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  But “could haves” do not count. After the hit by Hernandez it was first-and-third again, still no outs. Hershiser struck out Darryl Strawberry. The next batter, Kevin McReynolds, hit the first pitch, a fastball, to center for a sacrifice fly. The score was 2–1, and it would remain so.

  The next morning a United Airlines charter lifts out of LAX, through the smog clogging the Los Angeles basin. The flight is carrying the Dodgers to Philadelphia to begin a road trip the next night. Hershiser is wearing glasses and carrying a briefcase. He jokes that when he retires he may “bulk up” and become a professional wrestler using the name “The Mad Librarian.” He settles in for the five-hour flight and some morning-after reflections.

  Aside from the fact that he lost, it was a typical night for him. He pitched well. He had to. The Dodgers’ hitters are in a dry spell. In fact, it has been an arid season. Last night’s game was the seventh 2–1 loss for the Dodgers so far in a season in which they would lose ten 2–1 games. So Hershiser had to scratch for every edge he could find. For example, in the first inning, after the first Mets batter grounded out to second baseman Steve Sax, Hershiser walked over to first baseman Woodson and said something. When asked what he said, Hershiser laughs, pauses to weigh candor against the politeness owed a teammate and says: “Oh, boy. I know exactly what I said but I don’t know if I should say it in public.” Candor wins: “Woodson doesn’t play first for us very often. I said, ‘Just remember, with Sax throwing you don’t stretch too early.’” Meaning what? “Saxy has some errant throws at times”—that was the understatement of the 1988 season—“and if you stretch too early you won’t be able to catch the ball. If you stretch straight at him early and the throw is to one side, you can’t move, you’re stuck.”

  The previous night the Mets got their first hit in the fourth inning, a single to center. The ball came back to the infield, was thrown to Hershiser, and he promptly threw it to the umpire to have it replaced, which it was. Why did he want that? “The particular ball I had was okay for throwing fastballs but it wasn’t a very good ball for throwing curves.” The 108 stitches sewn on every baseball by Haitian hands are not quite as uniform as they would be if machines did the work. “The ball that I throw for a curve, I look for a high seam on the ball to pull on. If the ball doesn’t have a high seam, if it has just two equal seams, or seams that are a little bit on the large size, it’s okay for my sinker because I really don’t need a high seam for my sinker. Even though I like a high seam for it, I can throw it without a high seam and I don’t go out of my way to find the perfect ball every time. But in a key situation like last night, after they got a hit and they have a chance to score a run or start a big inning, I make sure I have the right ball in my hand. I change balls a lot out there and I think the umpires know that, and I don’t want them to get tired of me throwing the balls in.” He has had the experience that Jim Palmer, another notorious perfectionist, occasionally had. The intensity of Palmer’s attention to detail was about equal to Hershiser’s intensity cubed. Palmer would throw a ball to the umpire, who would throw Palmer a new ball but would put the one Palmer rejected back into the pouch on his belt. Later in the game the umpire would throw it back to Palmer, to see if Palmer would notice. Usually Palmer rejected it again.

  In a later inning of the Mets’ game, with the Mets’ pitcher up and a runner on second—a clear bunt situation—the Dodgers’ shortstop broke over toward the runner on second just as Hershiser went into his motion. The shortstop looked badly out of position, but appearances can be deceiving, especially when they are supposed to deceive. That was a play the Dodgers put on in just that sort of situation. “We break the shortstop to the bag,” Hershiser explains, “which makes the runner think we’re throwing to second, so he’s going back to the bag. I throw home and throw a strike to get the guy to bunt. If he does, the runner on second has got a terrible jump.” And that substantially increases the chances of throwing the runner out at third. Because this maneuver opens such a huge hole at short, it can not be used when the batter is skillful enough to abandon the bunt and try to shoot the ball through the yawning hole on the left side, into left field. “We can only do that with a pitcher who can’t swing the bat. He doesn’t have good bat control, so we’ll give him the hole. And even with a good bunt we might throw out the guy at third.”

  But it is usually wise to have the third baseman charging on a bunt, which he can not do if the shortstop has been jockeying far to his left. “The third baseman is more used to handling the ball [than a pitcher] and we’re charging at three areas instead of two. With only one charging the third base-pitcher’s mound area, the only bunt we’re going to get a double play on is the one directly to me. If two of us charge, there are more bunts we can get two on.”

