‘The band is out on the field!’ The iconic call that changed Joe Starkey’s life
BERKELEY, Calif. — Joe Starkey thought he had blown the call.
Hours after “the most amazing, sensational, dramatic, heartrending, exciting, thrilling finish in the history of college football,” Starkey attended a neighborhood party near his home in Walnut Creek, California, about 15 miles East of Cal’s Memorial Stadium. The date was Nov. 20, 1982, and Starkey had spent the day calling the Big Game, featuring archrivals Cal and Stanford.
Starkey, the eighth-year radio play-by-play voice for Cal, scrambled to find a highlight of what had happened in the final four seconds, a scene that would become known in sports lore simply as: The Play.
Trailing 20-19, Cal fielded a kickoff with four seconds left. The Bears made five laterals, the last going to Kevin Moen. As Starkey shouted, “The band is out on the field!” Moen weaved through Stanford band members, crossed the goal line and plowed into trombonist Gary Tyrrell.
Final score: Cal 25, Stanford 20.
“I thought I’d screwed it up completely,” Starkey said. “I was too excited, not enough detail.”
Even in the KGO radio booth, amid the mayhem and excitement after Cal’s victory, Starkey felt fear run through him.
“I realized pretty quickly the magnitude of what had happened,” he said. “Now, my fear is, did I do it right? Did I make the call right? Did I screw it up and say something I shouldn’t have, or did I miss something I should have had? That haunted me.”
Eventually, Starkey warmed up to the call that would change his life, the one that will forever be associated with him. He’s called Super Bowls as the San Francisco 49ers radio play-by-play voice. While working for ABC at the 1980 Winter Olympics, he did an impromptu call of the third period of the U.S.-Russia “Miracle On Ice” game, which aired on ABC’s West Coast radio affiliates.
But no single moment will compare to the one 40 years ago in Strawberry Canyon. The one that got him recognized on the streets of Tokyo and in a hotel pool in Rome with the drummer for the Rolling Stones. Now 81, Starkey will call his final Big Game this week as he prepares for retirement after 48 seasons as the voice of the Bears.
“They’re going to bury me with it,” Starkey said of his famous call. “It will be the first words when I die in the obituary. It lives on forever, apparently. This is 40 years later, and it’s starting all over again.”
NOVEMBER 20 BEGAN like any other football Saturday for Starkey, then 41. He drove to the game with his wife and sons, and arrived at the stadium two hours before kickoff. Pregame always began an hour before, but Starkey used the extra time to finalize his notes and chat with the broadcasters from Cal’s opponents to gain a nugget or two. He knew plenty about Stanford, especially star quarterback John Elway, the son of college coach Jack Elway, and a high school standout in California.
The booth configuration was standard: Starkey and color commentator Jan Hutchins, a longtime Bay Area sportscaster; producer/engineer Neil Hogue; spotter Jim Starkey, Joe’s 15-year-old son; and a statistician. The broadcast didn’t include a sideline reporter.
“It was one of my first games,” Jim Starkey said. “I had just started spotting for him that year.”
Cal came in at 6-4, Stanford at 5-5. Joe Starkey expected “just a very normal Big Game day with a big crowd.” He’s not one for premonitions about events or potential historic moments, but sensed early on that the 85th Big Game would be special.
“The level of play, the amount of big plays, was so dramatic,” he said. “I’ve always said that even if there was no band on the field and game-winning laterals, it would have been one of the best two or three Big Games I ever saw.”
Cal wide receivers Mariet Ford and Wes Howell made highlight-reel touchdown catches. Elway, whose Pro Football Hall of Fame career featured many clutch drives, converted a fourth-and-17 from Stanford’s 13-yard line with less than a minute left.
“If that’s an incomplete pass, there is no ‘Band on the field,'” Starkey said. “They lose.”
Stanford set up for a field-goal attempt that everyone, including Starkey, expected to be the game winner. But rather than ensure the field-goal attempt would be the final play, Stanford took a timeout with eight seconds left. Mark Harmon converted the 35-yard field goal. Four seconds remained.
