Weird & Wild: White Sox trivia, Judge walks the walk, and a 104.7 mph K for the win (2024)

It was another one of those weeks. We had a 47-pitch inning in which not one fair ball left the batter’s box. … We had a team score four runsbefore anyone even reached base.… And we had a team get so terrified of Aaron Judge, it intentionally walked him two days in a rowwhile the bases were still empty.

But as Weird and Wild as all that was, there’s only one place to start just about every Weird and Wild column these days. That place is Chicago, where once again …

These Sox don’t fit

Their fans hide their faces under paper bags. Their manager made it to 100 games under .500, then got fired. And when they finally won a game, for the first time in nearly four weeks, they ran out of beer to wash it down with.

These are your 2024 Chicago White Sox, chasing history — kind of in the way that “Daddy Day Camp” (Rotten Tomatoes score: 1) chased cinematic history.

Until Thursday, I thought that the Weirdest (and Wildest) White Sox news of the week would be: OMG, the White Sox won a game!But they waited for their manager, Pedro Grifol, to make his own kind of history, and only then invited him to clean out his office.

So let’s look in once again on these White Sox, if only because when we do, these columns pretty much write themselves.

Under new management

Did Pedro Grifol get fired Thursday? Or was he actually freed from captivity? I could defend either argument. But that’s not important now. What’s important is that we assess this poor guy’s place in managerial history.

His first season (2023): 40 games under .500
His second season (2024): 60 games under .500

It’s the 40-60 Club! Which seemed like a rare feat.I set out to investigate. How many managers in American League/National League history went at least 40 under and 60 under, in either order, in their first two seasons? I can’t promise I found them all. But I did my best. So here you go.

Mark Kotsay, 2022-23 A’s:That’s right. Grifol wasn’t even the only activemanager with this claim to fame. Kotsay’s Oakland teams went 42 under and 62 under in his first two seasons. But here’s the difference: He got to keep going. So his A’s this year only need to go 15-31 the rest of the way to avoid another 40-under season. I like their chances.

Doc Prothro, 1939-40-41 Phillies:Was Doc, a former practicing dentist, the worst manager of modern times? Let’s go with yes. Check out his three seasons of managerial glory: 61 under, 53 under, 68 under. And that was a wrap.

So he went 138-320, compiled the worst managerial win percentage of the modern era (.301) and never did cap another filling. His son, Tommy, later coached seven seasons in the NFL — and had a winning record in one of them.

John McCloskey, two teams:This one’s a little tricky, but I’ll explain. McCloskey, born during the Civil War, began his managerial career with Ducky Holmes’ 1895 Louisville Colonels, who finished 61 under. His 1896 Colonels were 2-17 when ownership pulled that plug. But he did get another chance.

Unfortunately, it was with the three worst teams in modern Cardinals history (1906-07-08). He went 46 under, 49 under and 56 under with those teams. So should he qualify for this list because of his first two “full” seasons? Why the heck not?

And that’s it … except I’m not quite done here, because those 1899 Cleveland Spiders are always lurking. So …

Special citation — Joe Quinn, two teams: It always comes back to the Spiders at times like this. So let’s salute Quinn. Before he got to Cleveland, he went 11-28 managing Bones Ely’s 1895 St. Louis Browns. Then they’d seen enough. So he never got to finish what he started there.

He returned four years later to “rescue” those Spiders after what seemed like a rough 8-30 start. Except they managed to go an incredible92 under(12-104) on his watch — in only four months. So among everyone who managed only two seasons (or fewer) in the big leagues, just one person wound up more games under .500 than Pedro Grifol. Guess who?

OK then. That’s the group. That’s the company Grifol will hang out with as historians look back on his tenure. It’s hard not to feel sorry for him. He’s a good man. He meant well. But sadly, the next thing he knew, his fans were shopping for paper bags perfectly tailored for their heads. Hey, it happens.

Meanwhile, back on the field

OMG, the White Sox won a game! Yeah, they did. Tuesday in Oakland, they won for the first time in 27 days, ending their historic losing streak at 21 games. So how could the Weird and Wild columnnotattempt to put that in perspective?

• Here’s the final update on the mind-blowing stat I rolled out Monday: 197 different pitchers won a game while the White Sox were winning zero games. Yep, 197!

• The Chicago Bears — who were still finishing up their beach vacations when that streak began — had time to report to training camp and win a game, all in the time when the White Sox were winning no games.

