Louisiana Lightning: Ron Guidry's Impossible 1978

September 9, 1978. Fenway Park, late evening, the third game of a four-game series Boston's newspapers were already struggling to name. The Yankees had just won again. They'd been doing that all September. On this night it was Ron Guidry on the mound, and when the final out landed in someone's glove, the scoreboard read Yankees 7, Red Sox 0. Guidry had allowed two hits.

Two hits.

The 14-game lead Boston had built through July was gone. The Red Sox were tied for first place. The man who'd dismantled them didn't say much on his way to the visiting clubhouse. He didn't need to.

The Man Nobody Was Supposed to Keep

Here's the part that gets buried under the legend: the New York Yankees almost didn't have Ron Guidry at all.

Before the 1976 season, George Steinbrenner had run out of patience with a slight 24-year-old left-hander who kept getting hurt and couldn't seem to throw his breaking ball where he wanted it. "I've got to get rid of him," Steinbrenner told general manager Gabe Paul. "He can't pitch." Paul talked him out of it -- one of the quieter acts of genius in Yankees front office history.

Guidry came close to being traded twice more: once in the deal that brought Mike Torrez from Oakland, and again in the package discussed for Bucky Dent from Chicago. Each time, the Yankees held him back. Torrez, of course, is the man who threw the pitch that Bucky Dent sent over the Green Monster in October 1978. (The trade for Torrez that nearly included Guidry. The deal for Bucky Dent that nearly included Guidry. There's a version of 1978 where he's pitching for Oakland or Chicago, and it ends very differently.) History runs on coincidence and contingency in equal measure.

By 1977, Guidry had started to find himself. He went 16-7 with a 2.82 ERA, split between the bullpen and the rotation, and helped the Yankees win the World Series as a piece of the staff -- not the centerpiece, not yet. He was a good pitcher. He was about to become something else entirely.

How You Go 25-3

From the first start of the 1978 season, Guidry set a pattern that held through June: the Yankees winning, and Guidry the reason.

He was 7-0 through the end of May, 1.88 ERA. By mid-June he'd won 10 straight decisions without a blemish. The runs scored against him were becoming a genuine curiosity among beat reporters. Opposing batters hit .193 against him across the full season -- roughly half the league average. He threw a fastball in the mid-90s and a slider he'd learned from Sparky Lyle, his teammate. The two-pitch combination, thrown with exceptional command, was enough to make the best lineup in each of the other 13 clubs look slightly confused.

Thurman Munson called every pitch from behind the plate. Guidry went the full season without shaking off his catcher once. "I went the whole year never shaking him off one time," he said later. Munson, by Guidry's telling, understood the psychological dimension of catching as well as anyone who'd ever put on the gear -- he knew what each pitcher needed, pitch by pitch, inning by inning, to get through a game. In 1978, what Guidry needed was to throw what Munson asked for. That was it.

Then came June 17.

Eighteen

The most important game Ron Guidry pitched in 1978 wasn't in September, and wasn't in October. It was a Saturday night in June when the California Angels came to Yankee Stadium.

Guidry retired batter after batter. By the seventh inning he had 14 strikeouts. He struck out Brian Downing to match Bob Shawkey's 1919 Yankees franchise record of 15. The crowd of 33,162 understood what was happening. Somewhere in the upper deck, a fan held up a hand-painted sign: LOUISIANA LIGHTNING.

Yankees broadcaster Phil Rizzuto spotted it and repeated it over the air. The nickname attached itself to Guidry before the game was over and stayed there for the rest of his career and beyond. (Rizzuto would read a fan's sign and accidentally name a legend. This is exactly the kind of thing Phil Rizzuto was made for.)

Guidry finished with 18 strikeouts. One shy of the major league record of 19, shared by Nolan Ryan, Tom Seaver, and Steve Carlton. Nolan Ryan was in the Angels dugout that night, watching. The final was 4-0 -- complete game shutout, his 11th win of the season, his record now 11-0.

Something else started that night. The two-strike standing ovation -- fans rising in unison and clapping rhythmically every time there are two strikes on a batter at Yankee Stadium -- started here. Guidry kept piling up strikeouts, and the crowd kept rising, and the rhythm that developed became part of how the Stadium sounds when October arrives.

I'm not the No. 1 guy on the staff, I'm just trying to do the best job that I can do every time I go out there, because I know how much the team depended on me. Reporters were telling me, 'You've probably already locked up the Cy Young Award.' I was like, 'Dude, we've got three more months to go.'

The Chaos He Pitched Through

The 1978 Yankees were a team that ran on talent and organizational dysfunction in roughly equal measure. Billy Martin managed the club like a man who believed the best way to survive a fire was to pour gasoline on it. In late July, following his infamous comment about Reggie Jackson and George Steinbrenner -- "one's a born liar, the other's convicted" -- Martin resigned. Bob Lemon took over on July 25.

At that point, on July 19, the Yankees had been 14 games behind Boston. In fourth place in the AL East. The Red Sox were 62-28. The math pointed in one direction, and it wasn't October baseball in New York.

