An older guy at a kid’s birthday party was happy to learn that he was talking to a sportswriter, because he had plenty to share.
“If Cleveland would have beaten Golden State,” the senior gent began, “then LeBron James’ postseason would have been the greatest individual achievement in any team sport, ever.”
James would have been hailed for carrying the Cavaliers past the much deeper Golden State Warriors, it was agreed, as he had carried his team past Indiana, Toronto and Boston in the Eastern Conference series.
Against a better team, though, it wasn’t good enough, and a simple discussion about who was basketball’s greatest player soon became an exercise in the futility of comparing sports eras.
“LeBron got about as much support as Harvey Haddix,” the man said, turning seamlessly from 21st century basketball to 20th century baseball.
Haddix is the former Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher generally regarded as the gold standard in failed teammate support. He threw a perfect game against the Milwaukee Braves for 12 innings – 36 up, 36 down – but lost the game in the 13th, 1-0.
Some have called it the greatest single pitching performance of all-time, given that he’d achieved the best success a pitcher can have, and did it for 33 percent longer than anyone else ever had.
It came against a strong team, too. The Braves were the class of the National League at the time, having won the pennant the previous two years. Hank Aaron and Eddie Matthews led a Milwaukee lineup full of tough outs, but for the better part of a May afternoon in 1959 none of them could do a thing with Haddix.
Was it the greatest pitched game ever? It’s hard to argue against 12 perfect innings. All of the other perfect games in Major League Baseball history were nine-inning jobs.
If Haddix’s near-perfecto is the most impressive single pitching effort, and as long as we were doling out superlatives, then Lew Burdette’s shutout in the same game is among the most underrated. Many sports fan are aware of Hard Luck Harvey’s 12 perfect innings, but few – including my elderly confrere – are aware that it was Burdette outdueling Haddix for 13 innings.
The old guy then went off on a tangent oozing with get-off-my-lawn vitriol, asserting that pitchers from the bygone era had better stamina and fewer arm problems than today because they threw baseballs to condition their muscles instead of lifting weights.
For proof, he pointed to the game played a few decades before the Harvey Haddix game, when the Boston Braves and Brooklyn Robins played to a 26-inning, 1-1 tie.
As you may have guessed, both pitchers – Boston’s Joe Oeschger and Brooklyn’s Leon Cadore – went the distance. A couple of hitters went 0-for-10 that day and one guy went 0-for-11, but pitch counts went unsung.
I reminded the old sports fan that irrespective of training techniques, pitchers in that era could sail a fastball up around the hitter’s armpits and get a called strike.
This seemed to resonate with him, at least until his reply, which was, “Huh?”
Back to his original point about the best pitching performance in baseball history, Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series came to mind. He certainly got a lot of mileage out of it. In his only other appearance in that series, Larsen got rocked and didn’t make it out of the second inning. Nonetheless, the Yankees won it in seven, and Larsen was named series MVP.
The most intriguing feat by a pitcher in a regular season is the back-to-back no-hitters thrown by Cincinnati’s Johnny Vander Meer. He no-hit Boston on a Saturday, and on three days rest he threw another no-hitter, this one against Brooklyn.
“On three days rest!” the man said, repeating a point already made.
Greatness has been revealed in every era and none of the accomplishments should be minimized or overhyped, I said, seeking a tidy end to a confab going nowhere. Our visit came to a merciful close with his memorable, thought-provoking final rejoinder:
“Huh?”