• As devoted White Sox historian Jay Cuda reported, the AL All-Star team won a game while the White Sox were forgetting to win any games. But it was still another three weeksbefore the White Sox won one, too.

• Oh, and also, an Olympiad welled up while all this was going on. So thanks to my friend John Fisher of CBS Sports for reminding me that the South Sudan Olympic hoops team (winner of no games in Olympic history), even won a game (against Puerto Rico).

• And not just them. The women’s soccer team from Colombia, equally winless in Olympic history, also won a game (over New Zealand) while the White Sox were winning no games (not to mention no Olympic medals).

Oh, and one more thing. According to the Baseball Reference transactions page, 171 players got traded — all in the time the White Sox never won a single freaking game.

Brooks and Done! I don’t know how much you know about rookie infielder Brooks Baldwin. But he had a really cool thing happen: He made his big-league debut for the White Sox on July 19. Except guess what happened next? Yup. Of the first 16 games he played in, his team lost all 16 of them.

This seemed kind of unusual. Thanks to the great Katie Sharp of Baseball Reference, I can tell you how unusual. How many other position players since World War 2 have seen their team lose the first 16 big-league games they participated in? This is where you’re supposed to say:That has to be none!And how right you are.

Luckily for Baldwin, though, this is not the “all-time record.” Let’s hear it for Otis “Rabbit” Lawry, a proud University of Maine alum who made his debut for Connie Mack’s unabashedly tanking 1916 A’s and got to play in 31 losses in a row. No one since 1901 has played in more. And let’s hope no one ever does!

It was a total team effort!While all this was going on, the White Sox practically changed rosters on the fly. So 38 different players showed up in at least one box score during that 21-game losing streak. Wait, 38? That seemed like a huge number. So Katie Sharp checked that, too.

Turns out it’s such a huge number, they beat the previous record by essentially an entire team’s worth of players (i.e., nine).

MOST PLAYERS USED DURING A LOSING STREAK OF 20+ GAMES*

2024 White Sox — 38
1988 Orioles — 29

(*1901-present)

Beat the streak!But we shouldn’t just keep our eyes on all the crooked-number losing streaks the White Sox have piled up. Turns out the one thing they almost never do is only lose once.

Would you believe they’ve had only three “one-game losing streaks” all season? That, too, seems hard. That’s because — tell ’em, Wash — it’s incredibly hard.

Katie Sharp found only one AL/NL team since 1900 that made it through a full regular season with that few “one-game losing streaks.” Shanty Hogan’s 1935 Boston Braves also had just three of them.

Say goodbye, it’s Elimination Day!Finally, since the White Sox are about to get mathematically eliminated in their division any day now, I keep getting hit with questions about whether they can set some sort of record for that.

Sorry, that short answer is: Nope! Jonathan Schoop’s 2018 Orioles wrapped that up by getting eliminatedon Aug. 3 — in their 110th game of the year. That’s the division-play record, anyway. So barring some emergency time travel, can we safely say that’s one record the 2024 White Sox will not be breaking? I think we can!

The power of good intentions

Are youone of those insightful humans who has been watching Aaron Judge’s march toward 60 homers this summer and thinking:When the heck are they going to give that guy “The Barry Bonds Treatment?”

BREAKING:We’re officially there!

We take you to Yankee Stadium last Saturday. Yankees versus Blue Jays. Here’s how Judge’s first inning went.

What did announcer Michael Kay just say? Babe Ruth has company?Barry Bonds was about to have company, because here’s how Judge’s second inning went.

After hitting his 41st HR of the season in the 1st inning, Aaron Judge gets the intentional walk in the 2nd with two out and nobody on. pic.twitter.com/YvPzQ8MXH6

— MLB (@MLB) August 3, 2024

So what did you just watch there? There was nobody on base. There were two outs. It was the second inning — of a 4-1 game.And Blue Jays manager John Schneider was so excited to see Judge heading for the plate again, he intentionally walked that dude.In the second inning.

“I honestly didn’t feel like seeing him swing,” Schneider said afterward.

Then, a couple of days later, he told MLB Network Radio’s Mike Ferrin: “It was 4-1, and I just said: ‘You know what? I kind of don’t want it to be 5-1 right here.’”