“The Stanford assistant coaches, many of whom I’ve known for years, have told me that there was actually a very aggressive shouting match going on between the coaches upstairs as to when they should stop the clock,” Starkey said. “The guys who wanted eight seconds, unfortunately for Stanford, won out over the guys who wanted four seconds.”
Stanford was flagged for excessive celebration after the field goal, a penalty Starkey hated then and hates now. Harmon kicked off from the 25-yard line rather than the 40, creating a shorter distance for Cal to ultimately cover.
“If they don’t get those 15 yards, does that play work?” Starkey said. “Do they actually bring it all the way back?”
STARKEY HAS NEVER rehearsed his calls, even when a significant play is approaching. He came close in 1992 when Jerry Rice was about to set the NFL’s touchdown receptions record, but ended up reacting to the moment in real-time.
As Stanford prepared for the kickoff, Starkey essentially began wrapping up the game, crediting the Cardinal for their drive despite “defeat staring them straight in the face.” He could see Stanford preparing to hoist the Axe, the Big Game’s rivalry trophy, which the Cardinal had won in 1981. He paid no attention to the Stanford band.
Jim Starkey stood up and stretched a bit, ready to pack up his binoculars. He briefly left the booth before returning, sitting to his father’s left as Stanford kicked off. Joe’s wife, Diane, sitting not far from the KGO booth, remembers seeing groups of fans leaving early.
“It wasn’t like, you think 40 years later, this was going to be such a momentous event,” Diane said. “But people said to me later, who were out on the street, people were at intersections and nobody was moving, because they were listening to it on the radio.”
Joe expected a squib kick, which would limit the chances of a long return. That’s what Harmon did.
“The Bears need to get out of bounds,” Starkey began his call, thinking Cal could attempt a Hail Mary if it immediately reached the sideline.
He thought Cal might pull off a successful lateral or two before the play would end. Moen took the kickoff and passed the ball backward to Richard Rodgers, who then found Dwight Garner. The young running back’s knee nearly hit the ground — or did, according to anyone affiliated with Stanford, including a group of players who ran onto the field to celebrate — before he pitched the ball back to Rodgers.
Things were getting interesting, but a Cal touchdown? “I still didn’t believe it,” Starkey said. He continued to watch the ball, which Rodgers had pitched to Ford as the action shifted closer to Stanford’s sideline. By this point, Starkey’s color man and spotter had become irrelevant.
“Strictly me,” Starkey said. “I’m making every bit of the call.”
A split second before three Stanford defenders converged, Ford pitched the ball over his shoulder to Moen at around the Stanford 25-yard line.
“It’s again, serendipity, a fluke, whatever you want to call it,” Starkey said. “When he throws that ball over his shoulder, he is hoping and praying that maybe there’s a Cal guy behind him that can catch this, but he can’t possibly know that.”
This week, Joe Starkey will broadcast his final Big Game for @CalFootball, 40 years after calling The Play. pic.twitter.com/EWJzRLoeo5
— Adam Rittenberg (@ESPNRittenberg) November 13, 2022
The excitement in Starkey’s voice built as the play continued, but after the Ford lateral to Moen, his voice amplified. Stanford band members had entered the field.
“It changes everything. How do I describe this? It’s so bizarre,” Starkey said. “I’ve broadcast nearly 1,000 college and pro football games. I’ve never seen anything that matches what happened at the end of that game. To this day, you’ll see a game where they’ll have laterals at the end of the game, trying to save a play, save a touchdown.
“But the wild card is always the band.”
While Starkey tried to describe the scene before him, Hutchins started screaming, completely immersed in what was unfolding. It was similar in 1972 when, as a young sports reporter in Pittsburgh, Hutchins stood on the sideline at Three Rivers Stadium as Steelers fullback Franco Harris made the “Immaculate Reception” and ran right by him.
He’s grateful his audio track has been edited out of clips that show The Play.
“I was not thinking, I was totally being, which is why I started screaming,” Hutchins said. “They’ve taken my whole soundtrack out because I was gibberish and ruining your chance to hear what Joe had to say. I try to live like this most of the time anyhow, but I was flat-out in the moment. I was not thinking anything.
“I was experiencing what I knew was one of the most fantastic sporting results ever.”
