rewrite this content and keep HTML tags
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 so, an eephus pitch in a game is still thrown with a hitter in mind. If it was a certainty that the hitter wouldn’t swing, how many strikes could a pitcher throw?
“That’s what I’m going through in my head right now,” said Giants left-hander Kyle Harrison. “Even lobbing it over, you can miss. So I think I’d have a few walks sprinkled in there.”
But could he still throw enough strikes to strike out 300 batters? Even if it took something like 1,100 total pitches?
“If that’s what it takes, I could do it,” Harrison said. “I’d have to get back to my soft-toss days… When I was a kid, I threw BP forever to my little brother.”
“I’m going to walk a guy every once in a while,” said Rockies prospect Brody Brecht. “Hopefully, I can get through a few before I do that. I don’t know. I mean, 900 pitches… If you know they’re not swinging, I mean, shoot, you can throw it underhand.”
And there’s the second breakthrough: The 900 strikes required to get to 300 strikeouts in a day would have to be legal pitches, but they wouldn’t have to resemble anything like a typical major league fastball.
“I remember training in the offseason years ago, and I’d do several pitching lessons,” Banks said. “I’d do my throwing, which ended up being 100, maybe 150 throws in a day. Then I’d go and do three or four pitching lessons that I would catch. So I’d warm up with them, then I’d catch their bullpens — it was maybe 400 throws tops, but it was lobs. I think with a combination of all of the styles of throwing you could get it done. It wouldn’t be pretty, and you’d definitely be sore, but I think you could get it done.”
It’s been settled science for decades that part of what makes pitching so destructive to the body is the overhand throwing motion. Pitching underhand is far more natural and less stressful, which is why softball pitchers can rack up enormous pitch counts. Last season, 22 Division I softball pitchers threw 200 or more innings. The national leader, Florida freshman Keagan Rothrock, appeared in 50 of the Gators’ 69 games and threw 262 innings. The last big league pitcher to throw that many innings in a season, which is more than twice as long, was Roy Halladay in 2003.
Now, softball uses a bigger ball, a shorter distance between the rubber and the plate, and a flat pitching circle instead of a mound. It is, to paraphrase Ted Stryker, an entirely different kind of pitching altogether.
But the pitchers I talked to got more bullish on the idea of a 900-strike day once they considered throwing underhand as an option. I’m skeptical that even professional baseball players could hit the zone reliably throwing underhand, but perhaps I’m underestimating their athletic prowess.
Strahm, who said, “My shoulder hurts just thinking about” throwing 900 pitches at full effort, was absolutely certain he could complete the task underhand.
“Cornhole’s my shit,” Strahm explained.
The final breakthrough in this puzzle came courtesy of Mitch White, who’s currently pitching in the Brewers’ farm system. White estimated that he had a maximum of 150 to 180 pitches in him under normal conditions, but if he were allowed to lob the ball up there without fear of it getting hit, he had a shot at the mythical 300-strikeout day.
“Yeah, I could do it,” White said. “But I feel like one of our BP throwers would probably be better for it. They’re used to throwing that much.”
I felt foolish for not having thought of that myself. If you need someone to strike out 300 batters in six months, Strider is an ideal choice. But throwing 900 strikes in one 100-inning game requires a different kind of pitcher.
Batting practice pitchers train not to miss bats, but to put the ball in the zone: Reliably, repeatably, and in high volume.
One name immediately sprung to mind: Dave Jauss. You might not know the name, but you’ve definitely seen his work.
Jauss, 67, has worked in baseball for more than 40 years, in a variety of front office, coaching, and managerial roles in college, the minor and major leagues, and LIDOM. To give a sense of his experience, I originally miscounted the number of organizations Jauss has worked for because he’s been with both the Montreal Expos and Washington Nationals.
In 2021, Jauss — then the Mets’ bench coach — was Pete Alonso’s pitcher for Alonso’s second Home Run Derby title. Having watched Kris Bryant get waxed in the 2015 Derby as his dad struggled to find the zone, I’ve long believed that winning a home run-hitting contest is as much an accomplishment for the pitcher as it is the hitter. Jauss stridently disagreed when I put the proposition to him — sometimes the most accomplished masters of a craft are the most humble — but if there were a Hall of Fame for batting practice pitchers, he’d be in it.
“I get guys coming to see me, and they don’t know I’m throwing,” Jauss said. “And they see me throw my first pitch and they say, ‘Oh, that’s Jauss!’ because my throwing mechanics are really good.”
Jauss is one of the pitchers for MLB’s Home Run Derby X, a global exhibition tour featuring baseball and softball stars; he’s been throwing for so long that he’s got it down to a science. By day, Jauss is a special assistant in Washington’s front office, but when I reached out to the Nats to set up this interview, I was cautioned that he might not get back to me right away, because he was busy throwing batting practice to the Double-A Harrisburg Senators that afternoon.
Not wanting to beat around the bush, I came right out and asked if a 300-strikeout day was possible, and Jauss immediately said yes, if the hitters weren’t swinging. In fact, he said he’d actually thrown a 100-inning game of sorts earlier in his career.
