The Major League Baseball 2021 regular season completed three days on Saturday, but Jose Berrios and Corbin Burnes may have recorded the pitch duel of the year as part of the Minnesota Twins’ 2-0 win over the Milwaukee Brewers. Over the course of six innings, the pair had combined for 23 eliminations, zero strokes, zero walks and two strokes.
Although Berrios was not allowed to start seventh inning after throwing 84 shots in the first six frames, the Twins were able to reach five outs from a combined non-hitter after Taylor Rogers hit the team in seventh. Omar Narvaez then chose Tyler Duffey to end the offer with an eliminated in eighth place.
However, Berrios ended his night with 12 punches from the 19 hitters he faced. He racked up 18 whiffs in 36 swings, with nine of them coming up against his characteristic curveball. He even limited the quality of the contact that the Brewers made to the point that Milwaukee’s hitting balls had an average speed of 125 km / h; for reference, the worst exit speed among qualified hitters last season was 82.2 mph. Berrios’s departure was a resounding success and a welcome sign after a disappointing 2020, which saw him post his worst ERA and his worst walkout strike rate since his debut season.
If Berrios and the twins had completed the effort without success, it would have been the first in almost a decade. Francisco Liriano had already taken the action against the Chicago White Sox in May 2011. The twins have not had seven hitters in the history of the franchise, but only two others since 1970: one launched by Scott Erickson in 1994 and another by Eric Milton in 1999.
Berrios and Burnes became the first set of pitchers to have duels without strikes intact beyond the sixth inning since Jake Peavy and Jacob deGrom did this in August 2014, according to the Bally Sports broadcast. They are also the first set of pitchers in the modern era to have more than 10 kills and one or less hitting allowed in the same game, by STATS.
Burnes lost his non-hitter to his last batter of the night, with Byron Buxton hitting a home run for the right midfield. Overall, Burnes completed 6 1/3 innings, hit 11 hitters and launched 87 shots. He generated 17 whiffs in 40 swings, including seven in his dominant mid-90s cutter. Overall, it was a magnificent season debut for Burnes, who finished sixth in the Cy Young Award vote last year after posting an ERA 2.11 and eliminate 37 percent of the hitters he faced in 59 2/3 innings.
If Burnes had completed the streak-free streak, and it probably would have been a combined effort considering his shot count, it would have been the second in the franchise’s history. The first and only other was not released by Juan Nieves in April 1987 against the Baltimore Orioles.
The MLB had two non-hitters during the shortened 2020 pandemic season. Lucas Giolito won the feat against the Pittsburgh Pirates, then Alec Mills against the Milwaukee Brewers. In 2019, the most recent season played under normal conditions, the MLB saw three without batting launched, including two combined efforts.