Even while shouting about Moen entering the end zone, Starkey had seen flags fly during the play and posed the essential question: “Will it count?” Would Cal’s win — and Starkey’s incredible call — be wiped away by a penalty on the Bears?
At worst, Starkey had become really excited for nothing. But it was better than the alternative.
“My theory had been, even then as a young broadcaster, is you can always apologize, but do it all the way through the first time,” he said. “If you stop and then it counts, then there’s no record of it, you screwed it up, and now it’s lost for posterity. In any sport, whatever I was doing, it was call the play and feel free to say, ‘Gee folks, I guess I messed that up.'”
Starkey’s rule is why only one call of The Play truly resonates. There had been a local TV broadcast and a Stanford radio broadcast, but both cut off the call midstream, thinking there was no way the touchdown would count.
“The worst thing would be doing what the other broadcasts did,” Starkey said. “They wrote it off too soon.”
Starkey’s eyes locked on the officials. He theorized to the audience that Cal might have made a forward lateral during the return.
“It is louder than you can ever imagine,” Jim Starkey said. “Half the stadium, the red is not believing it, and the blue is saying, ‘It happened.’ You had the band on the field, all these bodies, and since I had binoculars, I saw [Moen] running into the end zone. But you still don’t know if it’s truly going to happen because it’s just chaos.”
The crew congregated around referee Charles Moffett, who confirmed Moen had crossed the goal line, that every lateral was legal and that the penalty was against Stanford for players and band members entering the field. Moffett raised his arms: Touchdown.
“I get kind of wacky and scream and yell,” Joe Starkey said.
He then delivered the famous summation of The Play: “The most amazing, sensational, dramatic, heartrending, exciting, thrilling finish in the history of college football. California has won the Big Game over Stanford!”
0:50
November 20th is the 40th anniversary of when Cal improbably took down Stanford and its band with an infamous kick return.
WHEN DIANE STARKEY saw her husband after he finished his postgame duties, she joked, “I bet you’re excited about this one.” But she could tell Joe, always the self critic, thought he’d left out too many details in the call. He had hit the emotional notes, but worried he missed something big. Then, Diane heard the replay.
“Amazing, unbelievable, I didn’t realize he knew that many adjectives,” said Diane, a longtime school teacher. “It was a true moment, full of real emotion, and people react to that. This man is so excited about the team he loves.
“He’s always been on the more emotional side of broadcasting.”
Starkey immediately recognized The Play and his call would resonate, but he thought it would be confined to the Bay Area or the West Coast. For a while, he was right.
Sports broadcasts were different in 1982. Media mechanics didn’t allow clips to go viral, even ones that would belong among the most famous playcalls in sports history.
But the elements and emotion attached to one of the most incredible unscripted sporting moments eventually broke through the media barriers of the time and reached a larger audience. The call also made Starkey into a celebrity.
Once, Starkey and Diane were vacationing in Tokyo when a Cal fan spotted him and said, “Oh, Joe Starkey, the band is on the field.” The same thing happened when they went to Athens.
“He’s been recognized in all sorts of places,” Diane said.
In 1987, Starkey and Diane took their youngest son Rob, then 11, on a summer trip to Italy and Greece. The vacation ended in Rome at the Cavalieri Hilton hotel. On a blisteringly hot day, Starkey’s wife and son decided to take a nap, so he grabbed a book and went down to the hotel pool.
While Starkey read poolside, the Rolling Stones, who were performing in Rome, and their families sat down next to him. Starkey and Charlie Watts, the Stones’ legendary drummer, struck up a conversation about the band’s tour through Europe.
“Then he says, ‘Ya know, mate, it really is hot, you want to go in the pool?'” Starkey said. “I said, ‘Hell yes.'”
They went to the shallow end of the pool and continued to talk more about music and the Stones, a passion for Starkey. As they chatted, Lou Ferrigno, the actor and bodybuilder, and star on the TV show “The Incredible Hulk,” joined them.
At this moment another man jumped into the pool and started swimming toward them. As he approached from the other side, Watts lamented that fans just wouldn’t leave them alone.
“The guy comes up to the three of us and says, ‘Aren’t you the Cal football announcer?'” Starkey said, laughing. “Charlie said, ‘What’s that all about?’ I said, ‘I broadcast college football. He’s obviously a Berkeley guy.’ I didn’t go into all the stuff about the laterals.
