The San Francisco Giants entered some rarified air Tuesday night by striking out 17 and walking 0 Blue Jays
In Brady’s excellent recap from last night, he noted what got pointed out on the broadcast: the San Francisco Giants have won 10 straight games on the road (in the same season) for the very first time. It last happened in 1952 when they were the New York Giants and coincided with a 12-4 start to their season, a full 10 years before the National League had a 162-game schedule. But that wasn’t the biggest bit of team or baseball history last night.
A 10-game road winning streak has happened now 260 times in baseball history, stretching back as far as 1901 but happening as many as 65 times since the turn of the century. I didn’t bother to look and see how many of those streaks are ones that stretched across seasons, though. That this is the first time it’s happened for the San Francisco team is more a quirk of history than anything else; the 2002 team started a streak that carried into 2003, after all. The Giants join 20 other active franchises with a single season streak.
The rarer accomplishment, the one I shouldn’t have waited to drop until the third paragraph, the absolutely astounding, stupendous, damn right impressive record set last night was what the pitching staff did in its opener configuration: 17 strikeouts, 0 walks.
Before last night, a team had struck out at least 17 while walking exactly 0 batters just 40 times in the history of baseball, all since 1968. It has actually been more of a trend this century, with the Giants’ feat being the 27th time it’s happened since 2000. That’s just the regular season. It’s never happened in the postseason, and there’s been just 21 playoff games to even have a minimum of 17 strikeouts pitched.
But back to the regular season. The Pirates just had a 17 strikeout, 0 walk game on May 14— eerily similar in that they did it on the road (against the Orioles) while also allowing 8 hits as the Giants did last night. But this is the first time a Giants team of any era has ever done it. Christy Mathewson has the franchise record for strikeouts in a game with 16, and in that one he still walked 3 batters. Gaylord Perry’s 15 strikeout game in 1966 featured a pair of walks.
This is only the 24th time the Giants franchise has struck out 17 or more in a regular season game, too; but, last night was only the third time ever that they struck out 17 without needing extra innings to do it. The most recent time was in 2020 and before that was 2000.
(Unrelated, but related: the Giants have struck out at least 17 in a postseason game, too, but that was the 18-inning game against the Nationals in 2014, which they won thanks to current Blue Jay Brandon Belt’s home run. They also walked 4 and had 1 intentional walk.)
Does the historical bunching of this feat make it less impressive? I’m saying no (for now), because at worst it shows that the 2023 Giants are pitching like their peers and at best it shows off the pitching staff’s dynamism. This really shows off the range of talents across the staff and why their opener/bullpen game/bulk guy/whatever you want to name it strategy has worked the past couple of years now.
In between that at worst/at best dichotomy is the truth that 7 of the 27 games this century have needed extra innings to get to 17+ strikeouts (9 of the 41 have needed extras). That does sort of make the zero walks part of the accomplishment more impressive in those cases, and then there’s this: Matt Cain’s perfect game featured 14 strikeouts in 9 innings by just one dude. Max Scherzer had 17 strikeouts in 2015 for his perfect game.
Perfect games are objectively better than whatever you want to call what the Giants did last night… “a K party,” “A no-walker,” etc. … but I’m compelled to point out that there have been 132 times when a team has struck out 14 with 0 BB and 113 times where a team recorded 15 or 16 strikeouts and 0 BB, so those lesser K totals are a bit more common when compared to just 23 perfect games in MLB history; but, again, there have been only 41 games where a team has struck out 17 and walked 0 — not quite, but almost as rare as a perfect game. What the Giants did is a very big deal!
And it wasn’t easy. Let’s look at the Blue Jays as an opponent.
I mentioned in the series preview that they’re a tough team to strikeout, with a 20.4% strikeout rate heading into the 3-game set that was good for 2nd in the AL (4th in MLB). Their 8.5% walk rate was more pedestrian (21st in MLB, 10th in AL), but their 30.3% rate on swinging on pitches outside of the zone was 2nd-best in the AL and tied with the Giants for 10th in MLB in that category. They were top 10 in MLB (top 5 in the AL) in making contact with pitches in the zone, too (86.8%).
The Giants’ 8.8 K/9 was not a rate that made you think they had a dominant strikeout performance in them, either. 4th-best in the NL, okay, but it was a rate just 13th in MLB. Toronto’s 9.4 is 5th in MLB!
About the only thing you could say about this one that could really stand as a mark against the Giants is that the Blue Jays have had two similar games already this season: their seventh game of the season was a 6-3 win over the Royals in Kansas City in which they struck out 12 times (9 times by Jordan Lyles!) and walked 0 zero times. On June 19, the Marlins used four pitchers to strike out 10 Jays, walking none for an 11-0 route in Miami.
I’m just not going to hold that against the Giants. Ryan Walker hasn’t been all that great subbing in for John Brebbia as the team’s opener. Coming into last night’s game, he’d walked 4 and given up 5 hits (2 home runs) in 3.2 IP, and even in his inning he had had to pitch through runners at the corner following a leadoff double and then a single. He struck out Brandon Belt, Vlad Guerrero Jr., and Matt Chapman with this 15-pitch sequence:
95 mph sinker
96 mph sinker
96 mph sinker
95 mph sinker
95 mph sinker
84 mph slider
85 mph slider
96 mph sinker
85 mph slider
96 mph sinker
96 mph sinker
96 mph sinker
95 mph sinker
97 mph sinker
97 mph sinker
Alex Wood added 7 strikeouts in 5 innings all while Kevin Gausman racked up strikeouts (he finished with 12 in 6 IP). He didn’t do anything different, stuff-wise, but he managed to spot his pitches better than in his last start and had a great tempo. Michael Conforto being unable to handle a rocket off Daulton Varsho’s bat in the 7th could’ve blemished Wood’s record, but Tyler Rogers proceeded to strike out a pair following a groundout with this remarkable 11-pitch sequence:
73 mph slider
74 mph slider
72 mph slider
82 mph fastball
72 mph slider
72 mph slider
72 mph slider
72 mph slider
73 mph slider
73 mph slider
82 mph fastball
It must be so cool to be a relief pitcher when everything is going well, because having one dominant pitch and another quality pitch that hitter’s have to worry about seems like that’s really all you need to be above averagely successful at retiring major league hitters. The Giants have stacked their pitching staff with these creatures and sometimes they daisy chain them in the same game and it becomes just an awful experience for the opposition.
After watching Giants relievers dominate the league for the past 58 days, I declare that it is poor and lazy analysis to say that the Giants are “making it look easy.” They’re doing something that’s extremely difficult — dominating the league most of the time across a pen that goes seven arms deep — and achieving a nearly perfect score. It’s not like bullshitting an extemporaneous public speech or an essay the night before it’s due. It takes careful planning and peak performance.
The Giants set a franchise mark with a signature game in the midst of an historic run.
I hope we’re all impressed.