On Sept. 12, 1962, Tom Cheney of the Washington Senators struck out 21 Baltimore Orioles in a 16-inning game, a single-game mark never equaled and not very likely to be.
Three days later, a pitcher as obscure as Cheney broke a record set by Christy Mathewson in 1913 for the most consecutive innings pitched without walking a batter. On Sept. 15, Bill Fischer of the Kansas City Athletics, a former Nat, topped Mathewson’s 68 innings without a free pass. He did it in a game he started against the Orioles in the second game of a doubleheader in Kansas City. He left with the score tied, but ran his walk-free total to 69 and two-third innings.
Cheney’s name comes up relatively often when trivia buffs talk about the nine-inning standard of 20 strikeouts, held now by four pitchers. Yet righty Bill Fischer gets far less mention for his equally unlikely-to-be-surpassed mark of 84-and-a-third consecutive innings without issuing a base on balls.
Fischer had his best season in the majors with the 1959 Washington Senators. On a team that finished last with 91 losses, he was part of a pitching staff that featured Camilo Pascual, Pedro Ramos and little else.
Fischer’s mark, like Cheney’s, has stood for more than 60 years. Given today’s manta of three true outcomes – a home run, a strikeout or a walk — it would be hard for any pitcher to approach Fischer’s accomplishment. Cheney’s record has become increasingly untouchable as few pitchers go even nine innings, let along 16.
Fischer was claimed off waivers by the lowly Senators on September 11, 1958, from the Tigers, to whom he had been traded by the White Sox in June. He lost the three games he started for Washington, but had a respectable 3.86 ERA.
As a member of the Senators’ 1959 starting staff, he matched up against the Yankees’ Whitey Ford in late April and pitched one of the best games of his career, shutting out the Bronx Bombers for 10 innings. Ford was just as good, however, and went 14 innings as the Yanks beat Washington, 1-0.
That game “did wonders for my confidence,” Fischer told Burt Hawkins of the Washington Evening Star. He proceeded to throw a complete game in beating the Red Sox in his next start and then beat the Tigers, yielding just a run in another complete game. His earned run average at the end of April was 1.06.
He faded in the second half, however, winning just one game to finish 9-11 on a team that went 63-91. Still, he started 29 games and threw 187 innings, both career highs, with six complete games and one of his two career shutouts.
Fischer credited Senators pitching coach Walter “Boom Boom’ Beck and manager Cookie Lavagetto for his early season success. “I learned more about pitching in three weeks with Washington than I had learned in all my other years in baseball,” he told Hawkins. “Cookie made me feel as if I belong,” as recounted in Bob LeMoine’s SABR bio essay on Fischer.
Lavagetto, Hawkins reported, said Fischer’s new-found sinker and slider gave him confidence. “I felt all along he could help us because he has the heart,” Lavagetto said.
Fischer couldn’t replicate his 1959 success, however, and in 1960 he was relegated to the bullpen before returning to the Tigers in a July trade. Although he did better in 20 games for Detroit that season, he again slumped to start 1961 and was shipped to the Athletics in a four-player deal.
Fischer was sent to AAA to begin the 1962 season, but was back with the A’s in late May. On August 3, his consecutive innings streak began after he walked a batter in the first inning in a game he started and lost, 1-0. The first game he appeared in after the streak began and in which he issued no walks came on August 7 at D.C. Stadium. He pitched a complete game, beating the Senators 10-3, pushing his walk-less innings to 17.
His next walk came in the last game of the season, Sept. 30.
“There are only two reasons a guy is wild: He’s got bad mechanics or he’s afraid,” he told John O’Connor of the Richmond Times Dispatch in 1998. “I had pretty good mechanics, and I was too dumb to be afraid.”
Fischer walked just six batters unintentionally over 127.2 innings in 1962, fewer than one base-on-balls every 21 innings. A more recent comparison of pitcher whose stinginess with walks was notable: In 1994, Bret Saberhagen walked just 13 batters in 177 innings. Even so, that amounted to a walk about every 13 innings.
After his playing career ended, Fischer spent decades as a scout and pitching coach. He died at age 88 in 2018.
Cheney began the1963 season with a one-hit shutout and completed his first four starts, yielding just one earned run, but his career essentially ended in July when he hurt his arm. He died at age 67 in 2001.
Please check out Bob LeMoine’s SABR bio essay on Fischer at https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/Bill-Fischer/ .
My Games Project story of Cheney’s 21 strikeouts is also on SABR.org and on this site (Sept. 12, 1962: Tom Cheney strikes out a record 21 batter, posted June 16, 2019).
This also appeared in the Jan. 10, 2025, edition of Here’s the Pitch, the online newsletter of the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America.
Washington baseball history 