  The Dodgers, like all teams, have a play in which the shortstop sprints to third ahead of the runner coming from second on a bunt. But going for the lead runner is risky and in the game with the Mets the Dodgers wanted to be sure to get one out. Better to have a runner on third with one out than to risk having first-and-third and no outs and a big inning brewing. Furthermore, with the Mets’ pitcher having just bunted, the top of the Mets’ order was coming up. Hershiser got past that patch of trouble. He had only one bad time, beginning with Mookie Wilson’s triple, but it was bad enough to beat him.

  Asked how many pitches he threw last night, he guesses 115 to 120 and calls up to pitching coach Ron Perranoski sitting a few rows ahead. Perranoski knows: 127. Hershiser’s recall of components of last night’s game is complete. He knows, for example, that he threw nine pitches to the first batter in the game, Mookie Wilson. “I threw five pitches to get to 3–2, he fouled three off, I finally got him out. The next guy was out on two pitches, and Hernandez was out on three. So the first inning I threw 14 pitches.”

  In Hershiser’s next start, against the Montreal Expos, he will face the Expos’ first baseman, Andres Galarraga, who is having a wonderful year. How good does Hershiser think he is? “He’s very good. He’s patient. He waits for your mistake.” How many mistakes does Hershiser make in a game? “A mistake is a pitch I didn’t execute well, one I left in an area where they could hit it. You don’t call a ball a mistake because you miss the strike zone. That’s not a mistake. A mistake, to me, is a ball I leave in the middle of the plate. I probably threw about five of those last night.” Five mistakes out of 127 pitches. And not all of those were hit safely. Not all were even put into play. He struck out Strawberry on a mistake. “The count was 1–2 and I threw a curveball in the strike zone that he swung at and missed. Bad pitch. One-and-2, I’ve got three pitches to get him out. I might throw him three balls that are close to the plate. He’ll probably chase one of them. But on my very first pitch at 1–2, I threw a curveball for a strike. It was an unbelievable curveball—don’t get me wrong. It was a hard, hard breaking curveball—star wars—but it was still in the hitting area.” Hershiser also got away with a mistake to Dave Magadan. “When I got Magadan to line out to third and got out of the inning, I was mad at myself because I had made a stupid pitch. But I was fortunate. It was a ball right in the area he likes to hit. It was up and away, and my strength is low and away. And I threw the ball too hard, so the ball straightened out. I allowed the intensity of the situation to overcome what is best for my ability, which is to be a little more relaxed.”

  Relaxation is, paradoxically, a form of baseball concentration. Relaxation must be willed. It is the necessary unclenching of the mind. It is a form of discipline. The Dodgers were flying into the final leg of a pennant race that would allow neither time nor energy for might-have-beens. They can drive players ’round the bend at any time.

  A case in point: In the bottom of the seventh, right before the Mets went ahead, 2–1, the Dodgers got two hits and runners on first and third, no one out. The next batter, Dave Anderson, bounced the ball back to the pitcher and the runner on third, Tracy Woodson, was thrown out trying to score. After Woodson was thrown out, Hershiser was up. He bunted
the runners over to second and third but made the second out. Steve Sax was up next. He popped out to end the inning. Woodson might have made a mistake in heading home as soon as the ball was hit. The reason for breaking from third is to prevent a double play, and if there had been one out there would be no questioning the decision to head for home. But in this case the runner might better have waited until the pitcher turned and threw to second, and then headed home. If he had made it, the Dodgers would have led, 2–0. Anderson had swung at the first pitch. If he had not swung and if the pitch had been a ball, Lasorda might have put on a squeeze play because, with the count 1–0, the pitcher probably would have put a buntable pitch in the strike zone.

  But let the dead past bury its dead. “You get into close games, you’ve got to execute. Suppose you lose a game, 4–2, and they beat you on a two-run home run in the ninth after it had been 2–2 the whole way. You say, ‘Oh, if the guy hadn’t hit that home run, we would’ve won.’ But you go back to the first inning when you couldn’t bunt the guy over. Maybe in the fifth inning there was a man on third with less than two outs and you didn’t get him in. Another inning you were first-and-third, no outs, and you didn’t score.”

