A Nearly Perfect Mark

It’s Hall of Fame consideration season.  For the rest of the calendar year, Connections will be looking at some of the names on the 2025 ballot.  

It’s July 21, 2004, and the Indians are hosting Mark Buehrle and the White Sox.   Through six-and-a-half innings, Chicago has erupted for 12 runs, but somehow that’s only a nice sidebar to the plotline being written by the visiting southpaw, who has faced 18 batters and retired them all.  The perfect game bid ends with a one-out single in the seventh, but just as quickly, the inning ends with a double play.  Buehrle faces six batters over the final two frames and after a tidy, if not brisk, two hours and 31 minutes, has a shutout in which he’s faced the minimum 27 batters.  

Three years later, in mid-April, Buehrle again has a flirtation with perfection, even if this brief affair doesn’t last past the fifth inning.  Here, a one-out walk is immediately erased by a pickoff at first, and from there, the southpaw picks up his perfect pace.  He retires every other batter in a no-hitter while – over a two hour and three minute contest – facing the minimum 27 batters.  

Two years after that history-making display, Buehrle takes on Tampa Bay in a July 23rd matinee in Chicago and adds to his lore.  Ater meeting and retiring all 24 batters to open the game, Buehrle opens the ninth and almost loses everything – the perfect game, the no-hitter, the shutout.  Dewayne Wise ensures he doesn’t.   After that, smoother sailing brings things to a close just two hours and three minutes after they started – the 18th perfect game in history, Buehrle’s second career no-hitter, the third time he’s thrown a shutout and faced the minimum 27 batters.  At this moment, Buehrle has more of these specific outings – a regulation shutout while facing exactly 27 batters – than any other pitcher in the modern era. 

15 years later, as I recount all of this, Buehrle remains the only pitcher since 1901 to have three such supremely stingy showcases.  More than Cy Young (two such games*), Walter Johnson (2*), Lefty Grove (0), Bob Feller (0), Sandy Koufax (2*), Tom Seaver (0), Pedro Martínez (0), Roger Clemens (0), Randy Johnson (1), Greg Maddux (0) or any other name that might ring when imagining exemplars of dominance and excellence.

In each of the three seasons that witnessed this singular peak (2004, 2007, 2009), Buehrle finished the year with at least 200 innings.  In fact, he reached the threshold in every campaign from 2001-2014, a run that ties him with Christy Mathewson, Phil Niekro and Greg Maddux for the fifth longest ever (only Cy Young, Warren Spahn, Gaylord Perry and Don Sutton produced longer streaks).  Across his 16-year career, he never led a league in any of the Triple Crown stats, but finished in the top-10 in wins or ERA nine times; although he never had more than two shutouts in any single season, from 2000-2015 he tied for the ninth most cumulative blankings in the Majors.  It’s a testament and an irony – a pitcher so reliable and consistently good who possessed an uncanny penchant for meeting lightning in a bottle.

This was Mark Buehrle for the first decade-and-a-half of the 21st century – dependable, stable, durable, steady, capable of the awesome.  He might have gotten lost in the story of how the 2000s began if not for those peaks and the other (not quite ancillary, not quite central) compelling details of his narrative.

He was a defensive whiz (again, sometimes astonishing) who claimed four Gold Gloves.

He was a not-quite constant presence at All-Star Games who would turn up every now and again to share center stage with the superstars (and once, in 2005, make the start).

He was a pitcher who, if you had dinner plans for after the game, gave you a pretty good feeling that reservations could be for a little earlier than a little later.  Of all the nine-inning complete games thrown this century, a start by Mark Buehrle on April 16, 2005 clocks in as the quickest, one hour and 39 minutes.  His nine-inning effort in Game 2 of the 2005 ALCS stands as the seventh fastest affair for any AL v. AL postseason contest since 2000.  Deliver a pitch, receive the ball back, accept the sign, throw another one to the plate.  There was little waste in a Buehrle start, an event that could promise a lot of balls in play and a brisk pace to the dialogue between pitcher and batter.  

All of this:  this was the Mark Buehrle that we knew and came to appreciate with a little more ardor than might be reserved for a guy whose best-ever finish in Cy Young voting was a fifth-place nod in 2005.  Mark Buehrle was one of the most interesting pitchers of his generation.

For the fifth time since retiring after the 2015 campaign, Mark Buehrle is going to be considered by Hall of Fame voters.  He’s not going to get in – so far, he’s crested at 11.0%.  But I hope he receives enough votes to stay on the ballot, for he assembled a career that deserves remembrance and celebration.  And perhaps, a position on the biggest baseball ballot out there is enough to make an annual event of recalling the southpaw who defined both consistency and the extraordinary in a near-perfect balance.  

*Along with Cy Young, Walter Johnson and Sandy Koufax, one other hurler (since 1901) authored two nine-inning shutouts while facing just 27 batters:  Cubs right-hander Frank Hiller, who produced one such game in 1950 and another in 1951. 

**Buehrle had a fourth outing that just misses the criteria I’ve set forth in this piece.  On August 3, 2001, he threw a one-hit shutout with no walks and finished his day having faced just one batter over the minimum.  The hit came in the seventh.

Thanks to Baseball Reference and its extraordinary research database, Stathead, for help in assembling this piece.