Chris Sale simply latest whose greatness didn’t get a ‘W’

COMMENTARY

Steve Trachsel. I’ve forgotten the exact circumstances surrounding my child’s first steps, but I vividly recall feeling palpable anger at Steve Trachsel.

On May 6, 2000, the Red Sox played a Saturday matinee against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays at Fenway Park. It was on Fox 25, I remember — “Sox on Fox” — and called by Sean McDonough. Pedro Martinez, already 5-0, at the height of his powers, facing arguably the worst team in baseball. I was home from my sophomore year of college and literally carved out time to watch the game. And Pedro did not disappoint: Complete game, six singles, one walk, 17 strikeouts. He didn’t go on any great runs of retired hitters or anything, but he was Pedro in 1999-2000.

And he got outdueled by Steve Blanking Trachsel, a slow-working stiff who that day fanned 11 in a shutout and won when the Rays strung together two singles and a stolen base in the eighth.

The Globe’s sports front on May 7, 2000.

“Straight survival,” said Greg Vaughn to reporters that day, the Globe gamer noting he’d fanned three times on nine pitches before lining a full-count, two-out breaking ball to center for the game’s only run.

For all the world, I thought Pedro was going undefeated in 2000. It wasn’t entirely unhinged, given he’d won 13 straight decisions including the ’99 postseason, but it probably is that I immediately thought of that Trash Trachsel Saturday on Tuesday night, when Chris Sale faced a similar fate.

“Seven innings is great and 17 punchouts is great, but at the same time, I had terrible timing with giving up the runs I did,” he told reporters, Nolan Arenado’s Fenway special in the seventh hastening the lefty’s exit and setting the table for a 5-4, 11-inning loss. “I appreciate what happened tonight. I’m not taking away from that. But at the same time, it’s pretty crappy timing to give up a two-run homer and give a team a new life.”

It was an eye-catching two games, well worth your attention (as promised). Yet for the roller coaster Tuesday was, followed by more extra innings and a Michael Chavis walk-off on Wednesday, we’re only going to remember all those ‘K’ cards. Seventeen strikeouts in seven innings and 108 pitches. Disappointing that Alex Cora didn’t give Sale a shot at 20 in the eighth, but entirely understandable.

Six days after 14 strikeouts in Baltimore, six weeks after he didn’t even average 90 mph with his fastball in Oakland, we look up and Chris Sale has struck out 59 of the last 125 hitters he’s faced.

To be clear, he’s had better starts turn into losers. (The Sox are 2-3 in that above run, scoring Sale fewer than three runs per game.) But the mind goes where it goes, and mine went to Trachsel and the history of great singular performances in Red Sox history that were undercut by happening in losses.

The obvious first thought is Nathan Eovaldi last October, and he certainly fits. Let’s leave that to the side, simply to dig a bit deeper in the archives.

Matt Young — April 12, 1992

Declaring that the lefty tossed a complete-game no-hitter and lost isn’t technically true, because the league doesn’t recognize no-hitters of fewer than nine innings as official. Regardless, Matt Young — nowhere near the talent of Clay Buchholz, but with the same sort of frustratingly untapped potential — didn’t allow a hit to the Cleveland Indians to start a doubleheader at old Cleveland Stadium.

He did, however, walk seven batters, and the Tribe capitalized. In the first, they scored on a stolen base and a Luis Rivera throwing error. In the third, they scored again on two walks and two groundouts. And thus, when what would become one of the worst offenses in the American League mustered only one run in reply, Cleveland didn’t need to bat in the bottom of the ninth.

No win. No no-hitter. No matter, in Young’s eyes.

“They didn’t get any hits. The game’s over,” he told reporters afterward. “People can make all the rules they want. It doesn’t matter to me.”

Amazingly, he wasn’t even Boston’s best pitcher that day. Roger Clemens, pitching the nightcap, tossed a two-hit, 12-strikeout shutout.

