Amid all the (mostly Gunnar Henderson-related, as I understand it) Orioles hoopla, John Means has a chance to do something unusual in his start later today against the Cardinals. Means is the only starting pitcher this season to make it through his first three outings without walking a batter.

That might not sound like much to all you folks who walked barefoot in the snow — uphill, both ways — to see Christy Mathewson shut out the Louisville Trench Foots every three days, way back when. But it’s pretty impressive by modern standards. Only four other starters — Mitchell Parker, Sonny Gray, Corbin Burnes, and Shota Imanaga — even made it through their first two starts without giving up a free pass in 2024. And if Means continues according to form this afternoon, he’ll join a surprisingly small group of pitchers.

Since the dawn of the Wild Card era in 1995, how many pitchers do you think were able to start a season on a run of four or more appearances of at least 18 batters faced and zero walks. Surely at least one a season, right? Thirty? Fifty? A hundred?

Just 10. And it’s a good list: two Hall of Famers (Maddux and Mussina), two Hall of Very Gooders (Hudson and Wainwright), and two of the top pitchers in the game today (Burnes and Gausman).

On the other hand, in order to filter out openers and part-time starters, I changed the search parameters to include any outing, start or relief, that went through the order twice. That allowed Jae Weong Seo — a man whom I surely saw pitch at some point but whose memory has escaped me entirely in the interceding 20 years — to slip through with three starts and a five-inning relief appearance.

Avoiding walks is good; it will surprise nobody that Maddux is on here with a four-start run with a 0.67 ERA. One of the first things young pitchers learn is to throw strikes, though I suspect that has as much to do with beleaguered U10 coaches wanting to keep the game moving as it has to do with good tactics. Means has an ERA of 3.06 in his first three starts, despite not getting any groundballs and posting a pedestrian strikeout rate — not that those were ever strengths of his — because pitchers have more breathing room when they’re not giving up cheap baserunners.

It’ll be tough for Means to extend his streak; the Cardinals might stink, generally, but they’ll take a walk. St. Louis is seventh in the majors in walk rate and 12th in walk rate against left-handed pitchers. But if he can do it, he’ll not only have such luminaries as Maddux and Seo for historical company, he’ll advance onto another list.

If Means turns over the lineup twice without walking a batter, that’d almost certainly get him onto the list of the 10 longest season-opening walkless streaks of the Statcast era by innings pitched. Starters and relievers included.

A brief aside: My favorite artifact of this search was Wei-Chung Wang, who went the entire 2017 regular season without walking a batter. Unfortunately, that season comprised eight relief appearances in which Wang faced nine batters and allowed five hits and two earned runs — that’s a 13.50 ERA and 33.8 hits per nine innings. But he didn’t walk anyone, and that’s what counts!

Sharp-eyed readers will notice that Means, at least as of this writing, is not even the major league leader in innings among pitchers who haven’t walked a batter this year. That’s Tyler Rogers — the right-handed one — who’s in the top 10 in relief appearances, full stop, but is still yet to issue his first walk. Rogers and Means are two of the 33 players — mostly pitchers, with a couple position players lumped in — who have faced at least one batter this year without issuing a walk.

Sorting those 33 pitchers by innings, Rogers is no. 1, Means no. 2. Then the next eight pitchers on the list through May 20 — Ray Kerr, Nabil Crismatt, Cody Poteet, Matt Andriese, Ryan Borucki, Emmanuel Ramirez, Nick Nelson, and Brett de Geus — are no longer on major league rosters. If there’s one thing we all should’ve learned from 2017 Wei-Chung Wang, it’s that avoiding walks will not keep a pitcher in the majors.

I don’t really know how long a walkless streak has to go on before it turns from useless trivia to genuinely impressive. Probably somewhere between Kerr’s 9 1/3 innings and Rogers’ 22 2/3. Because the margins are thin. Burnes got 34 innings into 2021 before his first walk; you might remember this streak, as he allowed only one run in his first four starts put together. But Burnes also hit three batters during that stretch, which is hilarious; it’s like doing shrooms a couple times during Dry January.

Both Rogers and Means have hit batters during their current stretches without a walk, but even setting that aside they’ve had some close calls. As you might expect, pitchers who don’t walk anyone tend to work ahead in the count a lot; nevertheless, Means has thrown 21 pitches in three-ball counts this season, while Rogers has thrown 12.

In three-ball counts, Rogers has been much more careful about where he throws; he’s missed the zone just twice on those 12 pitches, each time only by a couple inches, and both of those pitches ended up going for base hits anyway. Might as well have just walked the guy.

Means has thrown six of his 21 three-ball offerings outside the zone — two of them full-count pitches in the same at-bat against Elly De La Cruz, in fact. Means has gotten a whiff, two foul balls, two popouts, and a lineout on a pitch that Julio Rodríguez hit at over 100 mph but with just enough lift to allow Colton Cowser to settle under it.

That leaves one pitch.

May 11 against Arizona, full count to Blaze Alexander in the top of the third. Means attempts to drop a slider onto the top floor of the strike zone, but the pitch doesn’t slide as much as it needs to.

Home plate umpire Chad Whitson is nonetheless satisfied, and rings up a visibly upset Alexander. A righteously upset Alexander, I might add. That pitch was pretty fat; even not knowing the eventual ball-strike call, Alexander might’ve been better off expanding the zone and trying to swat this slider into a gap. As hopping mad as Alexander was, he would’ve been even angrier if he’d known the next two batters were going to hit a triple and a home run, in that order, and that the Diamondbacks would go on to lose by a single run.

So if Diamondbacks partisans want to declare Means’ streak fraudulent already, they have a cause for protest. But this is a game decided by fine margins, and part of any extraordinary achievement is getting the bounces.

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