“He wouldn’t have cared. He’s from England.”
Soon after the 1982 Big Game, people began calling KGO radio, asking for tapes of The Play. As sports director, Starkey realized he couldn’t keep asking for copies to be sent out. Plus, since ABC owned the rights, there were legal hurdles to jump over before distributing.
Starkey approached KGO’s station manager with a plan: Transfer him the rights to The Play. He would arrange for the tapes to be produced and would sell them solely at the manufacturing cost.
“I said, ‘I guarantee you I will not do it for money, strictly for cost,'” Starkey said. “So he says, ‘Gimme a buck.’ So I’ve had the rights to The Play for 40 years for a dollar. It hasn’t made me a lot of money, but there have been commercials over the years where people wanted to use it and they had to pay me whatever rates.
“But it’s basically been my play.”
Jim Starkey understood his dad’s initial angst about the call.
“As a professional broadcaster, you’re always supposed to paint the picture, especially in radio, and he’s very studious about that,” Jim said. “He knows the numbers, he’s always very good about knowing both teams, and college teams have a lot of players. I think there are no names actually said in the [call].
“It was right for the moment, but if you look at it in a classroom, you’d probably say, ‘Not the way it’s supposed to go.'”
As the years went by, Starkey warmed up to his call. He now considers it his co-favorite, along with a 25-yard touchdown pass to Terrell Owens that lifted the 49ers past the Green Bay Packers in the 1999 NFL playoffs, a play known as “The Catch II,” after Dwight Clark’s original 17 years earlier.
The USA-Russia Olympic hockey call also sticks with Starkey, who “used a lot of the same adjectives” as he did for The Play.
“It was so unique,” Hutchins said. “It would have been easy for him to get carried away or to get lost, but he stayed in his broadcaster brain the whole way through that thing. It was kind of funny to me, my reaction versus his, but it was evidence and a testimony to just how professional he always was.”
The way Starkey described The Play jibed with his general broadcast style. He wasn’t a football lifer, like others in the booth. The Chicago native played second-string in junior college but had no football broadcasting experience before landing the Cal job in 1975. Starkey had worked in banking in Los Angeles and the Bay Area before breaking into sports broadcasting, his dream job.
“I tend to be a fan in moments like that, where I really kind of let it loose,” he said. “You hope you don’t lose the detail by just screaming and yelling, but I have no problem with being excited about a particular moment. There’s such exuberance and astonishment in the call.
“People get caught up in that and appreciate the pure drama of what was going on.”
Despite his initial angst about the call, Starkey embraces its significance, both personally and historically. The call is an identifier and an icebreaker — “Apparently nuns in convents know The Play,” he jokes — and so distinct that it will never be replicated.
Four decades later, Starkey’s call has a place in sports history, and has far exceeded his initial assessment.
“The things I said and didn’t say, I thought made sense after a while,” he said. “As the years went on, I realized, ‘No, that’s exactly the way you should have done it,’ to capture the excitement of the moment and the mystique that built up around it as this absolutely unique football play.”
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Bradford Doolittle
The 3,000-strikeout club has grown by one, with Clayton Kershaw of the Los Angeles Dodgers whiffing the Chicago White Sox‘s Vinny Capra in the sixth inning Wednesday at Dodger Stadium, becoming the 20th pitcher in baseball history to reach that milestone.
The 3K pitching club doesn’t generate as much hullabaloo as its hitting counterpart, but it is more exclusive: Thirty-three players have reached 3,000 hits.
When you look at the list of pitchers with 3,000 strikeouts, and Kershaw’s place on it, a few things jump out.
• None of them pitched at Ebbets Field, at least not in a regular-season game. I frame it like that to illustrate that this level of whiffery is a fairly recent phenomenon. The Dodgers bolted Brooklyn after the 1957 season, and at that point, Walter Johnson was the only member of the 3,000-strikeout club. A career Washington Senator, he never pitched against the Dodgers. Every other 3K member made his big league debut in 1959 or later. Half of them debuted in 1984 or later. Three of them (Kershaw, Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander) are active.
