The unsinkable Sarah Langs — the MLB.com/ESPN baseball analyst whose birthday last Friday inspired an outpouring of love from legions of followers in and out of professional baseball — landed a gem on Sunday. She pointed out that Jacob deGrom has taken the fewest games pitched (225) to reach 1,700 strikeouts.
On the same Sunday, our heroine mulcted further that 10 solo home runs among the Royals (with 7) and the Orioles (with 3), in a game the Royals won 11-6, tied for the most such solos in one game with the Diamondbacks vs. the Cubs (2022: it might have been more but for Josh Rojas spoiling it with a 2-run shot in the fifth); and, the White Sox vs. the Tigers (1995: Cecil Fielder was the spoilsport who hit a 3-run homer in the bottom of the first).
DeGrom's feat gives pause when you realize he's been injury-disrupted so often since his second and (so far) final Cy Young Award that he might have achieved it as a Met in better or at least less medically imposing circumstances. The Rangers rewarded his milestone with an 8-1 thrash upon the Mariners that's only the fifth Rangers win in fourteen games.
It was once said of deGrom that his issues weren't not knowing how to win but not knowing how not to pitch for the Mets, whom he could have hauled into court for lack of support. The Rangers now provide him with the kind of support he has deserved long enough. Maybe not enough to gain him credit for more than two wins thus far, but still.
He struck the side out in the second inning Sunday after surrendering a leadoff single, but the first of those strikeouts — to the Las Vegas Athletics of Sacramento's J.J. Bleday — is the one that landed him on Ms. Langs's money list. His reward was the Rangers dropping a six-spot upon the A's in the very next inning, after the Rangers couldn't produce more than two over their previous nine games.
Our Ms. Langs has also exhumed that this year's Padres are now tied for third place among teams with the most shutouts in a season's first 33 games. Their eight are equaled by the 1972 Orioles, the 1969 Cubs, the 1945 Tigers, the 1913 A's, and the 1907 Cubs; and, bested only by the 1876 St. Louis Brown Stockings, the 1914 Red Sox, and the 1968 Guardians (Indians). You may notice two World Series winners among them, the 1913 A's and the 1945 Tigers.
You may presume from the foregoing, and just about anything else Ms. Langs has written or tweeted, that if she'd taken up geology as a profession instead of baseball writing, the earth would have no further secrets to yield, except, perhaps, the final resting place of Dave Kingman's Metrodome roof fly.
She does all that and more while smiling through a battle against the insidious disease known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, that has yet to rob her soul, mind, or spirit, whatever it has done so far to thwart her body. Spend even five minutes in her published company (I've yet to meet the lady in person) and her illness is irrelevant. It's a volume of courage Mr. Gehrig himself would envy.
Her appreciation of the End ALS campaign — much of which includes T-shirts in her honor with the proceeds going to the campaign — is probably equaled only by the likelihood that she'd rather tell you Juan Soto and Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle are separated only by 3 when it comes to the most career walks before turning 27. (Mantle: 797; Soto: 794.) Or, that she'd rather tell you only three men in baseball history have hit 10 or more home runs and batted .430+ in their teams' first 33 games. (The answers: Hall of Famer Jimmie Foxx, 1932; Hall of Famer Henry Aaron, 1959; Hall of Famer in the making Aaron Judge, 2025.)
"Baseball is the best!" she loves to post, whenever she falls upon the sweetest and most compassionate behaviors at the ballpark or among those who play and live the game. The day may yet come when she appreciates that she herself is one of the reasons her exhortation is true.
"Sarah" in the original Hebraic intent means "princess" or "noble woman," first applied to Abraham's wife. Sarah as worn by our Ms. Langs is both for baseball, and plenty more. File this in the better late than not at all department, since my entries here don't appear until Mondays. But here is a belated happy birthday, Ms. Langs, accompanied by a devout wish that there should be many, many, many more on this island earth for you.
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