In the major leagues this season, batters have been hitting the ball so
hard, and so far, that pitchers are suggesting foul play. “There’s just
something different about the baseballs,” one veteran reliever complained earlier this summer. “I don’t have
anything to quantify it, but the balls just don’t feel the same.” It’s
been an unprecedented year for home runs: hitters are on pace to shatter
the previous single-season record for them (5,693), which was set in
2000, at the height of the steroid era, when sluggers were making
widespread and illegal use of performance-enhancing drugs. In June,
players hit more home runs than in any previous month in the game’s history (1,101), sometimes in gaudy fashion, as when seven
different players hit grand slams in a single day (another record). Some pitchers claim the balls are being wound differently, making them
soar farther off the bat; others say the seams are depressed, and that
they’re getting less movement on their pitches as a result. Thirty years
ago, the league also saw a sudden increase in home runs; then, too,
players and coaches openly speculated about whether a so-called rabbit
ball was responsible. (The power surge subsided by the following season, only
adding to the mystery.) As in the past, the league denies anything is
awry, but a few recent studies, which analyze the rise in the exit
velocity of batted balls, may show otherwise.

Under the circumstances, it was easy to miss another major-league record
being set this week. Granted, it was somewhat obscure. It concerned one
of baseball’s most pleasurable and least appreciated feats: the
immaculate inning.

Rick Porcello, the starting pitcher for the Red Sox, threw one in a win against
the Tampa Bay Rays on Wednesday night. He struck out the side—three up,
three down—on nine consecutive pitches. It was the eighth immaculate
inning pitched this season, which topped the previous high (seven), from
2014. This being baseball, there are precise specifications for how to
earn this distinction: each pitch has to be a strike, and every batter
has to be struck out. There are more economical ways to end an inning,
three pitches being the swiftest. (While that level of efficiency is
rare, it’s not unheard of.) But
the immaculate inning is more dazzling, a triumph of trinitarian
symmetry. Porcello is tall and rangy, with a tidy, easeful delivery.
Working from the windup, he rocks back, lifting his arms over his head,
before tucking his leg with a gentle kick and rearing toward the plate.
There’s a rhythm to his motion, and his crisp strikes hit the catcher’s
glove like some declarative punctuation, neither too loud nor too soft.
Then the cycle repeats—pitch by pitch, batter by batter. It all has the
feeling of perfection.

Pitching accolades generally depend on complete-game accomplishments
(the shutout, the no-hitter, the perfect game). And a moundsman’s
prowess is generally defined by clear and objective terms (a win-loss
record, earned-run average, the number of strikeouts or walks
administered). What an immaculate inning communicates is more limited,
but also more exquisite—it is a degree of momentary flawlessness. That
it couldn’t possibly be sustained for much longer is precisely the
beauty of it. Earlier this month, when the Yankees ace Dellin Betances
threw an immaculate sixth against the Tigers, none of the batters he
faced even made contact with any of his pitches. The Yankees went on to
lose the game.

There have only been eighty-nine immaculate innings in major-league history—far fewer
than no-hitters, of which there have been roughly three hundred. With a
no-hitter, or a perfect game, the sense of expectation mounts as a
pitcher works his way into the later innings. Everyone from the
pitcher’s teammates (who, as the superstition goes, give him the silent
treatment) to the fans in attendance can feel the momentousness of the
occasion. The sportswriter Joe Sheehan, who was at Yankee Stadium
earlier this month when Betances threw his immaculate inning, said he
only noticed what was happening after five pitches. Betances threw
another strike, then faced Miguel Cabrera, one of the most fearsome
hitters in baseball. When Betances, improbably, struck him out with a
slider, there weren’t bells and whistles in the ballpark. “It’s not
clear to me how many people were aware of the significance of the moment, beyond Betances striking out the side, or for that matter, Betances
throwing nine consecutive strikes,” Sheehan wrote afterward.

As for the immaculateness this year, it’s true that the increased
tendency to swing for home runs comes with an additional likelihood that
one will miss: strikeouts have also spiked to record rates. As some
disgruntled commentators have pointed out,
a third of all at-bats now end without the ball being put in play.
Batters are hitting home runs, drawing walks, or striking out. The
baseball writer Rany Jazayerli dubbed these the “Three True Outcomes,”
undistorted by such fickle factors as fielding and foot speed. Critics
complain that this is a more bloodless and blunted version of the game.

But the immaculate inning, partly a by-product of this style, is still a
quirky and elegant reminder of baseball’s persistent poetry. After
Porcello’s performance on Wednesday night, I e-mailed John Thorn, the
official historian of Major League Baseball, looking for a wise
pronouncement about what the single-season record for immaculate innings
could mean in a year dominated by the long ball. His answer, which
mooted my question, reassured me.