• For now, Kershaw has thrown the fewest career innings of any 3K member, though he’s likely to eventually end up with more frames than Pedro Martinez.
• Kershaw has the highest winning percentage of the 20 (.697) and the best ERA+ (155), though his edges over Martinez (.685 and 154) are razor thin.
• Kershaw tops the list in average game score (61.9) and is tied for second (with Bob Gibson) for quality start percentage (68%), behind only Tom Seaver (70%).
• Kershaw lags behind in bWAR, at least among this group of current, future and should-be Hall of Famers with 77.1, ranking 16th.
So where does Kershaw really rank in the 3K club? I’m glad you asked.
First, what should be obvious from the above bullet points is that the response to the question will vary according to how you choose to answer it. The ranking below reflects not only how I chose to answer the question but how I’d like to see starting pitchers rated in general — even today, in the wildly different context from the days of Walter Johnson.
1. Roger Clemens
FWP: 568.8 | Strikeouts: 4,672 (3rd in MLB history)
Game score W-L: 477-230 (.675)
The top three pitchers on the list, including Rocket, match the modern-era top three for all pitchers, not just the 3K guys. (The string is broken by fourth-place Christy Mathewson.) Before running the numbers, I figured Walter Johnson, with his modern-era record of 417 career wins (the old-fashioned variety), would top the list. But Clemens actually started more games (relief appearances don’t factor in) and had a better game score win percentage.
2. Randy Johnson
FWP: 532.9 | Strikeouts: 4,875 (2nd)
Game score W-L: 421-182 (.698)
Since we’re lopping off pre-1901 performances, the method does Cy Young dirty. Only two pitchers — Young (511 wins) and Walter Johnson got to 400 career wins by the traditional method. By the game score method, the club grows to nine, including a bunch of players many of us actually got to see play. The Big Unit is one of the new 400-game winners, and of the nine, his game score winning percentage is the highest. The only thing keeping Johnson from No. 1 on this list is that he logged 104 fewer career starts than Clemens.
3. Walter Johnson
FWP: 494.7 | Strikeouts: 3,509 (9th)
Game score W-L: 437-229 (.656)
Don’t weep for the Big Train — even this revamping of his century-old performance record and the fixation on strikeouts can’t dim his greatness. That fact we mentioned in the introduction — that every 3K member except Walter Johnson debuted in 1959 or later — tells you a lot about just how much he was a man out of his time. Johnson retired after the 1927 season and surpassed 3,000 strikeouts by whiffing Cleveland’s Stan Coveleski on July 22, 1923. It was nearly 51 years before Gibson became 3K member No. 2 on July 17, 1974.
4. Greg Maddux
FWP: 443.3 | Strikeouts: 3,371 (12th)
Game score W-L: 453-287 (.612)
There is a stark contrast between pitcher No. 4 and pitcher No. 5 on this ranking. The wild thing about Maddux ranking above Nolan Ryan in a group selected for strikeouts is that no one thinks of Maddux as a strikeout pitcher. He never led a league in whiffs and topped 200 just once (204 in 1998). He was just an amazingly good pitcher for a really long time.
5. Nolan Ryan
FWP: 443.1 | Strikeouts: 5,714 (1st)
Game score W-L: 467-306 (.604)
Ryan is without a doubt the greatest strikeout pitcher who ever lived, and it’s really hard to imagine someone surpassing him. This is a guy who struck out his first six batters in 1966, when Lyndon Johnson was in the White House, and his last 46 in 1993, when Bill Clinton was there. Ryan was often criticized during his heyday for his win-loss record, but the game score method clears that right up. Ryan’s revised winning percentage (.604) is markedly higher than his actual percentage (.526).
6. Max Scherzer
FWP: 385.7 | Strikeouts: 3,419 (11th)
Game score W-L: 315-145 (.685)
Here’s another club Mad Max is in: .680 or better game score winning percentage, minimum 100 career starts. He’s one of just eight members, along with Kershaw. The list is topped by Smoky Joe Wood, who dominated the AL during the 1910s before hurting his arm and converting into a full-time outfielder. The full list: Wood, Martinez, Randy Johnson, Lefty Grove, Mathewson, Kershaw, Stephen Strasburg and Scherzer.