Heck, you can’t blame him. So of course, the very next day, Schneider intentionally walked Judge three more times — including one more time with the bases empty (this time with no outs).And you know what they call that around my household? Weird and Wild material. That’s what. So you might want to know that …

Nobody had ever done what Judge did Saturday.By that I mean: Since intentional walks became an official stat in 1955, no hitter had ever hit a home run in the first inning of a game and gotten intentionally walked with nobody on base in the next inning of that game. Then again, that’s probably because …

Those bases-empty intentional walks in the second inning don’t happen much.According to the amazing Baseball Reference/Stathead Event Finder, this was only the sixth time since 1955 that a hitter had been intentionally walked in the first or second inning of any game with nobody on base. And it hadn’t happened in over half a century. The others:

Not pictured above: Barry Bonds!

Two days in a row?All right, Barry Bonds is about to get pictured. Here comes your complete list of hitters who have been intentionally walked with nobody ontwo days in a row. It won’t take long.

Aaron Judge — last Saturday and Sunday
Barry Bonds — three times*

(*plus four more times where that happened twice in one game)
(Source: Baseball Reference / Stathead)

The Bases Empty, No Outs INT BB Club.I’m still trying to digest that Aaron Judge was intentionally pointed toward first base with nobody on and nobody out. Just so he knows, that’s quite a club he is now hanging out in.

INTENTIONAL WALKS WITH 0 OUTS, 0 ON

Barry Bonds — five times
Frank Howard — two times
Ryan Howard — once
Aaron Judge — once

And that’s it!

The More Than Once Club.Finally, what’s the definition of a hitter who causes the entire opposing dugout to come down with a severe case of The Fear Factor? Guys who have been intentionally walked, with nobody on, more than once. That about sums it up.

Judge is up to five of those in his career. Here are the only men since 1955 with more than that:

Bonds — 41
Mark McGwire — 10
Frank Howard — 8

The only other active players with more than one: Mike Trout (4), Shohei Ohtani (2), Andrew McCutchen (2).

Most famous guys with none of those (in the 21st century): Alex Rodriguez, Joey Votto, Todd Helton, Freddie Freeman, Mookie Betts, Giancarlo Stanton.

And how many more of these might Judge run up? The Angels just handed him another one Wednesday. Want to guess how many times all the other hitters in baseball have been intentionally walked this season with nobody on? As always, that answer would be …

Not a single one!

This Week in Useless Info

ONE OUT FROM …No-hit fever. Turns out it’s not as contagious as we thought. Just when it looked as if we might see three no-hitters in two weeks, as Astros ace Framber Valdez got one out away Tuesday, this incredible thing happened.

And when that happened, Valdez had a rare claim to fame: Pitched a no-hitter one year, then had one broken up with two outs in the ninth the next year.

So who else has done that, you ask? That’s exactly the question I posed to Katie Sharp. I was shocked by the answer:

No one else has done that — not in that order, anyway.

Katie did find three pitchers who did it in reverse, by losing a no-hitter with two outs in the ninth one year, then finishing a no-hitter the next year: Dave Stieb (1989-90), Ted Lyons (1925-26) and some guy named Cy Young (1896-1897).

When you write columns like the Weird and Wild opus, you think you have an idea when something happens that’s never happened before. I had no idea Framber Valdez had just done one of those things. But then I remembered: You can’t predict baseball!

THE TIGERS PASS JIM CLASS — Last Saturday, onthe day they retired Jim Leyland’s number, the Tigers had One of Those Games. They trailed in the ninth inning. They trailed in the 10th inning. They trailed in the 11th inning … and they won!

So as usual, I got to thinking. In those eight seasons when Leyland managed the Tigers (2006-13), did they ever win a game remotely like that? My friends from STATS took a look for me.

Leyland managed 1,297 regular-season games in Detroit. But you know how many times, in all those games, his team trailed late and had to score in each of the last three innings to win on a walk-off? There was exactly one.­­­­­­­­­

That was June 25, 2008, Tigers versus Cardinals. It wasn’t an extra-inning game. But the Tigers trailed in the seventh, until Miguel Cabrera singled and scored to tie it. Then they trailed in the eighth, but tied it again on a Magglio Ordonez RBI hit. Then they walked it off in the ninth — on a Gary Sheffield hit.

Miggy was in Detroit for the ceremony Saturday. Sheffield was in Cooperstown to see Leyland inducted into the Hall of Fame. That’s how the Baseball Earth spins. It’s the best.

TWENTY IS PLENTY — We don’t talk enough about Salvador Perez. Do we?

When the Royals’ ebullient catcher launched home run No. 20 last week, that gave himeight20-homer seasons. And only seven other catchers in history have that many. You’ve heard of them.

