In August of 1995, during a span of just 17 days, baseball witnessed one of the most astonishing displays of pitching mastery the sport has ever seen. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t flashy. It was simply excellence — so precise, so efficient, so impossible to replicate — that it still stands today as one of the greatest stretches by any pitcher in the modern era.
Across four starts, he allowed just four earned runs. Not four runs per game — four total. And while the numbers alone are remarkable, they barely scratch the surface of how dominant he truly was. Each outing was a complete game, as if he were refusing to hand the ball to anyone else. Two of those starts were shutouts, executed with the calm of a surgeon and the confidence of someone who knew hitters could swing all day and still not find anything clean to hit.
This was pitching at its purest form: command over velocity, strategy over brute force, intelligence over chaos. In a decade defined by power hitters and offensive explosions, he carved out his own universe — one where hitters seemed trapped inside a puzzle they were never meant to solve.
What made the stretch even more unbelievable was how easy he made it look. No theatrics. No fist pumps. No showmanship. Just quiet dominance, inning after inning, mixing pitches, changing speeds, painting corners, and suffocating lineups without ever appearing to break a sweat.
Coaches and teammates at the time described his approach as “predictable only in its perfection.” He didn’t overpower hitters; he dismantled them mentally. His command was so razor sharp that missing by two inches felt like a mistake.
During those 17 days, he faced some of the league’s toughest lineups. It didn’t matter. Lefties, righties, power hitters, slap hitters — all reduced to soft contact and defeated expressions as they walked back to the dugout wondering how the ball they thought they squared up somehow ended up as a routine groundout.
What separates this run from other great pitching streaks is its efficiency. He didn’t rack up double-digit strikeouts. He didn’t need 120-pitch outings. Instead, he worked so quickly and ruthlessly that games moved at a pace fans today could barely imagine. Complete games felt effortless. Shutouts felt inevitable.
Looking back, analysts still struggle to contextualize the 1995 stretch. Metrics that didn’t exist at the time now highlight how superhuman it truly was. FIP, xERA, command+ — every measurement points to the same conclusion: what he did in those 17 days wasn’t just great. It bordered on impossible.
In a sport obsessed with velocity, spin rate, and highlight-reel strikeouts, his masterpiece remains a reminder of baseball’s deeper truths: brilliance doesn’t always roar. Sometimes, it whispers.
And sometimes, it whispers so perfectly that nearly three decades later, we’re still not done talking about it.
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