Baseball was the sport of my youth. I played several positions: shortstop, second base, outfield, pitcher. What I liked most about short and second was the athleticism of those skill positions — reacting quickly to turn double plays, throwing sidearm and off balance. I played third base, too, but the “hot corner” really is just too hot. The hard hops are dangerous and genuinely hazardous to your health (certainly to your teeth and face). What I loved about outfield was diving fully extended in the air for fly balls. I’ve tried doing that in our church softball league, but, well, hell, I’m almost 60 years old. That needs to stop. I recently moved myself to second base. 

My best position was pitcher, which brings me to my topic today, namely: complete games. That is, pitchers who pitch the entirety of a baseball game, all the innings, without being pulled for relievers with fresher arms.

Games were tests of endurance, toughness — your manliness.

In my day, whether Little League, high school, the minor leagues, or Major League Baseball, the starting pitcher was expected to go the distance. That was the goal. Unless the pitcher blew up and didn’t have his stuff. Games were tests of endurance, toughness — your manliness. You could be expected to throw a couple of hundred pitches in a game. In fact, we didn’t even count them.

I laugh as I look right now at a “game ball” signed by my coach, Jim McCollough, from June 18, 1982, congratulating me for throwing a no-hitter that day in a game we won 11-3. Yes, I gave up three runs in a no-hitter. I walked a lot of guys. I must have thrown over 150 pitches. And that wasn’t unusual.

My post-game routine was not pleasant. I would lumber home with my aching arm on fire. My mom would rub Bengay cream all over my arm and shoulder. We would wrap it in a towel. It was shot for the week. To this day, I have problems with my right shoulder.

Of course, that’s why they don’t do this anymore. My youngest son plays Little League. The pitchers have limits on the innings they can toss per game. The limits are imposed by the league.

In Major League Baseball, there’s no league-imposed limit. However, every coach nowadays imposes pitch limits. The degree to which they’re doing this is shocking. Sure, it’s laudable that coaches don’t want to ruin pitchers’ arms, especially younger prospects. But it’s also lamentable because many coaches overreact. Beyond injury concerns, they’ve become slaves to modern “analytics” — that is, a crazy litany of new statistics suggesting or demanding you switch pitchers for whatever reason. We have seen managers do this blindly and sometimes stupidly. They will pull a pitcher prematurely in, say, the sixth inning, once he gives up a second or third hit after not yielding a run or walk all game. They go straight to their bullpen, as if nothing but a computer dictated the decision. Whatever happened to a manager’s intuition?

One such infamous gaffe was made by the Houston Astros coach in the World Series a few years ago. I was dumbfounded, astonished, appalled, screaming at my TV. The Astros lost the game and the series.

Once upon a time in baseball, pitchers went the distance. To complete a game was the objective, if not the norm. The record for most complete games is 749 by the immortal Cy Young (who threw a grand total of 7,356 innings in 22 seasons). We always hear that a certain record “will never be broken.” In this case, that’s surely true. Cy Young’s number will never be surpassed because today’s managers would never dare let it. Last year, there were only 29 complete games in MLB by all pitchers combined, out of a total of nearly 2,500 games. That’s about 1 percent of games.

The great (and more recent) Nolan Ryan pitched 222 complete games across 5,386 innings. He routinely threw 300-plus innings per year, smoking the ball at a velocity of over 100 miles per hour. Did this ruin his arm? No, he pitched until he was 46 years old, registering 5,714 strikeouts across 27 seasons. Then again, Ryan was a freak of nature. 

You simply don’t see this today. In fact, pitchers today are deprived of the glory of a no-hitter by a coach who yanks them after seven innings once they reach that predetermined limit. They’re gone. The reigning National League Cy Young winner, Paul Skenes of the Pittsburgh Pirates, has been pulled amid no-hit bids. Remarkably, Skenes, who was Rookie of the Year in 2024, has started 71 games but has been permitted to complete only one, an eight-inning gem in Philadelphia on May 18, 2025 (which unfortunately, was a 1-0 loss for Skenes).

Long gone are days like May 26, 1959, when the Pirates’ Harvey Haddix pitched a perfect game for 12 innings against the Milwaukee Braves, losing the no-hitter and the game in the 13th inning. A coach wouldn’t dare permit that today.

Speaking of Milwaukee, this leads me to highlight a recent brilliant performance by the young ace for the Milwaukee Brewers.

On June 12, Brewers sensation Jacob Misiorowski struck out 15 batters in a complete game one-hitter in which he threw only 95 pitches. No doubt it was because he threw under 100 pitches that he was permitted to stay in, issuing no walks and facing the minimum number of batters. Even more impressive, “The Miz” threw so hard that he set the record for the fastest pitch ever by a starter, 104.5 miles per hour, breaking a coveted record that Nolan Ryan once held for decades. He threw the zinger against Philadelphia Phillies home-run hitter Kyle Schwarber. He also reached 104.1 against Bryce Harper and 103.5 against Trea Turner.

Over 40,000 Brewers fans (including two I know) were on hand for an electric evening in which The Miz lowered his ERA to 0.17 in his past eight starts. Amazing.

The game was made especially thrilling because of its rising rarity — not for being a one-hitter but for being a complete game in today’s MLB. Other pitchers might get a crack at what Misiorowski did — if they can hold down their pitch count and avoid the hook by managers beholden to analytics. Indeed, as brilliant as he has been in his young career thus far, the Miz had never pitched beyond the seventh inning in 27 MLB starts.

I suppose — no, I know — that it’s a good thing that pitchers today are protected by managers who better understand the physics and health of hurling a baseball. I personally could have benefited. But I think they’re also erring in the other extreme. We’re seeing too many pitchers yanked after 80 pitches simply because they’ve hit an artificial limit predetermined by some “analytics” geek. That seems to be the prevailing zeitgeist for today’s baseball wizards. As long as it remains, you’re not going to see marvels like Cy Young or Nolan Ryan, or a performance like Harvey Haddix once had, or even what The Miz just did. 

And that’s unfortunate for baseball.

READ MORE from Paul Kengor:

A Father’s Hand in the Valley of Death

Your Vanishing Paperboy

Your Vanishing Newspaper