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Introduction

On August 7th, 2024, I went to a Cardinals game in St. Louis. I had just visited Kansas City and Dallas, and figured I'd time my visits to these stadiums with a Cardinals game so I could go back to Busch Stadium and experience it as a stadium chaser as opposed to a normal visitor. It was on the way back home to Chicago, so I wasn't sweating adding the additional game. The game itself seemed to be typical, with a team jumping out to an early lead and not losing it throughout the game. The Cardinals held a comfortable three-run lead, 5-2, heading into the top of the ninth inning.

Then, the stadium lights turned off.

The ambient light of the beautiful backdrop and the occasional lit sign on the concourse was the only way I could discern what was happening until the scoreboards turned a deep red -- engulfing the entire stadium in a sinister hue as the Cardinals' star reliever, Ryan Helsley, emerged from the bullpen. I've seen plenty of videos of revered relievers coming in amongst fanfare that raises a hitter's heart rate, like Edwin Diaz coming into trumpets and flashing lights and Mariano Rivera coming into his famous Enter Sandman. This is not the first grand entrance for a reliever I have ever witnessed. However, it is the first that left me awestruck. Helsley went on to deliver his league-leading 36th save of the season, with a truly dominant plate appearance that has stuck with me to this day versus the Rays' Christopher Morel.

The first pitch: a slider at the top of the zone, a swing and a miss.

The second pitch: a slider in the outside corner of the zone, a swing and a miss.

The third pitch: a slider in the dead center of the zone, a swing and a miss.

Three pitches, of the exact same type, and three whiffs to end the game. To this day, I have never witnessed anything like it. In the nearly five months since the game, this plate appearance has sat with me and had me wondering: how often does this type of thing happen? I talked about improbable events in my blog post about my almost no-hitter, "How Unlucky am I?", but purposefully did not mention this as I believe it deserved its own dedicated post and associated research.

Fishing for Dominance

I wanted to see pitching dominance and hitter tantalization. This was a hedonistic dive into baseball data to watch hitters look foolish, swinging at ghosts, and losing a baseball game because of it. I don't hate hitters in baseball -- I just really like pitchers.

To start, I looked at all pitches that happened in the ninth inning or later in the 2024 season that resulted in a swinging strike on Baseball Savant and cross-referenced it to a list of the 127 game-ending swinging strikeouts on three pitches at a 0-2 count in the 2024 season from Stathead. There was a total of 85 plate appearances in the sample that matched the three-swing, three-miss criteria that I was looking for, and after the cross-reference to the Stathead dataset I found that 17 of them came on the game's final plate appearance. For reference, there were 2429 games played (not 2430) in the 2024 regular season, and therefore 2429 final plate appearances -- a 17 out of 2429 moment. Further limiting these plate appearances to where all three pitches were the same type of offering lowers the number of plate appearances to six that I want to highlight.

Three Fastballs

There's something near-superhuman about a pitcher dominating a hitter with pure speed. My fastest throw topped out in the low 70s and required me to throw not only the baseball but also my entire body into the radar. Meanwhile, shortstops like Mason Wynn have topped 100 throwing hundreds of feet, and pitchers such as Aroldis Chapman have not only reached, but exceeded, an unfathomable 105 -- stuff that blows my throw out of the water. It's scary to think about the fireballers of the past that did not have the precision of StatCast on their side, like Nolan Ryan and his mythical (and alleged) 108 MPH fastball. The fastball is baseball's most common pitch, which makes it even more ridiculous when the best hitters in the world swing, and miss, at three in a row.

The 2024 MLB season began in Korea with the Seoul Series between the Dodgers and the Padres. While the first game of the series was a relatively uneventful win by the eventual World Series champions, the second game of the series was an offensive explosion: 26 runs on 34 hits, with the Padres in control for most of the game. Despite their 15 runs, the Dodgers had 11, and the Padres needed to save the win. Luckily, this is exactly what happened – three four-seam fastballs later, the game was over and the Padres evened out the series. Fastballs two and three hit the exact same spot high and inside, narrowly missing Max Muncy's bat both times. One, two, three.

