes the hypothetical Strider could throw before he needed to go back under the knife. Cheney’s 21 strikeouts required 63 strikes — 300 strikeouts would require, at minimum, 900 strikes. Not consecutively, of course, but each pitch comes with a cost in fatigue — a cost that compounds over time.
We don’t have pitch counts dating back to the 1800s or anything, but according to Baseball Reference, the record for most strikes in a major league game is 128, shared by Sandy Koufax and Herm Wehmeier. In other words, 14% of the way is the closest that anybody has made it to throwing 900 strikes in a game, that was so long ago ballplayers had names like “Herm Wehmeier.” The only starter to throw 100 strikes in a game in the 21st Century is Randy Johnson. So one of the best and most durable starters of all time got within 800 strikes of the goal — several times, in fact, but most recently 22 years ago.
We’re clearly dealing with theory here. So theoretically, what’s the upper limit pitch count at game strength? “For relievers, it would probably be 70, 75 pitches, just because we haven’t worked that load,” said Phillies righty Orion Kerkering. “But starters, you probably get 130, 140 before it’s like, ‘All right, I’m getting tired.’ ” Kerkering guesses the most he’s ever thrown in a game was about 110 pitches, back in college, when he was a starting pitcher. Kerkering’s teammate, Tanner Banks, says he threw 151 pitches in a high school game once, though his fastball was in the low 80s at the time. “My high school coach would say this didn’t happen, but I have the pitch chart from the game,” Banks said. Rangers righty Grant Anderson got up to about 125 pitches in a high school game once. “That would be, lifetime-wise, by far the highest,” he said. “But now in Texas, they’ve got a rule, where you have your number of pitches capped. Like, they can’t go past 80 or something like that.”
I kept expecting to bump into a pitcher who had some ridiculous 300-pitch outing back in college or high school, but I didn’t realize how far in the future we are. The pitch count discussion has been going on as long as guys like Kerkering, Banks, and Anderson have been alive. The really bad pitcher-abuse cases in college are mostly 10 or 15 years in the past by this point. Almost all of the pitchers I talked to have personally thrown 110 or 120 pitches in a game and figure they could get to somewhere around 150 if they absolutely had to, but anything beyond that is science fiction.
“I think your arm fatigue would just get pretty severe,” said Nationals righty Jacob Barnes. “Once you start getting deeper, I think not only your arm, but your whole body fatigues. So even if you’re lobbing it, just the constant motion and trying to repeat that would be hard.” To say nothing of the fact that pitchers aren’t simply taught to get the ball over the plate, because a get-me-over pitch frequently ends up as a souvenir. “The way the game’s going with stuff in general, effort has to be through the roof, which takes away the command,” said Phillies left-hander Matt Strahm. “You can’t pitch at 91 with a little bit of movement anymore. You can get away with 91 when you have max effort because of the deception it creates… Robert Stock would always tell me in San Diego, ‘You could throw a lot harder, because you throw too many strikes.’ And I always giggled at that, because he’s not wrong, but I’m here because I throw strikes. So it’s that double-edged sword of which [command or stuff] you want to take.”
I asked Strahm if it’s possible to pitch effectively at reduced effort in order and last longer into games. “I don’t know. I mean, this is the best less than 1% of the world competing at the highest level every night,” he said. “I still don’t buy it when starters are like, ‘Yeah, I’m saving a little for the second and third time through.’ I call the BS button right there. You’re competing, so you’re probably giving as close to full effort as you can on every pitch.”
So clearly, with a live batter, 300 strikeouts in a day is impossible. But what if conditions were perfect, and all the pitcher had to do was throw the ball over the plate? This could be accomplished with an agreement between the two teams: The hypothetical Strider’s opponents would not swing, and his teammates would score as many or as few runs as necessary — zero, unless Strider started hitting or walking batters — to keep the game going for at least 100 innings.
How would it change things if the pitcher knew the hitter wasn’t going to swing? If the only challenge was to hit the strike zone? Lobbing the ball to the catcher is still a challenge. In the 10 seasons of the Statcast Era, there have been 2,606 tracked eephus pitches in game action, of which just 36.5% have been strikes. And while the majority of those pitches have come from position players in mop-up duty, the real pitchers hit the zone only 38.9% of the time themselves. (This season, 49.6% of total pitches have been in the strike zone.) Even…
