Calling the Pen: Remembering when 21 strikeouts was a big deal

The futility of the Chicago White Sox in their 2-0 loss to the Cleveland Guardians on Saturday night made me think of a night in Baltimore in 1962. It was the September night when the Washington Senators’ Tom Cheney struck out 21 Orioles in a 2-1 win.

One notable difference: It took the White Sox only nine innings to strike out 21 times; it took the Orioles 16 innings. Incredibly, Cheney pitched all 16 innings, throwing 228 pitches. Baseball historian Marty Appel wrote a wonderful retrospective story about Cheney’s historic performance, a feat I read about the next day and remember to this day because of its remarkability.

For White Sox fans, there is nothing memorable about their team’s collapse against the Guardians and for striking out 19 times in Game 3 before eclipsing it on Saturday night as Cleveland advanced to the American League Championship Series to play the Tampa Bay Rays. There are still just 27 outs in a nine-inning game, which means only six were recorded with the White Sox putting the ball in play.

The lack of action had me switching between the Georgia-Alabama game and Game 5. I thought I heard broadcaster Alex Faust say that was strikeout number 19 when Munetaka Murakami fanned for the first out in the ninth. I suppose it’s the sad state of modern-day baseball that he wasn’t making a bigger deal of it, although he was trying to give the Guardians their due for being on the cusp of victory. Andrew Benintendi, who once was a promising outfielder for the Red Sox, was strikeout number 20. Tristan Peters was number 21, flailing at a 99-mph fastball from Cade Smith to complete the Guardians’ comeback from two games down in the best-of-five series.

Oriole writer Rich Dubroff wrote on Saturday that the four games between the White Sox and Guardians had been the worst postseason series I’ve seen. If possible, the worst got even worse in Game 5, making me yearn again for the lost art or lost emphasis of putting the ball in play, which helps explain Tampa Bay’s consistent success.

We were taught to cut down on our swing and protect the plate with two strikes. It didn’t necessarily make us better hitters, but it seemed to be a trusted philosophy that good things could happen if we put the ball in play.

The 21 strikeouts is an MLB postseason record for a nine-inning game. The 1996 Orioles hold the overall record, with 23 strikeouts in a 12-inning 4-3 win that also came against Cleveland in 1996. It was called a flawed classic.

In the 16-inning game that Cheney pitched, the Orioles’ Charley Lau drove in the tying run in the seventh. A light-hitting singles hitter, Lau became the game’s most highly regarded hitting coach in the 1970s and ’80s, first gaining notoriety for his work with Oakland outfielder Joe Rudi and later with the Royals’ George Brett, Hal McRae, Amos Otis and Willie Wilson.

Lau is credited with instituting the use of videotape in working with the Royals’ hitters. He spent hours studying tape of his hitters, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses. Brett was Lau’s most prized pupil. “After some experimentation and refinement, we came up with a stance and hitting approach for me that worked,” Brett said years later. “And little did I realize at the time what it was going to do and how it was going to change my life.”

Lau’s life changed, at least for a while, when the Royals released him because they thought he had turned power hitters into singles hitters. He went to work with the Yankees and first baseman Bob Watson said later: “Charley is the most scientific teacher I’ve ever seen. If I’d had a Charley Lau seven years ago, I’d be a much better hitter today.”

Lau, who died of colon cancer at age 50 in 1984, wouldn’t like the batting approaches of today’s hitters — the high strikeout rates and the launch-angle obsession. He wasn’t one of Cheney’s strikeout victims in 1962, but he watched as hitters such as Jim Gentile, Russ Snyder, Marv Breeding, Dave Nicholson and pitcher Dick Hall, who went 8 1/3 innings in relief, struck out three times apiece.

“I can’t explain it and neither can anyone else,” Cheney told columnist Thomas Boswell years later.  “It was one of those times when everything works.”

Cheney’s performance was one of those you don’t forget as an impressionable 11-year-old. It was the game that defined a 19-29 career record. It was a big deal.

That’s Chicago’s 21 strikeouts isn’t a bigger deal says a lot about today’s game.