Jim Rice — Aug. 29, 1977

The year before Rice won his MVP award, he truly established himself as a fearsome force in the American League, hitting .320/.376/.593 with an AL-best 39 homers and 83 extra-base hits (including 15 triples). He was never better on one day, however, than he was on a Monday against the post-dynasty Oakland A’s. Carrying a 17-day home run drought into the game, Rice smashed three home runs in five innings as part of a 4-for-5, 4-RBI evening — one of just two three-homer games he’d have in his Hall of Fame career.

But this one, the Sox lost 8-7 to an Oakland team destined for 98 losses, via single runs in the eighth and ninth. The home side stranded 13 runners and blew leads of 5-1 and 7-6, the latter coming on Rice’s third blast.

The ’77 Sox finished 97-64, just 2.5 games behind the eventual champion Yankees.

Carl Yastrzemski — May 14, 1965

The last 100-loss Red Sox team featured a rookie Jim Lonborg and a second-year Tony Conigliaro, with Tony C and Yaz actually leading the squad to AL-best marks in OPS, home runs, walks, and total bases. In that sense, their 12-8 loss to the Detroit Tigers in front of a typical pre-1967 Fenway crowd of 10,271 was their season in microcosm.

Yastrzemski, who’d make his second of 18 All-Star teams that year, had the best game of his career: 5-for-5, with home runs in both the first and second innings off Denny McLain — Boston scored five times, all on Yaz’s home runs — a walk in the fourth, a triple in the sixth, a single in the eighth, and a double in the 10th. Their pitchers, last in the AL for the season in both hits and runs, immediately squandered that 5-0 lead and a 6-5 lead in the fifth before Detroit piled on for four in the 10th.

The cycle is often overblown, but in more than 3,300 MLB games, that was Yaz’s only one. He was on base in six innings. And his team lost by four runs.

Joe Harris — Sept. 1, 1906

They all, every last one, pale to Joe Harris.

Joe Harris was born and bred in Melrose, living to be either 82 or 84 — the Globe couldn’t decide when he passed away in 1966. His obituary credited him for 36 years as a Melrose fireman and as operating a taxi service in the years after that, and coverage through the years lauded him for valiantly battling more than his share of life’s bad breaks: Illness, a house fire, the loss of his wife, the loss of most of his hearing and sight.

He went 2-21 in 1906 with the then Boston Americans — they weren’t the Red Sox until 1908 — and 3-30 in a three-season MLB career. And yet, his name was never forgotten for a generation of New England baseball fans. Because of Sept. 1, 1906.

When Joe Harris pitched 24 innings against the defending champion Philadelphia Athletics, including 20 consecutive shutout innings, and lost.

The Globe front page from Sept. 2, 1906.

Before an announced crowd of 18,084 — Harris, recalling the game decades later, counted it as no more than “2,500” at the end — the 38-81 home side played Philadelphia to a stalemate in a game four innings longer than any previously seen in the American or National Leagues. That record stood until 1920, when the Boston Braves and Brooklyn played a 26-inning tie called by darkness; this game nearly met the same fate, but the umpire ignored pleas from both teams to stop after the 23rd.

By that point, no one had scored in hours. Philadelphia took a 1-0 lead in the third, its rookie pitcher Jack Coombs reaching on an infield single, stealing second, then scoring on another infield single. Boston tied it in the sixth, Freddy Parent’s triple followed by player-manager Chick Stahl singling him home.

And that was it. The teams combined for 31 hits, but Coombs — who’d play 14 years in the majors — and Harris fanned 32 between them in what was supposed to have been the first game of a doubleheader. One arm cracked at the end, though, and it was the righty from Melrose.

“The plucky Quakers landed a grand victory, not, however, until two men were down and two strikes had been called on the lucky [Ossee] Schreckengost,” described the Globe, which described his run-scoring single back through the box and over second base as coming on “a ball aimed at his head.”

“I was lucky to go that far,” recalled Harris in 1963, sure to note Philadelphia tacked on two more runs for the 4-1 final. “They almost knocked my head off in the 24th.”

He was equally dismissive of the idea he deserved any particular sympathy for losing the longest game in Red Sox history, one that makes any involving the Colorado Rockies or Steve Trachsel look like backyard tee ball.

“It was just like losing any other game,” Harris said. “Sure, I’d love to have won, but I didn’t, so why cry over spilled milk?”