As the foul pop-up veered toward the home dugout at Nationals Park on Wednesday night, the crowd, already on its feet, let out a gasp. It was a tense, one-run game in the bottom of the ninth. Every out counted. First baseman Ryan Zimmerman ran onto the warning track dirt, hit the fence, glove outstretched.
"Don't catch it!" a fan behind me screamed. "Let it go!"
Not what you'd normally hear when your team is clinging to a tight lead and the opponent is threatening. But this wasn't something normal. This crowd wanted more than one more step toward a May victory. That fan - like me and tens of thousands of others - wanted every out to come via a strikeout, a running tally that had gained steam innings before as the K's began stretching along the scoreboard in centerfield. Max Scherzer was on the verge of doing something special, something so rare it had happened in Major League Baseball just four times previously. He was sitting on 19 strikeouts, one away from tying Roger Clemens and Randy Johnson and Kerry Wood, two away from setting a new record. The pop-up fell harmlessly into the stands to wild cheers. When the third strike came, Nationals Park exploded with sound.
Amazingly, it was the second time I've seen a pitcher throw a 20-strikeout game live - 20 years apart - something I imagine puts me in some pretty limited company.
That's part of what makes baseball so fun, the randomness of it. You never know when a Wednesday night interleague game will create the rarest of sporting drama, when a last-minute decision to hit the ballpark will yield a lifelong story, when greatness will appear and bring chills of excitement to a dreary and drizzly May night.
While baseball purists know in their hearts that the only statistics that matter are which team has more runs at the end of each game, baseball is so much more complex than that. There's a number, a statistic, a formula to explain everything, and the game elicits a range of emotions from tragic to euphoric, sometimes in the same game, the same inning, or even the same at-bat.
Scherzer's 20 strikeouts - and 3-2 complete-game victory - amounted to far more than one tick in the win column in May. It brought the rarest version of excitement to Nationals Park, it brought the fans to their feet, it evoked history in the very early part of a promising season.
More rare than a perfect game, a no-hitter, hitting for the cycle or almost any other feat in baseball, this has happened just five times in approximately 210,000 regular season games. The chance of seeing that - experiencing it - just once is .00238 percent. As a fan, the odds of seeing it twice are astronomical.
It was pure, dumb luck each time. Wednesday night was a random game I chose as part of a season ticket group, a good interleague matchup with the chance (fulfilled) of seeing Jordan Zimmermann return to Nats Park.
The first time was on a lark, when in September 1996 as a college student I decided to head to Tiger Stadium with a couple friends to see my hometown Red Sox during a late-season, meaningless game between also-ran teams. The Tigers were amid a 109-loss season and 36 games out of first place. The Red Sox were barely over .500 and were 8.5 games out with 11 games to go. Clemens, the superstar, was 9-12 with a 3.67 ERA, one of just two losing seasons in his career (and, coincidentally, his last with the Sox).
I went to see Clemens pitch in what should have been a pretty ho-hum game. Also on a Wednesday night, we walked up to the stadium and bought $15 tickets that I recall came with a free hot dog and a drink. The official attendance that day was listed at more than 8,700, but in my memory that's pretty difficult to believe. Our cheers echoed around the aging field. One Tigers fan stood in dead center for most of the game screaming "Buddy Bell!" repeatedly, taunting the team's manager in what must have been a very long first year.
But extraordinary feats can turn meaningless September games into historical markers. As Clemens mowed through the Tigers lineup, the opposing crowd started to stir. They started to boo groundouts and flyouts. They realized what was happening.
The pressure that builds, watching someone do something that almost never happens, pulls the game along in slow motion. Each pitch has meaning, each batted ball - fair or foul - could send things off course. In a twist of baseball fate, singles, doubles or even home runs (as in the case with Scherzer) allow the strikeout quest to continue.
Leading off the ninth inning in Detroit on that September night in 1996, Alan Trammell stood in against Clemens, who at that point was sitting on 19 strikeouts. When Trammell hit a weak pop fly toward Mo Vaughn at first base, the fans were screaming at him to drop it, let it go. Afterall, it was a 4-0 game that meant little - if anything - to both teams. Let it fall. Let's see history.
He caught it for out number one. After a single and a deep fly out, Clemens ended the game on a swinging strike, getting 20Ks for the second time in his career, 10 years after the first. I thought it was something I'd never see again. I have retold the story many times. It took 20 years to match it.
There is something particularly magical about pitching brilliance, and it's a special kind of game when you're waiting for your team to take the field so you can see the ace start throwing again. Unlike a perfect game or a no-hitter, which so often rely on spectacular fielding plays behind the pitcher, a 20-strikeout game is a solitary display of power, finesse, artistry, gamesmanship.
It doesn't happen often, to the tune of once about every 42,000 games. To me, twice in a lifetime. (Incredibly, Tigers Manager Brad Ausmus has been on the losing end of a 20-strikeout game as a player or manager three times - those two games and one other, in 1998, when he was on the Houston Astros and Kerry Wood hit the mark for the Cubs.)
As Scherzer stormed around the mound Wednesday night, it gave me chills. Seeing Nationals Park rise on two-strike counts, the fans stay to the final pitch, rallying behind one man doing something few have done before, the electricity of baseball lighting up the city - that's the best kind of baseball there is.
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