7. Justin Verlander
FWP: 385.0 | Strikeouts: 3,471 (10th)
Game score W-L: 349-190 (.647)
Like Scherzer, Verlander is fresh off the injured list. Thus, the two active leaders in our version of FWP have resumed their tight battle for permanent supremacy. Both also resume their quests to become the 10th and 11th pitchers to reach 3,500 strikeouts. Verlander, who hasn’t earned a traditional win in 13 starts, is 4-9 this season by the game score method.
8. Pedro Martinez
FWP: 383.5 | Strikeouts: 3,154 (15th)
Game score W-L: 292-117 (.714)
By so many measures, Martinez is one of the greatest of all time, even if his career volume didn’t reach the same levels as those of the others on the list. His 409 career starts are easily the fewest of the 3K club. But he has the highest game score winning percentage and, likewise, the highest score for FWP per start (.938).
9. Steve Carlton
FWP: 379.8 | Strikeouts: 4,136 (4th)
Game score W-L: 420-289 (.592)
When you think of Lefty, you think of his 1972 season, when he went 27-10 (traditional method) for a Phillies team that went 59-97. What does the game score method think of that season? It hates it. Kidding! No, Carlton, as you’d expect, dominated, going 32-9. So think of it like this: There were 32 times in 1972 that Carlton outpitched his starting counterpart despite the lethargic offense behind him.
10. Tom Seaver
FWP: 371.3 | Strikeouts: 3,640 (6th)
Game score W-L: 391-256 (.604)
Perhaps no other pitcher of his time demonstrated a more lethal combination of dominance and consistency than Seaver. The consistency is his historical differentiator. As mentioned, his career quality start percentage (70%) is tops among this group. Among all pitchers with at least 100 career starts, he ranks fifth. Dead ball era pitchers get a leg up in this stat, so the leader is the fairly anonymous Jeff Tesreau (72%), a standout for John McGraw’s New York Giants during the 1910s. The others ahead of Seaver are a fascinating bunch. One is Babe Ruth, and another is Ernie Shore, who in 1917 relieved Ruth when The Babe was ejected after walking a batter to start a game. Shore replaced him, picked off the batter who walked, then went on to retire all 26 batters he faced. The other ahead of Seaver: Jacob deGrom.
11. Clayton Kershaw
FWP: 370.9 | Strikeouts: 3,000 (20th)
Game score W-L: 301-137 (.687)
And here’s the guest of honor, our reason for doing this ranking exercise. As you can see, Kershaw joined the 300-game-score win club in his last start before Wednesday’s milestone game, becoming the 38th member. In so many measures of dominance, consistency and efficiency, Kershaw ranks as one of the very best pitchers of all time. When you think that he, Verlander and Scherzer are all in the waning years of Hall of Fame careers, you can’t help but wonder who, if anyone, is going to join some of the elite starting pitching statistical clubs in the future.
12. Don Sutton
FWP: 370.6 | Strikeouts: 3,574 (7th)
Game score W-L: 437-319 (.578)
For a post-dead ball pitcher, Sutton was a model of durability. He ranks third in career starts (756) and seventh in innings (5,283⅓). During the first 15 seasons of his career, Sutton started 31 or more games 14 times and threw at least 207 innings for the Dodgers in every season.
13. Ferguson Jenkins
FWP: 353.8 | Strikeouts: 3,192 (14th)
Game score W-L: 363-231 (.611)
Jenkins is in the Hall of Fame, so we can’t exactly say he was overlooked. Still, it does feel like he’s a bit underrated on the historical scale. His FWP score ranks 17th among all pitchers, and the game score method gives him a significant win-loss boost. That .611 percentage you see here is a good bit higher than his actual .557 career winning percentage. He just didn’t play for very many good teams and, in fact, never appeared in the postseason. He’s not the only Hall of Famer associated with the Chicago Cubs who suffered that fate.
14. Gaylord Perry
FWP: 335.6 | Strikeouts: 3,534 (8th)
Game score W-L: 398-292 (.577)
Perry, famous for doing, uh, whatever it takes to win a game, famously hung around past his expiration date to get to 300 wins, and he ended up with 314. Poor Perry: If my game score method had been in effect, he’d have quit two wins shy of 400. Would someone have given him a shot at getting there in 1984, when he was 45? One of history’s great what-if questions.