  Hershiser believes he did his duty last night. “After I threw the three perfect innings I said, all right, just two more sets like that. Last night the first set we were tied. The second set I won, 1–0. The third set they won, 2–0. They won, 2–1. If I can just go two sets I’ve done my job as a starting pitcher. That third set is all above and beyond the call of duty.” He adds, “If I can go out and throw nine innings and give up two runs for the rest of my career, I’m going to pitch a long time and make a lot of money and get a lot of wins.”

  In the first-class section of the plane sit the manager, coaches and other dignitaries. They include a broadcaster who once was a pitcher and now is in the Hall of Fame, partly because of a record that will, during the next six weeks, be broken by the pitcher sitting about 15 rows to the rear.

  The plane landed in Philadelphia. Five nights later, in Montreal, Hershiser took off. The Expos scored two runs off him in the fifth inning. That was it for the National League against him in 1988. Beginning in the sixth inning he pitched 59 consecutive scoreless innings, eclipsing along the way the achievements of four Hall of Famers: Carl Hubbell (45 Va), Bob Gibson (47), Walter Johnson (55⅔) and Don Drysdale (58⅔), the broadcaster who had been seated in first class. And the streak was just part of Hershiser’s achievement. In his last nine starts of 1988 he racked up a record of 7–0 with seven shutouts. As icing on the cake there was a twelfth-inning relief appearance to nail down victory in the fourth game of the play-off against the Mets. And all that was before he beat the Athletics twice and became World Series MVP. He became the first pitcher to achieve shutouts in both the League Championship Series and World Series in the same season. Between September 5 and the last game of the World Series Hershiser pitched eight shutouts. He yielded 5 earned runs in 101⅔ innings, and one of those scored after he had left the game. Counting (as the official record does not) the first game of the play-offs, he pitched 67 consecutive scoreless innings. He figures that even a very good pitcher who is pitching well should expect to give up an average of a hit an inning. In his final 13 appearances he gave up hits at about half that rate, 55 in 101⅔ innings.

  In his last 101⅔ innings in 1988 his ERA was 0.44. That was bettered only by Bob Gibson’s 0.19 over 96⅔ innings. However, Gibson did that in 1968, which, as will be demonstrated, was a peculiar season that brought about some changes that make Hershiser’s achievement even more impressive. In the game in San Diego in which he broke Drysdale’s record, Tony Gwynn, the hitter Hershiser most respects, grounded four times to the second baseman. As we shall see, Gwynn should never hit four consecutive balls to the right side of the infield.

  Suppose Hershiser had shut out the Mets on August 24. (If Mike Marshall had caught Mookie Wilson’s fly ball, a shutout could easily have been the result.) That would have been Hershiser’s second shutout in a row. Now, suppose he had not been scored on in the middle of that next game, in Montreal, when he began his record-breaking shutout streak. The streak would have been more than 82 scoreless innings in the regular season, and 90⅓ counting the first 8⅓ innings of game one of the play-offs.

  On the other hand, suppose there had been a single run somewhere in the middle of Hershiser’s streak. That would not have diminished the quality of his season. A run, earned or unearned, could have scored on a bloop hit off a great pitch, on a bad bounce of what should have been an easily fielded ball, or on an error. Happens all the time. But it did not happen for 59 innings.

  If Dave Stieb of the Blue Jays had not given up a bad-hop single with two out in the ninth of one game in September, 1988, and had not given up a broken-bat single with two out in the ninth in the next game, Hershiser would have had to share the headlines with Stieb’s back-to-back no-hitters for the Blue Jays. (Stieb was only the sixth pitcher in history to pitch two consecutive one-hitters. In his second start in 1989 he pitched another one-hitter, becoming the first pitcher to throw three one-hitters in four starts and coming tantalizingly close to the dizzying achievement of three no-hitters in four starts.)

  Was Hershiser lucky? Obviously. So what? Some sports achievements are all luck. Usually these are single instances, such as Don Liddle’s good luck in having baseball’s greatest center fielder playing behind him one day in October, 1954.