“It was a fundraiser when I was coaching in college back in 1986 or 1987, and I threw the 100-inning game for both teams,” Jauss said. The catch: The count started 1-2 to each batter. “I threw for maybe two hours and 15 minutes. It definitely wasn’t 900 pitches. I throw, on a normal BP, probably about 10 to 12 pitches a minute. So if that’s 12 per minute, for an hour, that’s 720 pitches.”
At a rate of one pitch every five seconds, it takes 75 minutes to throw 900 pitches. Accounting for the occasional misfire, and a slightly less grueling pace — say one pitch every six seconds instead of five — that session stretches out to something closer to 90 minutes. Which sounds like a lot of throwing to me, even at less than maximum effort. That’d be a long session, according to Jauss, but doable for any professional batting practice pitcher.
So, by changing the context from an actual game to a BP session, the 900-strike challenge goes from impossible to doable in less than an hour and a half. Sort of.
Jauss, like a softball pitcher, doesn’t throw from a major league mound. He throws from a ramp, behind a screen, set up between 45 and 52 feet from the plate. And he says the reason he can throw so many pitches, accurately, is because he’s honed his delivery for that specific task.
“I don’t have to throw 60 feet, 6 inches. I don’t have to throw 120 feet from the hole, or 260 feet from right field,” he said. “I always take it as a cross-seam [fastball] around the horseshoe and on the laces. I can spin the ball right, I feel right on my fingers, and so those things really help the BP guy. Whereas all those other things, for the pitcher, is going to add a whole lot more stress.”
Jauss mentioned that not having to control the running game or field their position — nobody on the other team is swinging, after all — would help any pitcher work faster and longer without getting tired. But one aspect of this experiment we can’t change is the literal rules of the game. Jauss might be able to throw 700 strikes an hour, but he’d only be able to throw nine at a time before he’d have to sit down and wait for the other half of the inning to play out.
Of the pitchers I talked to, Barnes was most enthusiastic about going down the rabbit hole and trying to consider every factor in whether a 300-strikeout day was possible. And the inevitability of fatigue-induced mechanical collapse was the thing that gave him serious doubts.
“It would take most of the day, I would say, in order to be able to get that many strikes,” Barnes said. “You would probably have to take a couple 10-minute, 15-minute breaks, to try to reset and get back out there.”
Inning breaks would afford the pitcher some rest, but not 10 or 15 minutes under the boundaries of this experiment. Conventional wisdom says that a longer break between pitches allows the pitcher to recover, but within this context, Jauss thinks slowing down and resting between innings would do more harm than good.
“It would mess with your rhythm,” Jauss said. “Your ability to throw every five or six seconds is the reason it works.”
Jauss brought up a recent Home Run Derby X trip to Durham, North Carolina, where he had to throw several rounds of the competition at intervals of between one and three hours.
“I got up like four times over seven hours,” Jauss said. “I was fine throwing the final, but I woke up on Sunday morning and my wife goes, ‘Hey, listen, you really look like you’re 67.’ I felt about 87. But it was the ups and downs and the time in between. So our rhythm is one of the things that really helps. That extra 10 seconds [between pitches] would not help.”
Jauss said that if he had to throw that many pitches from a 60-foot, 6-inch mound, he could do it, “as long as it was a BP.”
But even the pseudo-game situation this hypothetical demands comes with variables.
“The mound slope makes it tougher on your body — not your arm, but the body,” Jauss said. He gleefully recounted watching Kevin Brown throw a 70-pitch bullpen in the basement of Camden Yards during a rain delay in less than 10 minutes without even breathing heavily, a feat Jauss attributes to Brown’s incredible fitness and conditioning. But once the body gets tired, the arm follows.
“Even though you’re not going to full effort, it’s still trying to repeat the same thing constantly throughout the game,” Barnes said. “I think that would be where the issue is — when your legs start getting tired. Does your arm catch up? It’d be a little harder than a lot of people think.”
Every pitcher I talked to seemed to at least find the question amusing, I think partly because pitchers tend to love nerding about their craft, and partly because everyone loves to contemplate a ludicrous hypothetical. But there was also an undercurrent of “I bet you can’t do this” inherent in the question, and that raises the competitive hackles of an athlete and inspires them to bet that they could throw six weeks’ worth of strikes in an afternoon. Nobody ever ate 50 eggs, and so on.
“I was there in Pittsburgh when Joe Musgrove started the game with 21 straight strikes,” Jauss said. “Players can do more than they think when they don’t have to take care of a running game, change their motion, change their timing, their delivery.”
The only way to find out for sure is to try.
“It’d be interesting if someone actually would do it,” Barnes said. “I’m curious what route they’d go with it, like if they’d try to do it all at once, or take breaks, and how successful they are at actually getting to [900 strikes].”
Perhaps he’d like to be the one to try, I suggested.
Barnes laughed and walked off. I guess I’m not getting those points back after all.