15. Phil Niekro
FWP: 332.5 | Strikeouts: 3,342 (13th)
Game score W-L: 408-308 (.570)
Knucksie won 318 games, and lost 274, the type of career exemplified by his 1979 season, when he went 21-20. We aren’t likely to see anyone again pair a 20-win season with a 20-loss season. His .537 traditional winning percentage improves with the game score method, but he’s still the low man in the 3K club in that column. Niekro joins Ryan and Sutton on the list of those with 300 game score losses. Sutton, at 319, is the leader. The others: Tommy John, Tom Glavine and Jamie Moyer. Of course, they were all safely over the 300-game-score win threshold as well.
16. CC Sabathia
FWP: 323.2 | Strikeouts: 3,093 (18th)
Game score W-L: 339-221 (.605)
Sabathia will be inducted into the Hall of Fame next month, and his place in this group only underscores how deserving he is of that honor. Sabathia debuted in 2001, and to reach the 250 traditional-win level (he won 251) in this era is an amazing feat. The only pitcher in that club who debuted later is Verlander, stuck at 262 wins after debuting in 2005. Right now, it’s hard to imagine who, if anyone, will be next. Of course, if we just went with game score wins, that would be different.
17. Bob Gibson
FWP: 321.0 | Strikeouts: 3,117 (16th)
Game score W-L: 305-177 (.633)
Gibson, incidentally, also won 251 games — and also gets enough boost from the game score method to climb over 300. His revised percentage is better than his traditional mark of .591. His average game score ranks third in this group, a reflection of his steady dominance but also of the era in which he pitched. Gibson is tied for eighth in quality start percentage among all pitchers. In 1968, when Gibson owned the baseball world with a 1.12 ERA, he went 22-9 by the traditional method. The game score method: 26-8. You’d think it would be even better, but it was, after all, the Year of the Pitcher.
18. Bert Blyleven
FWP: 320.2 | Strikeouts: 3,701 (5th)
Game score W-L: 391-294 (.571)
It took a prolonged campaign by statheads to raise awareness about Blyleven’s greatness and aid his eventual Cooperstown induction. He finished with 287 traditional wins, short of the historical benchmark. Here he would fall short of the 400-win benchmark, but, nevertheless, he is tied with John and Seaver for 11th on the game score wins list. His actual winning percentage was .534.
19. Curt Schilling
FWP: 307.1 | Strikeouts: 3,116 (17th)
Game score W-L: 281-155 (.644)
There are 31 pitchers who have broken the 300 FWP level, and it’s hard for me to imagine how anyone in that group could be left out of Cooperstown. You can sort this out for yourself in terms of baseball and not baseball reasons for this, but the group not there is Clemens, Schilling, John and Andy Pettitte, plus the greats (Kershaw, Verlander, Scherzer) who are still active.
20. John Smoltz
FWP: 273.8 | Strikeouts: 3,084 (19th)
Game score W-L: 290-191 (.603)
Smoltz won 213 games the traditional way, and he falls just short of 300 by the revised method. But all of this is about starting pitching, and with Smoltz, that overlooks a lot. After missing the 2000 season because of injury, he returned as a reliever, and for four seasons he was one of the best, logging 154 saves during that time. He’s the only member of the 200-win, 100-save club.
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Alden Gonzalez
LOS ANGELES — Clayton Kershaw‘s 3,000th career strikeout was preceded by a scary, dispiriting moment, when Los Angeles Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy injured his left knee and had to be helped off the field Wednesday night.
Muncy is set to undergo an MRI on Thursday, but Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said initial tests have them feeling “optimistic” and that the “hope” is Muncy only sustained a sprain.
With one out in the sixth inning, Muncy jumped to catch a throw from Dodgers catcher Will Smith, then tagged out Chicago White Sox center fielder Michael A. Taylor on an attempted steal and immediately clutched his left knee, prompting a visit from Roberts and head trainer Thomas Albert.