Mike Piazza — 12
Johnny Bench, Yogi Berra — 11
Brian McCann — 10
Gary Carter — 9
Fisk, Posada, Perez — 8

But … now here comes a second list — of men with at least eight 20-homer seasons and five Gold Glove Awards as a catcher:

Salvador Perez … and Johnny Bench.

Keep that one in mind when Salvy shows up on a Hall of Fame ballot near you.

SAVED BY THE BEN — I don’t know how many Americans would recognize Angels reliever Ben Joyce if he sat next to them. But much like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, he’s in the rocket-launching business.

In fact, last Saturday, Joyce threw a pitch unlike any ever thrown in the history of this sport. You should take a few seconds and watch this.

Ben Joyce, 104.7 MPH Fastball. 😳 pic.twitter.com/1Ol4UnZAFE

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) August 4, 2024

What the heck was that? Oh, only the hardest pitch ever thrown for a game-ending strikeout — at a mere 104.7 miles per hour.MLB has only measured that back to 2008. But if you think relief pitchers were throwing 104.7 back in, say, 1953, your viewing angle on The Good Old Days might be slightly distorted.

Here, according to Statcast, are the hardest fastballs ever delivered for a game-ending K:

104.7 — Ben Joyce, Saturday
104.4 — Aroldis Chapman, Aug. 7, 2016
104.2 — Jordan Hicks, April 21, 2019
104.0 — Jhoan Duran, twice in 2023

TOMMY HITS A GRAND PHAM — Tommy Pham gets around. So it’s easy to lose track of him. But he also has a way of announcing his presence everywhere he goes.So it figured that his first big swing back in St. Louis after the trade deadline was a tough one to miss.

What’s so Weird and Wild about that Tommy Pham slam? Well, for one thing, the Cardinals were his first big-league team. And how many grand slams did he hit for them the first time around, in 2014-15-16-17-18? That would be none. Of course.

In fact, he hadn’t hit a slam since 2019, back when he was passing through the Rays’ ozone. You might say: That was five years ago. But here at the Weird and Wild column, we say:

That was eight teams ago!

No kidding: Rays, Padres, Reds, Red Sox, Mets, Diamondbacks, White Sox, Cardinals.

So how Weird (and also Wild) is that? Katie Sharp reports that only three others played in a game for eight different franchises between grand slams, Here they come:

Henry Blanco — Brewers, Braves, Twins, Cubs, Padres, Mets, Diamondbacks, Mariners

Tommy Davis — Dodgers, Mets, White Sox, Pilots, Astros, A’s, Cubs, Orioles

Kelly Johnson — Diamondbacks, Blue Jays, Rays, Yankees, Red Sox, Orioles, Braves, Mets

I don’t know why this amuses me so much. There’s just something about it that captures the essence of …

Baseball!

This Week in Strange But Trueness

PACHE’S TRIFECTA — Speaking of guys who get around, let’s check in on Cristian Pache.

July 21 — Gets a hit for the Phillies, then gets traded to Baltimore a few days later.

July 29 — Gets a hit for the Orioles, then gets designated for assignment and claimed by the Marlins a few days after that.

Aug. 4 — Gets his first hit for the Marlins, who somehow still have him on the roster nearly a week later.

But if you’re paying attention, you know this guy just got a hit forthree teams in two weeks. And if he’d like to know everyone in the modern era who has also done that, we can help. Here are the three other players to do it, courtesy of STATS:

Mike Piazza, 1998 — Dodgers, Marlins Mets
Brian McRae, 1999 — Mets, Rockies, Blue Jays
Adam LaRoche, 2009 — Pirates, Red Sox, Braves

Hmmm, I wonder why the travels of Cristian Pache got so much less attention than that Mike Piazza saga. OK, no I don’t.

BASEBALL: IT’S AN ACTION SPORT — A longtime baseball friend of mine shot me a frantic text last Friday afternoon:I hope you’re watching the Cubs and Cardinals,he alerted me — and for good reason.

The Cardinals were mounting quite the furious little two-run rally at Wrigley Field, you see. There was just one thing missing:

The sight of a baseball being put in play!

Yes, in an inning in which eight men came to the plate, two Cubs relievers threw 47 pitches. And not one of them was put in play.

You think this seems almost impossible to do? Trust me. It went like this:

Walk, wild pitch, strikeout, strikeout, walk, walk, bases-loaded walk, bases-loaded walk, strikeout.

Baseball in 2024. It’s a beautiful game. Isn’t it?