The next time a pitcher would scorch a hitter with three fastballs happened just over a month later in my favorite stadium, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, in a late April game versus the Athletics. The Orioles had a 2-1 lead for most of the game before noted scarecrow Craig Kimbrel took the mound, giving up a run in the ninth and sending the game into extras. The A's scored another run in the top of the tenth, making the game 3-2. The Orioles' ghost runner, the tying run, was on third base with two outs as the sophomore Mason Miller stared down his third batter of the inning. A 99.9 MPH fastball low cracked the count open, a 101.4 MPH fastball up out of the zone tricked Henderson into losing a checked swing for strike two, and a 101.8 MPH fastball up and in killed the game and the Orioles' chance to recover their lead. This is the only three-pitch at-bat that had three fastballs of increasing velocity -- three ramping gunshots and a blown save on Kimbrel's record. One, two, three. Pretty good!

The three swing and miss at-bat would not occur again until nearly a month later on May 25th, when the Twins visited Globe Life Field to take on the Rangers. A three-run explosion in the eighth inning took this game from a 3-2 Twins loss to a two-run lead for the home team and an opportunity for reliever Jhoan Durán to put the game to bed. With the home crowd on their feet, Durán fit two fastballs around 100 MPH into the bottom of the zone, with the Rangers' Jonah Heim missing his swing just under both pitches. For the final pitch, Durán unleashed the nastiest pitch of the three -- a 101 MPH, gravity-defying rising fastball out of the zone that Heim swung under again, ending both the plate appearance and the game to a roar from the crowd. One, two, three.

The final battering of fastballs in the 2024 regular season occurred over three months later on September 1st, when the playoff-bound Orioles travelled to sunny Colorado to play the Cancun-bound Rockies. The Orioles got out to a comfortable lead early and did not relinquish it, heading into the bottom of the ninth up six runs to one. Orioles pitcher Gregory Soto came in and allowed a few singles before getting the Rockies down to their final out, with runners on first and third. The Rockies' Hunter Goodman came up to the plate and swung late at a sinker inside, then swung late at a sinker outside, with both occupying the top of the zone. After this back-and-forth, the 0-2 pitch was a 99.4 MPH offering high and inside -- swung at late once again, sealing the win for the Orioles. One, two, three.

Three Off-Speed Pitches

Now that we've covered death by three fastballs, we'll look at the other side of the coin: off-speed pitches. The mystifying sliders, changeups, and curveballs that pitchers employ often work best as a surprise tactic to disrupt batter timing, but the most talented mound artists can use them heavily to great effect -- we need to look no further than the 2024 postseason, where Yankees reliever Tommy Kahnle threw 56 consecutive changeups between the ALCS and the World Series. After all, if the pitches are hard to hit, they may as well be thrown often! As these pitches are usually slower and easier to hit with proper timing, there are only two plate appearances to highlight.

The first plate appearance happened on August 17th, when the Toronto Blue Jays came to Wrigleyville for a summer series. Unfortunately, the Cubs were the team that had bottled lightning on this occasion as superstar Vladimir Guerrero Jr. stepped up to bat versus the Cubs' Jorge López. In this game, the Cubs jumped out to a 3-0 lead early but the Blue Jays sunk their talons into the Cubs in late innings, notching runs in the seventh and earlier in the ninth with a home run by Addison Barger to bring the game to 3-2. Unfazed by the homer, López struck out George Springer and Dalton Varsho with four pitches apiece and brought the crowd to their feet for what could be the game-ending out. And, unfortunately, that is what it was -- with three diabolical sliders to the same spot that Guerrero Jr. could not time up correctly, with him almost stumbling to swing at the third pitch that was a mile away from the corner of the zone. One, two, three. Strike three, out three, villains win 3-2.

And, finally, the reason I wrote this post in the first place: Ryan Helsley's three-slider kill of Chirstopher Morel. One of 49 saves on the year to break the franchise record, one of 62 closed games, and one piece of the mural of Helsley's work that led him to winning the NL Reliever of the Year award and an All-MLB First Team nod. The Cardinals went up early and headed into the ninth inning with a 5-2 lead and a 97% chance to win the game, although things looked potentially dicey with a single and a walk leading to the Rays' tying run coming up to the plate. Of course, we know what happened to this tying run: three sliders, of ramping velocity, that danced around the zone and resulted in what is the greatest strikeout I have ever seen in person up to this point. The three pitches are linked above, but for sake of consistency: One, two, three.

The probability of me witnessing this varies depdning on what metric you use -- 17 out of 2429? 6 out of 2429?. But, in a similar vein to how chess games become truly unique after the opening lines, baseball games diverge quickly into unique collections of events as well -- and to witness one of my favorite teams engage in an act of pitching, my favorite part of baseball, so vile that it's inspired me to write this article? I'd say it's one of one, a memorable gem out of the tens of thousands of professional baseball games that have been played.