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There’s nothing like weird sports lore: did you know that in baseball, you can be the winning pitcher without pitching to a batter?

And Kevin Drum is wondering if any sport has a greater ratio of build-up to actual event than the Kentucky Derby. I’m not sure, unless one counts a figure skater’s practice for the Olympics — four years for about six minutes of skating. But then, there are events in between such as the annual World Championships. (Actually, it’s Chad Orzel who’s wondering this, but I read about it on Kevin’s blog.)

EDIT: I dug up the box score from the game where the pitcher won a game without facing a batter. The short version of the story is that he came into the game with two outs, executed a pickoff maneuver which ended up catching a baserunner in a rundown for the third out, and then left the game. His team then scored the go-ahead runs in the next frame, giving him the win. Looking at his line, I see a goose-egg dutifully entered under his pitch count.

Oh, and I fixed the link to Mike’s article. I used the wrong permalink.

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