  With the score tied in the first game of the 1954 World Series between the New York Giants and the Cleveland Indians, the Giants brought in Don Liddle to pitch to Vic Wertz with two runners on. The Indians’ batter crushed a Liddle pitch 460 feet to the deepest part of the deepest center field in baseball, where only Superman could catch it. Superman did. Willie Mays made his famous over-the-shoulder catch and, even more remarkably, threw to hold the runner on third base. Liddle was immediately yanked. He strode into the dugout, put down his glove and said, “Well, I got my man.” Liddle was lucky. Hershiser was more than lucky. You have to be good, very good, to get 177 men out without anyone scoring.

  Some of baseball’s most memorable achievements were helped along by repeated instances of luck. In Don Larsen’s perfect game for the Yankees against the Dodgers in the 1956 World Series, the Dodgers’ Sandy Amoros missed a home run by about a foot; Mickey Mantle made a sparkling running catch at his knees of a sinking line drive off the bat of Gil Hodges; and Jackie Robinson ripped a line drive off Andy Carey, the Yankees’ third baseman, but the ball bounced straight to shortstop Gil McDougald, who threw out Robinson. (After the game, manager Casey Stengel was asked the dumbest question in the history of journalism: Was that the best game he had ever seen Larsen pitch? Stengel said: “So far.”) Some of the hits that kept Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game streak going in 1941 were lucky. Twice DiMaggio benefited from close calls by official scorers on hits that could have been called errors. Twice he got dinky hits—a catch-able fly ball fell untouched, and a full swing produced a slow roller that dribbled into an infield that was pulled back.

  However, Professor Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard—paleontologist, polymath and serious student of baseball—argues that long streaks necessarily are products of, are compounds of, skill and luck. Great athletes have a higher probability of success than normal athletes have in any instance—any at bat, any inning pitched. A streak is a series of discrete events occurring with the probability that is characteristic for a particular player at a particular point in his career. Frederick the Great, when asked what kind of generals he preferred, answered: “Lucky ones.” He was, as was his wont, being serious. His point was that luck is unpredictable but talent takes advantage of it. Thus the talented have, in effect, more of it. It magnifies the tendencies of the talented. In the future, just over the horizon, in the next game, the next inning, the next at bat, there lurks something that can never be wholly subdued by talent or eliminated by training and preparation. That recurring thing is luck. Baseball, with its long, leve
ling season, is the severest meritocracy in sports. There is ample time for talent to tell. The ratio of talent to luck is high. But luck is part of the equation.

  How good was Hershiser’s season? Very. In 1988 the league batted .213 against him, but right-handers did not do much worse .206). His record (23–8,2.26 ERA, 178 strikeouts in 267 innings) fell short of Ron Guidry’s 1978 season (25–3, 1.74 ERA, 248 strikeouts in 273⅔ innings). A streak, a season. How good has Hershiser’s career been? Very good. That is all, but that is a lot. Few people appreciate how hard it is to be a consistently successful pitcher. Ted Williams was, of course, right. Hitting a baseball is the hardest task in sport. But baseball would be unbalanced and uninteresting if it were not almost as hard consistently to pitch baseballs so skillfully that they can not be hit safely often enough to score runs constantly.

  Only one pitcher in either league—Dave Stewart of the Athletics—won 20 games in 1987 and 1988 and 1989. Jack Morris of the Detroit Tigers was the only major league pitcher with at least 15 wins in each of the seven years from 1982 through 1988. His streak ended in 1989. Only two pitchers, Morris and John Tudor, had winning seasons every year of the 1980s, through 1988. Their streaks ended in 1989. In 1988 Frank Viola won the Cy Young Award with a 24–7 season for the Twins. In 1989 with the Twins and Mets, he was 13–17. Of the 56 Cy Young winners through 1988, 19—slightly more than a third—had losing records the year after they won the award. Why is it so rare that individuals have high levels of performance over more than a few seasons? Because pitching is hard. A difference of a few miles per hour in the delivery, or a few inches in the location, of a few pitches thrown to major league hitters can make a decisive difference in wins and losses. Through 1989 Hershiser had winning records in three of his first six seasons (not counting 1983 when he pitched just eight innings). If losing as many as he wins makes a pitcher rank as mediocre, for two consecutive seasons, 1986 (14–14) and 1987 (16–16), Hershiser was mediocre.