“What a night for the Twins,” Jim Rich began in his introduction to Tuesday night’s postgame show. “And what a way to kick off a nine-game homestand.”
With a scant 89 pitches, Bailey Ober converted his 124th career start into his first shutout and the third complete game of his career. The final play in the scorebook, a two-hopper to Kody Clemens standing just inside the right field grass, landed in Ober’s glove as he glided to cover first base. After umpire Manny Gonzalez signaled the final out, Ober’s glove did not open again.
“Only fitting too,” said Cory Provus, “that the final out and the ball…already inside that mitt.”
Ober threw his last pitch, a four-seam fastball, at 87.9 mph. Statcast did not log any of his pitches above 90.6 mph.
THE MADDUX
The creature of the “complete game,” once a bountiful quarry for baseball enthusiasts (Nolan Ryan threw 222 of them), has become a bit of a white stag. 29 pitchers made it through all nine frames in 2025, but Ober is only the third to finish one this year. George Kirby suffered the strange, poor luck of losing his eight-inning, 101-pitch start in a 3-2 loss at Globe Life Field on April 7.
Six days prior, Sandy Alcantara received ten runs of support for his effort in a dazzling, efficient study of righty dominance which lasted less than two-and-a-quarter hours. He struck out seven with just 93 pitches: a “Maddux,” or a complete game shutout with less than 100 pitches thrown.
Ober’s start improved on that mark by the slightest of margins (4 pitches). However, that margin reintroduced him into rarified company: pitchers to throw a complete game — shutout or not — with fewer than 90 pitches.
In 2014, just a month and a half before Travis Ishikawa’s magnificent home run sent the San Francisco Giants back to the World Series, his teammate Yusmeiro Petit completed a 9-inning start with 84 pitches. Since then, only eight pitchers have done so. Rick Porcello accomplished the feat not once, but twice with the Boston Red Sox.
One other pitcher, as it turns out, holds two sub-90 complete games since Petit’s in 2014: Bailey Ober.
THE PROFESSOR AND THE BEARDED NIGHTMARE
Tuesday night’s 3-0 win over the Miami Marlins marks the second time in the past two seasons in which Bailey Ober completed a 9-inning start with fewer than 90 pitches. On June 22, 2024, it took him only 89 pitches to beat the then-Oakland A’s, 10-2, at Oakland Coliseum. He allowed two earned runs on an absurd 70 strikes (he threw 52 on Tuesday). Before Ober’s 2024 start, five years had passed since a pitcher achieved such efficiency: In 2019, both Sandy Alcantara (89) and Kyle Hendrix (81) completed starts below the 90-pitch tally.
The Professor himself shouted out opponents with fewer than 100 pitches in just 13 of his 109 complete games; of those 13, records show he dipped below 90 pitches on five occasions. Maddux was pitching before pitch counts were introduced in 1988, so a few more could have been lost to incomplete record books. Maddux would go on to win 355 games and enter Cooperstown on his first ballot, winning the World Series with the Atlanta Braves in 1995.
While Ober is not the only pitcher to join Maddux in the rarest of rare companies this year, it adds a distinguished mark to his pitching resume. After ranking among the best pitchers in baseball in the second half of 2023, much has been made of the drop in his velocity and lack of command. At the moment, these questions are more than valid: they are necessary, especially for teams angling to compete in their division.
But Statcast simply does not show us metrics like Bailey Ober’s very often. Comparing Ober’s with Sandy Alcantara’s Maddux on April 1, his average fastball velocity was 98.4 mph — a full ten miles per hour faster than Ober’s average.
To the east, while Ober worked the throttle on his pitches and crowded the strike zone, Paul Skenes was working on his own Maddux before Pittsburgh Pirates manager Joe Kelly pulled his ace after 8 innings and 98 pitches. His fastball — a glorious lie in every word, to be sure — clocked in at an average of 96.4 mph.
These are the standards of pitching dominance in 2026. And yet none — not Jacob Misiorowski, who has yet to pitch beyond seven innings; not Roki Sasaki, beyond six — have coaxed the rare secrets from the pitcher’s mound as has Bailey Ober and his 89 mph fastball. Tonight, he heard the deep magic of the finesse pitcher and the slow gape of the late-inning strike zone (brought to you by T-Mobile). A Maddux indeed: on the radar gun, up and down the lineup, and in the box score.
To see the name of Greg Maddux make the rounds for a few days is going to be good for baseball. It’ll remind us there’s more than one way to play the game, that statistics are not prophecy, and that hitting a baseball is the most difficult thing to do in sports. Bailey Ober recalled to life, if just for a moment, an earlier archetype of the starting pitcher.
And, lest we forget: not for the first time.
