Eighty-Nine Minutes

Ted Giannoulas made six dollars that night. The San Diego Chicken was paid four dollars an hour, and the game ended so fast he never got through his material.

May 4, 1977. Randy Jones and Jim Kaat, two left-handers who considered a wasted second a personal failure, went at each other in front of 10,021 people at San Diego Stadium. Neither man took a full set of warmup pitches between innings. From the fourth through the seventh they faced the minimum. Jones finished a complete game on 91 pitches, four hits, one walk, one strikeout, and nineteen ground balls. Somebody once described his sinker as "too good to take and too hard to hit," which is the whole scouting report in nine words.

Kaat took the loss and did not seem to mind. He had tickets to a Kenny Rankin concert at nine o'clock. He showered, dressed, got in a car outside the clubhouse, and made it to his seat before the first song.

Jones died in November at 75. He won a Cy Young Award throwing a fastball that topped out around 80, and he did it by refusing to give hitters time to think or beer vendors time to sell. Eighty-nine minutes is not a stunt. It is what the game looks like when two men decide that nothing they do out there needs to take as long as everyone assumes.