5 IP, 0 ER, 10 K

by
April 22, 2008

On April 17th, John Smoltz and the Braves shut out the Marlins by a score of 8-0. Still being closely monitored Smoltz lasted just five innings. These five innings were all the Braves needed from Smoltz, though, as he twirled a tremendous game; he did not give up any runs and struck out ten en route to his third win. On Baseball Tonight, Tim Kurkjian mentioned that this was the first time in over 100 years that a pitcher recorded a win while going for the exact line of 5 IP, 0 ER, and 10 K.

Though Retrosheet and the B-R Play Index do not have the game-by-game data capable of checking this assertion it is definitely true that Smoltz is the only pitcher to record this line since 1956. With that in mind I thought it would be fun to look at some more obscure pitching lines. To qualify as obscure there could be no more than three owners of the pitching line in question.

WINS

That is not a typo: Nolan Ryan, in the span of four years and against the same team, posted the same obscure line.

LOSSES

Only three pitchers since 1956 have recorded the 10 IP, 1 ER, 5 H line and all three came in consecutive years between 1967 and 1969.

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These are just some examples of interesting and obscure pitching lines. If anybody else has some good ones post them in the comments. We can have a contest to help discover the most obscure pitching line.





 

Eric is an accountant and statistical analyst from Philadelphia. He also covers the Phillies at Phillies Nation and can be found here on Twitter.

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David AppelmanFanGraphs Staff
17 years ago

The funny thing about pitching lines is, they’re all kind of obscure. If you look at just Wins, Losses, K’s, BB’s and ERs, there have been over 26,000 different pitching lines for starting pitchers since 1974 (sans 1999).

The most common pitching line by far is some variety of the 9 inning complete game. There are over 10,000 pitching lines that have only happened once and 17,000 in all that have happened less than three times.

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