FOUR ORBITS AROUND PLANET BASEBALL — But somehow or other, that inning at Wrigley wasn’t even the Strangest But Truest inning of the day. Just an hour later, the Diamondbacks kicked off the first inning in Pittsburgh like no first inning before.

First act– Corbin Carroll, Little League homer.

Corbin Carroll little league homer to start the game 🤯🔥#MLB #DBacks
pic.twitter.com/FWztcmHEu5

— Sports Nation (@Sports_Nation11) August 2, 2024

Second act — Ketel Marte homer.

Third act — Joc Pederson homer.

Fourth act — Josh Bell homer.

So … four batters, four consecutive D-Backs circling the bases? It was 4-0 with nobody out in the first — but nobody had actually reached base?What the heck was that?

I don’t know about you. But I could never remember seeing a game start like that. So I checked with my friends from STATS.

The question: Had there ever been a game that began with four consecutive runners making it all the way around the bases — via homer, via error, via earthquake or via pretty much anything, in any order?

The answer: Of course not! Complete public play-by-play data for every game goes back 50 years. And how many other games in that span started like this one? How could that answer be anything other than zero?

MYSTERY CLOSER OF THE WEEK — While we’re talking zeroes, that’s how many runs the Dodgers allowed against the A’s last Saturday. But that, obviously, isn’t the Strange But True part.

The Strange But True part was the guy the Dodgers ran out there to “close” that 10-0 shutout. It wasn’t Daniel Hudson. It wasn’t Evan Phillips. It wasn’t Alex Vesia or Blake Treinen or any of the other mystery bullpen guests manager Dave Roberts is always handing the ball to in the ninth. No, it was this man.

Kiké Hernandez is pitching pic.twitter.com/CbHXGGg1oj

— Dodgers Tailgate (@DodgersTailgate) August 4, 2024

That’s Kiké Hernández, not just pitching the ninth inning, but pitching the ninth inning of a shutout, by his team.That’s strange, all right. And it’s true, all right. But it’s not the Strangest or Truest part, because here’s the deal:

It’s only the sixth time in the last 70 years that a true position player has been allowed to get the final outs of a shutout by his own team …and three of those times, he was sent out there by Dodgers mystery-pitcher fan Dave Roberts:

• Kiké Hernández, Saturday (10-0)
• Hanser Alberto, July 28, 2022 (13-0)
• Russell Martin, Aug. 27, 2019 (9-0)

In Cleveland, Hunter Gaddis has a 1.34 ERA for the Guardians, and he hasn’t finishedanyshutouts. But Kiké Hernández has? How can you not love …

Baseball!

THE SOX MEET THEIR MATCH — We started this column with the White Sox. Let’s end this column with the White Sox. There was a bizarre little subplot hanging over that game Tuesday in which the White Sox finally got to recreate their long-lost postgame high-five line:

The starting pitcher they were facing that day (Oakland’s Ross Stripling) somehowhad a worse winning percentage than they had.

You could look this up. But that’s why I’m here. I already did that, just for you.

White Sox win pct. going into that game: .235 (27-88).

Stripling’s win pct. going into that game: .167 (2-10).

The more I thought about that, the more I convinced myself that I had to figure out if it had happened before. So I headed down a truly absurd rabbit hole. I looked at every team in AL/NL history that had ever lost 20 games in a row — and then at every starting pitcher they faced for the rest of their streak.

That meant all of them — even the 1894 Louisville Colonels (20 in a row) … the 1890 Pittsburgh Alleghenys (23) … and of course those 1899 Cleveland Spiders (24). It was like riding up and down the freeway, checking out all the disabled vehicles on the shoulder. But when I was through, I had an actual answer.

For a moment there, I thought I’d found one. On Sept. 19, 1899, the day the 1899 Spiders broke their streak, they faced a fellow named Bill Magee, of the original Washington Senators. And Magee’s record for the Senators that year was 0-1 …for a winning percentage of zero! Which was even lower than the Spiders’ attractive winning percentage … of .139 (19-118).

But oops! It turns out that Washington was Bill Magee’s third team of the season. And he’d gone 6-12 for the other two. So at 6-13, his winning percentage was a messy .316. But that was still better than the Spiders. In other words …

How fortunate were the White Sox?

In the game they needed to win to avoid setting the AL losing-streak mark, they became the only team ever to roll up that many losses in a row and then face a pitcher who was having even more trouble winning than they were!

I don’t know how I’d explain that to somebody who’d never read this far into this column. But if you’re still reading, you know exactly how to explain it. It’s …

Baseball!

(Top photo of the White Sox: Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)