Red Sox Memories: Boston’s rich history with the immaculate inning

Five members of the Boston Red Sox have achieved one of the rarest feats in all of baseball for a pitcher; the immaculate inning.

Before the Red Sox were a thing, the only professional baseball team in Boston was the Beaneaters, who would eventually become the Boston Braves. On June 4, 1889, the Beaneaters took the diamond against the Philadelphia Quakers with righty stud John Clarkson toeing the rubber.

Clarkson led the league in TWELVE pitching categories that season, and the one feat he accomplished that June afternoon would be remembered in the record books for eternity. In the third inning of that contest, Clarkson struck out Jim Fogarty, Sam Thompson, and Sid Farrar on nine pitches, thus making him the first player in baseball history to achieve the immaculate inning.

How rare is the immaculate inning? Rarer than a no-hitter. there have been 303 no-hitters in the modern era of baseball. There have only been 206 instances of the immaculate inning. Sandy Koufax did it three times (a record). Lefty Grove, Nolan Ryan, Randy Johnson, Max Scherzer, and a current member of your Boston Red Sox have done it twice.

Of the pitchers on this shortlist to have done it more than once, four are in the Hall of Fame, and the two current players will most likely be enshrined in Cooperstown after they retire. The immaculate inning started in Boston, and its rich history permeates the last 20 years of Red Sox baseball.

113 years after Clarkson K’d the side on nine, a 5 foot 11, 175-pound flamethrower from the Dominican gave the Red Sox their first immaculate inning.