As most folks know, in baseball, it’s one, two, three strikes and you’re out. A strikeout is a fairly common way for an at bat to end, occurring many times each game. Striking out the side is a rarer event, wherein a pitcher strikes out all three batters they face in an inning.1 Much, much rarer still is an “immaculate inning”, which occurs when a pitcher throws nine straight strikes and strikes out all three batters. In Major League Baseball’s history of millions of innings, just over 100 of them have been immaculate.
Earlier this week, the Houston Astros managed not one, but two, immaculate innings in one game. Hapless Texas Rangers Nathaniel Lowe, Ezequiel Duran, and Brad Miller went down on nine straight strikes in the second inning, for the 107th immaculate inning of all time. Then, incredibly, the very same batters did the same in the seventh for the 108th, and most recent, immaculate inning.
They say that every time you go to the ballpark, you’re going to see something you’ve never seen before. If you were a Rangers fan at the game on June 15, 2022, you saw something no one’s ever seen before, and it wasn’t great for you.
Footnotes:
Wikipedia states: “There is a disagreement as to the exact definition of striking out the side. Some feel a pitcher should be credited with striking out the side when all three outs in the inning were obtained via the strikeout, regardless of what other hitters that the pitcher has faced have done.” Those people are wrong.↩︎