Guidry kept pitching. Twenty-two of his starts that season came after a Yankees loss -- the archetypal stopper role. The Yankees went 19-3 in those games. "For the team, every time that I'd take the mound," Guidry said, "they would look at me knowing we were going to win." He wasn't boasting. The record supported it.

He took his first loss on July 7, 6-0, to the Milwaukee Brewers. His second on August 4, 2-1, to the Baltimore Orioles. He gave one run in that game. Both times, he came back on five days' rest and pitched like the loss hadn't registered.

September

The deficit was down to four games by September 6. Then the Yankees went to Fenway.

They outscored the Red Sox 42-9 across four games -- 15-3, 13-2, 7-0, 7-4. Writers named it "the Boston Massacre" before the series was finished. Guidry's game was the September 9 shutout: two hits allowed, 7-0, record improved to 21-2, Yankees suddenly tied for the division lead.

He took his third and final loss on September 20, 8-1, to the Toronto Blue Jays.

Here's the detail worth remembering: all three of Guidry's losses in 1978 came against left-handed pitchers named Mike -- Mike Caldwell in Milwaukee, Mike Flanagan in Baltimore, Mike Willis in Toronto. Every single one. Caldwell, it should be noted, finished second in Cy Young voting behind Guidry -- meaning the man who handed him his worst loss of the season also came closest to taking his award. The "three Mikes" quirk is the kind of thing that sounds invented and wasn't.

On September 24, Guidry threw his ninth shutout of the season, tying Babe Ruth's 1916 AL record for shutouts by a left-handed pitcher -- a mark Ruth had set 62 years earlier. Ruth's ERA that season: 1.75. Guidry's: 1.74.

October

The Yankees and Red Sox finished 99-63 and forced a one-game tiebreaker at Fenway. Guidry started on three days' rest. The outcome came down to a fly ball by a shortstop who'd hit four home runs all season.

New York defeated Kansas City three games to one in the ALCS and faced the Dodgers in the World Series. Guidry started Game 3 -- 9 innings pitched, 8 hits, 4 strikeouts, 7 walks, one run allowed, complete game win, 5-1 final. (Seven walks in nine innings. One run allowed. The numbers still look like a typo.) The Yankees won the Series in six games. The greatest comeback in Yankees history was finished.

The Cy Young vote wasn't close. Guidry received all 28 first-place votes -- unanimous, at the time only the second unanimous AL Cy Young in history. He finished second in MVP voting to Jim Rice, who'd had one of the great offensive seasons in American League history (.315 average, 46 home runs, 139 RBI). Rice got 20 first-place MVP votes. Guidry got 8. The argument that Guidry's season was more valuable -- his WAR was 9.6, Rice's was 7.6 -- was made and noted and didn't change the count.

The truest Yankee.

What He Left Behind

Guidry went 170-91 with a 3.29 ERA across a 14-year career, all of it in pinstripes. He had other excellent seasons -- 18-8 in 1979, 21-9 in 1983 -- and won five consecutive Gold Gloves from 1982 to 1986. He retired after 1988. The Hall of Fame didn't come; his career value, outside of 1978, wasn't quite enough to move the voters.

What he left is one of the stranger pitching seasons in American League history: a winning percentage no starter with 20 or more decisions has ever matched, nine shutouts that hadn't been matched by a left-hander in six decades, and a unanimous Cy Young vote that told you, at least for that one year, there was no argument worth having.

Reggie Jackson called him "the truest Yankee." In a clubhouse full of volcanic personalities -- Jackson, Munson, Goose Gossage, Billy Martin himself -- the quiet man from Carencro, Louisiana, became the story by refusing to act like one.

He went out every five days and didn't lose. Except for the three times he lost to a left-hander named Mike.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was Ron Guidry's record in the 1978 season?

Guidry went 25-3 with a 1.74 ERA, 248 strikeouts, 16 complete games, and 9 shutouts across 273.2 innings. His .893 winning percentage is the highest single-season mark for any pitcher in baseball history with at least 20 decisions.

Did Ron Guidry win the 1978 Cy Young Award unanimously?

Yes -- all 28 first-place votes. At the time, it was only the second unanimous AL Cy Young in history. Mike Caldwell of the Brewers and Jim Palmer of the Orioles were the runners-up in the voting.

What happened in Ron Guidry's 18-strikeout game in 1978?

On June 17, 1978, Guidry struck out 18 California Angels batters in a 4-0 complete game shutout at Yankee Stadium, breaking the Yankees' franchise record of 15 held by Bob Shawkey since 1919. During that game, a fan's sign reading "Louisiana Lightning" caught broadcaster Phil Rizzuto's attention, permanently giving Guidry his nickname. The two-strike standing ovation tradition at Yankee Stadium is also credited to that night.

How far back were the 1978 Yankees at their worst point?

Fourteen games behind the Red Sox on July 19, 1978 -- in fourth place in the AL East. Guidry was one of the central reasons the deficit closed. He went 19-3 in starts that followed a Yankees loss that season, earning his role as the team's stopper.

What is Ron Guidry's nickname?

"Louisiana Lightning," earned during the 18-strikeout game on June 17, 1978. He's also known as "Gator" -- a nod to his Louisiana Cajun roots and the alligators native to the bayou country around Carencro.