Baseball

Kings of the Hill

Although major league pitching has been generally bad in recent years, it's hard to come up with a week in baseball history as chock-full of pitching oddities—most of which were anything but bad—as last week. There was a perfect game that wasn't; a long streak of scoreless innings; another dominating performance by a knuckleballer who less than two months ago appeared to be finished as a big leaguer; the selection of a twentysomething Cuban defector in the first round of the amateur draft; and, as in every other week this season, an alarming number of walks.

Here's a rundown of these dumbfounding developments.

Perfect, but...

Expo righthander Pedro Martinez retired the first 27 Padre hitters he faced last Saturday night in San Diego and won the game 1-0, yet his feat will not be entered in the record book. That's because the game was scoreless after nine innings and the Padres' Bip Roberts doubled to open the bottom of the 10th. Martinez thus became only the second major league pitcher to take a perfect game into extra innings (the Pirates' Harvey Haddix also did it, in 1959); however, under amended baseball rules adopted in 1991, neither man is credited with a perfect game or even a no-hitter. But anyone who was at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium last Saturday night saw a performance that was one for the books.

"It's like he had the ball on a string," Padre hitting coach Merv Rettenmund said of Martinez. "Wherever the catcher set up, that's where he threw it. Up, down, in, out, off-speed pitches. He was good."

Montreal rightfielder Tony Tarasco kept the perfecto going in the ninth by making a running catch of a deep line drive by pinch hitter Scott Livingstone. That was the only close call until Roberts cranked a line drive that landed about 10 feet inside the rightfield line an inning later. Martinez went to a three-ball count on only one hitter, Ken Caminiti, in the sixth, but Caminiti chased a high fastball and struck out.

The Expos' pitching coach, Joe Kerrigan, said Martinez threw the most dominant game he had seen in his 22 seasons in professional baseball: "He averaged 94 miles per hour with perfect control. It was a rare combination of power and location."

Kerrigan said he's opposed to the amended rules on no-hitters and perfect games. "People don't know how hard that is, to retire 27 in a row," he says. "For Pedro to not get credit is a shame. This belongs somewhere in the annals of baseball. You can't pass this off as just another game, but that's how it will go down—as just another game."

Kerrigan was planning to take a walk with the 26-year-old Martinez and give him a history lesson. "I want to tell him about Harvey Haddix," says Kerrigan. "I want Pedro to understand what he did. I want to make sure it leaves an indelible mark on him." Even if it doesn't make one on the record books.