Henry Roldán
This Wednesday afternoon, a couple of Houston Astros pitchers entered the Major League history books with their impeccable work on the mound.
During the game that pitted the leaders of the American League West Division against the Texas Rangers, two of their pitchers were awarded immaculate innings against the local offense.
The first of them was the Venezuelan starter Luis García, who in the second episode threw nine pitches to retire the three batters he faced by way of strikeout.
Later, in the seventh inning, it would be reliever Phil Maton’s turn, who repeated García’s dose against the Rangers’ bats.
But this did not stop there. The feat achieved by García and Maton took on another nuance because it was achieved against the same order of Texas batters: Nathaniel Lowe, Ezequiel Durán, and Brad Miller.
At the end of the match, the Astros took the victory 9-2 with García’s great performance, who worked six innings of two runs and nine strikeouts to win his fourth victory of the campaign.
What Are Immaculate Innings?
It is called in this way a perfect inning from the point of view of a pitcher: an inning in which 3 outs are achieved with 3 strikeouts, each of three strikes in a row, for a total of nine pitches.
Since its founding, Major League Baseball has only witnessed 108 immaculate innings, adding the two achieved this Wednesday by Astros pitchers.
The small number means that this is the first time in the history of the Majors that a team throws two innings in an immaculate manner in the same commitment, according to Mark Berman of FOX 26.
Sarah Langs of MLB.com also noted that this is the first time in MLB history that two immaculate innings are released on the same day.
For their part, García and Maton join the left-hander Néstor Cortés Jr., of the New York Yankees, as the three pitchers who have pitched a similar inning this season after he did so, in mid-April, against the Baltimore Orioles.
