The Hardest Man to Strike Out

Joe Sewell's career started with a tragedy that still stands alone in baseball history.

In August of 1920, Cleveland shortstop Ray Chapman was hit in the head by a pitch from Carl Mays and died the next morning, the only on-field fatality the major leagues have ever known. The team needed someone to finish the season. They called up a 21-year-old from the minors named Joe Sewell. He hit .329 down the stretch, and the Indians won the World Series.

Then he spent the next fourteen years becoming the hardest man to strike out who ever lived. Not one of the hardest. The hardest. He fanned 114 times in more than 7,000 at-bats, roughly once every 63 at-bats, a rate no one has ever matched. Lefty Grove, who struck out better than 2,200 hitters in his career, faced Sewell 96 times and never once got him. He called Sewell the toughest out he ever saw.

Sewell did it all with a single bat he used his entire career, a 40-ounce piece of lumber he cared for with a Coke bottle and chewing tobacco. He swore he could see the ball hit the wood. And there is something quietly perfect about the whole arc. A career that began because one man could not get out of the way of a single pitch became the career of the man who almost never missed one.