Muncy wrapped his left arm around Albert and walked toward the third-base dugout, replaced by Enrique Hernandez. His injury, caused by Taylor’s helmet slamming into the side of his left knee on a headfirst slide, was so gruesome that the team’s broadcast opted not to show a replay.
Taylor also exited the game with what initially was diagnosed as a left trap contusion.
The Dodgers went on to win 5-4 on Freddie Freeman‘s walk-off single that scored Shohei Ohtani.
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Alden Gonzalez
LOS ANGELES — His start prolonged, the whiffs remained elusive, and the Dodger Stadium crowd became increasingly concerned that Clayton Kershaw might not reach a hallowed milestone in front of them Wednesday. Finally, with two outs in the sixth inning, on his 100th pitch of the night, it happened — an outside-corner slider to freeze Chicago White Sox third baseman Vinny Capra and make Kershaw the 20th member of the 3,000-strikeout club.
Kershaw came off the mound and waved his cap to a sold-out crowd that had risen in appreciation. His teammates then greeted him on the field, dispersing hugs before a tribute video played on the scoreboard, after which Kershaw spilled out of the dugout to greet the fans once more.
Kershaw, the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ longtime ace, is just the fourth lefty to reach 3,000 strikeouts, joining Randy Johnson, Steve Carlton and CC Sabathia. He is one of just five pitchers to accumulate that many with one team, along with Walter Johnson, Bob Gibson, Steve Carlton and John Smoltz. The only other active pitchers who reached 3,000 strikeouts are the two who have often been lumped with Kershaw among the greatest pitchers of this era: Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer, the latter of whom reached the milestone as a member of the Dodgers in September 2021.
Kershaw’s first strikeout accounted for the first out of the third inning — immediately after Austin Slater’s two-run homer gave the White Sox a 3-2 lead. Former Dodger Miguel Vargas fell behind in the count 0-2, becoming the ninth batter to get to two strikes against Kershaw, then swung through a curveball low and away. The next strikeout, No. 2,999 of his career, came on his season-high-tying 92nd pitch of the night, a curveball that landed well in front of home plate and induced a swing-and-miss from Lenyn Sosa to end the fifth inning.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts did not even look at Kershaw as he made his way back into the dugout, a clear sign that Kershaw would not be taken out. The crowd erupted as Kershaw took the mound for the start of the sixth inning. Mike Tauchman grounded out and Michael A. Taylor hit a double, then was caught stealing on a play that prompted Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy to come down hard on his left knee, forcing him to be helped off the field.
The mood suddenly turned somber at Dodger Stadium. Then, four pitches later, came elation.
Kershaw reached 3,000 strikeouts in 2,787⅓ innings, making him the fourth-fastest player to reach the mark, according to research from the Elias Sports Bureau. The only ones who got there with fewer innings were Johnson (2,470⅔), Scherzer (2,516) and Pedro Martinez (2,647⅔).
The Dodgers came back to win 5-4, capping their rally with three runs in the bottom of the ninth.
Before the game, Roberts called the 3,000-strikeout milestone “the last box” of a Hall of Fame career — one whose spot in Cooperstown had already been cemented by three Cy Young Awards, 10 All-Star Games, an MVP, five ERA titles and more than 200 wins.
Kershaw’s 2.51 ERA is the lowest in the Live Ball era (since 1920) among those with at least 1,500 innings, even though Kershaw has nearly doubled that. He was a force early, averaging 200 innings and 218 strikeouts per season from 2010 to 2019. And he was a wonder late, finding ways to continually keep opposing lineups in check with his body aching and his fastball down into the high 80s.
Kershaw went on the injured list at least once every year from 2016 to 2024. A foot injury made him a spectator last October, when the Dodgers claimed their second championship in five years. The following month, Kershaw underwent surgery to repair a torn meniscus in his left knee and a ruptured plantar plate in his left big toe, then re-signed with the Dodgers and joined the rotation in mid-May. He allowed five runs in four innings in his debut but went 4-0 with a 2.08 ERA in his next seven starts, stabilizing a shorthanded rotation that remains without Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, Roki Sasaki and Tony Gonsolin.
Since the start of 2021, Kershaw has somehow managed to put up the sixth-lowest ERA among those with at least 400 innings.
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