Day 118 Of The 2025 MLB Season
1. The Haggerty.
In the first inning on July 7, Sam Haggerty hit a comebacker off the glove of pitcher Yusei Kikuchi, who then “stumble[d], tumble[d] and roll[ed]” off the mound. As Kikuchi worked to put his life back together, second baseman Luis Rengifo jogged over to pick up the ball and end the play. Haggerty’s hit thus went down in baseball’s official records as:
Sam Haggerty singles on a sharp ground ball to second baseman Luis Rengifo, deflected by pitcher Yusei Kikuchi.
His next time up he hit a soft grounder off the glove of the diving third baseman, Chad Stevens. The ball deflected to the shortstop Zach Neto, who made the throw too late to first baseman Nolan Schanuel. Haggerty had done a somewhat very weird thing. He had managed to send the ball “to” all five infielders, without any of them being able to get him out.
It obviously wasn’t intentional, but I loved it anyway, because it resembled the sort of weird challenge a 10-year-old on summer break might have invented to breathe life into a game he’d already beaten several hundred times.
2. The Maddux.
You probably have had some experience like this: You’re playing tag and you’ve avoided being It for so long that you almost start to pursue the tagger, getting as close to being tagged as you can without succumbing. Or you’ve beaten Super Mario Bros. so many times that you begin to deconstruct it: You try to beat the game while staying short, or without ever collecting a coin, you speed-run it or slow-run it, you beat the game while wearing your sister’s prescription glasses or while hanging upside down off the couch.
These meta goals can look frivolous, but there’s something profound about them. “Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act,” the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote in Flow (a book I can’t recommend highly enough). In his theory, human flourishing depends on having somewhere to direct our psychic energy that is challenging and realistic. The happily engaged mind is always calibrating its challenges.
So, consider The Maddux, a concept introduced and named by the writer Jason Lukehart in 2012. A Maddux was a shutout completed in 99 pitches or fewer. The pitcher throwing a Maddux wasn’t just beating the game but speed-running it. There were 68 complete-game shutouts in 2012—impressive, but nothing you hadn’t seen before—but only nine Madduxes, putting them just slightly behind no-hitters in rarity1.
But the applicability of the Maddux has changed. This year there were 13 complete-game shutouts, total, of which three were Madduxes. The supposedly commonplace event that the Maddux was being set against—the 100-plus-pitch shutout—has itself all but disappeared. The median pitch count of this year’s shutouts was 104, and the highest pitch count in a shutout was only 110. We’re getting near the point where a shutout just is a Maddux, a total overlap.
The obstacle to a shutout today is not just keeping one’s pitch count down but, in a way, about getting one’s pitch count up. There were nine pitchers who were on pace for a Maddux before they got pulled from starts this year (plus many others who were a quick out or two from getting on pace), virtually all of whom would have been allowed to keep working in 2012:
Kyle Freeland — 88 pitches, eight innings
Matthew Boyd — 85, eight innings.
Cristopher Sánchez — 84, eight innings.
Yu Darvish — 76, seven innings.
José Soriano — 73, seven innings.
Jacob deGrom — 65, six innings.
Brandon Woodruff — 62, six innings.
Cristopher Sánchez — 60, 5 2/3 innings.
Simeon Woods Richardson — 52, five innings.
Going over 100 pitches in a start is now the modern accomplishment. Only 10 percent of all starters did it this year2. And almost nobody is ever allowed to start a new inning once they’ve reached 100 pitches. (That only happened, if you can believe it, 12 times all regular season.)
So throwing a shutout in 99 pitches tells us something about a pitcher. Throwing one in 111 pitches might now be even more impressive: It would show us a pitcher is a horse, he’s adaptable, he knows how to keep something in reserve, his manager trusts him.
For now, the Maddux is still a thing. When Nathan Eovaldi was working a shutout in the ninth inning on April 1 this year, the broadcast dutifully mentioned the pursuit, and after the final out on the 99th pitch the color commentator Mike Bacsik announced it excitedly: “He got the Maddux!” It remains a challenge worth our attention. But I think it’s dying, quickly. We’re just about to the point where saying somebody threw a Maddux will be redundant. Saying he threw a shutout will cover it.
3. The Mason Miller.
