If you have not heard about Jacob Misiorowski's 15-strikeout Maddux, a complete game shutout thrown in under 100 pitches, or Yoshinobu Yamamoto's perfect game that he carried into the eighth inning, look them up. Both starts happened recently, and together they represent the best pitching of 2026 so far.
Seeing two performances like that in close succession, combined with how rarely starters go deep into games anymore, made it worth revisiting what the greatest pitching stretches in history actually look like. The individual starts that define those stretches tend to be the ones that stick in memory. Sandy Koufax throwing a perfect game at the height of his powers. R.A. Dickey authoring back-to-back one-hitters in 2012 on his way to one of the most unexpected Cy Young Awards ever won. Clayton Kershaw's near-perfect masterpiece in 2014, spoiled only by a Hanley Ramirez error. Each of those is a singular moment of brilliance, the kind of start that anchors a stretch in the history books.
But what makes a stretch truly historic is not just one unforgettable outing. It is what surrounds it. And by that measure, there is one three-start run that stands above everything else.
Go back to June of 2015, a 1 p.m. start time at Miller Park in Milwaukee, Max Scherzer on the mound. Nobody at the ballpark that day knew it, but they were about to witness the start of something extraordinary.
The First Start
Scherzer was in the first year of his massive contract and pitching to his usual standard heading into June of 2015, with a 2.13 ERA and 97 strikeouts already on the board. It seems doubtful that even he could have believed he was capable of pitching much better than that. Then he went up a level.
His June 14th start against the Brewers was almost otherworldly: 9 innings, 1 hit, 0 runs, 1 walk, 16 strikeouts. The lone hit came in the seventh inning when Carlos Gomez placed a broken-bat single into the outfield, ending Scherzer's perfect game bid. The final result was a complete game shutout that earned a 100 on the Bill James Game Score formula, the highest strikeout total ever recorded by a Washington Nationals pitcher at the time.
For nearly any other pitcher, this would be the best start of the season. For Scherzer, it was merely the beginning.
The Second Start
Six days later, Scherzer delivered one of the most memorable and dramatic starts of the decade. On June 20th, he retired the first 26 Pittsburgh Pirates hitters he faced and struck out 10 of them. With two outs in the ninth, two strikes on Jose Tabata, one strike away from a perfect game, Scherzer hit Tabata to put him on first and end his shot at perfection. He stayed calm, got the next out, and secured a no-hitter.
The line from that start: 9 innings, 0 hits, 0 runs, 0 walks, 10 strikeouts, 1 hit batsman. While that last number became the defining memory of the afternoon, it should not overshadow just how brilliant the performance was. What makes it even more remarkable is that there is a reasonable argument this was not even the best start of Scherzer's week. The no-hitter with 10 strikeouts earned a game score of 97, three points lower than the start against the Brewers. A no-hitter with 10 strikeouts, and it wasn't even the best outing of his week. Scherzer wasn't done.
The Third Start
Another six days passed, and Scherzer took the mound against the Phillies and came out firing again. He retired the first 16 batters he faced before Freddy Galvis finally got a double in the sixth. The final line was not as eye-popping as the previous two: 8 innings, 5 hits, 2 runs, 0 walks, 7 strikeouts. Still, it earned a game score of 79, and viewed in the context of what came before it, it becomes something more than just a strong outing. It becomes part of history.
The Numbers Inside the Stretch
There are a dozen different ways to frame what Scherzer did across those three starts, so rather than choose just one, here they all are.
After walking a Brewer in the eighth inning of the first start, Scherzer retired the next five Milwaukee hitters. He then carried that into his next outing and retired 26 consecutive Pirates before hitting Tabata, then retired the next Pirate, then went out and set down the first 16 Phillies he faced. Between the Gomez single on June 14th and the Galvis double on June 26th, Scherzer faced 54 consecutive major league hitters without surrendering a hit. He essentially threw two consecutive no-hitters worth of batters while allowing only two runners to reach base.
During that 54-batter run, he struck out 25, had two legitimate shots at a perfect game, and threw a no-hitter. He went 16 straight innings without giving up a hit. He went 23 straight innings without allowing a run. Across the full three-start stretch he tallied 33 strikeouts, 1 walk, a WHIP of .27, an ERA of .69 over 26 innings. His combined game score for the three starts was 276, an average of 92 per outing. For context, three consecutive perfect games would produce a game score total of 342. Scherzer was not that far off.
Is This the Best?
Reasonable people will point elsewhere. Some will point to Sandy Koufax's peak and end the debate there. Others will cite Pedro Martinez in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Kershaw and deGrom have their cases as more recent examples of what truly unhittable looks like. All of those arguments are fair.
But Scherzer's June 2015 stretch has to be part of that conversation. The first two starts alone, a game score of 100 followed by a near-perfect no-hitter, make as strong a back-to-back case as you will find anywhere in the modern era. Few stretches carried the kind of dramatic tension his did, and as minor as those swings seem in the context of complete game shutouts and no-hitters, that tension is part of what makes it special.
In many ways, it was a perfect reflection of the pitcher himself. There is something a little unhinged about him, and with that comes drama, but do not mistake the drama for vulnerability. When he was on the mound, he was nearly impossible to solve, those two different-colored eyes staring in for the sign with absolutely no mercy behind them. For 54 consecutive batters across three starts in June of 2015, Scherzer became completely unsolvable.
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