The Cardinals had their own outstanding pitching performance last night with Adam Wainwright’s outing against the Reds. But we’d like to cross leagues for a moment to recognize a truly historic endeavor. With the pitch-to-contact philosophy of the Cardinals, and with erstwhile Redbird Todd Wellemeyer now plying his Three-True-Outcomes trade for the Giants, Cardinal fans don’t witness many pure power pitching efforts like the one Rich Harden turned in Wednesday night. Check out his line:

You’re reading that right: In fewer than four innings, Harden struck out eight, walked five, yielded a homer and dotted a guy. That means that of the 19 Toronto batters he faced, only four of them put the ball in play. That’s an uncanny 79% of his batters who did not put the ball in play.

We’re still researching, but we’ve found only Hideo Nomo’s April 3, 1998 18-batter, five-walk, nine-K night (78%) and Randy Johnson’s Sept. 16, 1993 game, in which he struck out 15, walked six and plunked one of the 30 batters he faced (73%), to come close. We defy anyone to find a performance of at least that duration in which fielders were less involved.

The legendary Satchel Paige once famously waved in his outfielders in a show of confidence. But we doubt that even he had as much reason to do so as Harden did last night.

UPDATE: We have a new leader. Ryan Dempster, who turned in a beauty of a start last night (nine strikeouts and two walks in six innings) once had an 81% BNIP (balls not in play) percentage. Back on Aug. 20, 1999 pitching for the Marlins he struck out eight, walked seven and allowed two home runs to only 21 Astro batters.

UPDATE 2: Wezen Ball found that Jorge de la Rosa had 82% balls-not-in-play % on 6/10/04 (but only 17 BF). Dempster still has best (81%), min. 18 BF.

This entry was posted by Pip on Thursday, April 8th, 2010 at 9:43 am and is filed under analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.