Tom Zachary

Eleven months before he put on pinstripes, Tom Zachary threw the pitch that made him a trivia answer forever. On September 30, 1927, pitching for Washington, he watched a Babe Ruth fly ball disappear into the right-field bleachers at Yankee Stadium for home run number 60 of the season -- Zachary argued it was foul, nobody agreed, and his name got stapled to Ruth's for the rest of history. Less than a year later, Zachary was standing in that same stadium's bullpen wearing the interlocking NY himself, about to become a lot more than a footnote to somebody else's record.

A Waiver-Wire Yankee

By August 1928, Washington had no more use for a 32-year-old left-hander who wasn't the pitcher he used to be, and the Senators put him on waivers. The Yankees, on the other hand, had a real problem. Herb Pennock, the crafty lefty who'd anchored the rotation since 1923, was pitching through a bad arm that kept getting worse -- and by October, it would be finished entirely. Manager Miller Huggins needed a reliable left arm for the stretch run, and on August 23, 1928, he got one for the price of a waiver claim.

Zachary wasn't a name that moved the needle. He went 3-3 with a 3.94 ERA in seven games down the stretch, unspectacular, the definition of organizational depth (the same depth Huggins leaned on all year -- shuffling Leo Durocher around the infield, plugging holes wherever the 1928 injury wave opened one). But the Yankees won the pennant by 2.5 games over Philadelphia anyway, and when Pennock's arm finally gave out for good, somebody had to take his spot in the World Series rotation.

Thirty-Six Innings, Three Arms

That somebody was Zachary. The 1928 World Series against St. Louis needed only four games, and the Yankees needed only three pitchers to win them -- Waite Hoyt took Games 1 and 4, George Pipgras took Game 2, and on October 7 at Sportsman's Park, it was Zachary's turn. He beat Jesse Haines and the Cardinals 7-3, going the distance -- seven strikeouts, one walk, three earned runs over nine full innings. No reliever warmed up. None was needed.

It was the third World Series win of Zachary's career (he'd won a pair for Washington's 1924 champions) and his second ring. It also completed one of the more absurd pitching feats in franchise history: Hoyt, Pipgras, and Zachary threw every single one of the 36 innings of that sweep. Three starters, zero relief appearances, four games. Try selling a modern bullpen on that workload.

Nine innings was just the job. Nobody was asking for a pitch count.

The Season Nobody Else Has Matched

If 1928 was Zachary crashing the championship party as an emergency fill-in, 1929 was him running away with the whole thing on his own terms. He made 26 appearances, threw 119.2 innings, posted a 2.48 ERA -- and didn't lose a single game. Twelve wins, zero losses. It's still the American League/National League record for most wins in a season without a defeat, a record that's stood for nearly a century (J.A. Happ got within shouting distance with a 7-0 stretch run in 2018, and everybody involved knew it was still Zachary's record to chase, not break). The only pitcher anywhere in major-league history with more wins in a winless season is Hall of Famer Ray Brown, who went 14-0 for the Negro National League's Homestead Grays in 1938 -- a fact that only makes Zachary's mark more interesting, not less.

Here's the part that gets left out of the trivia-night version of the story: Zachary's 2.48 ERA that year was actually lower than Lefty Grove's league-leading 2.81. He just didn't throw enough innings to qualify for the title under the rules of the time, so Grove got the hardware and Zachary got the shrug (The Sporting News noticed anyway, naming him its American League Pitcher of the Year). A 32-year-old waiver-wire pickup quietly having a better rate season than the best pitcher in the American League is the kind of thing that doesn't happen twice.

Gone by May

It didn't last, and it wasn't supposed to. Zachary opened 1930 with the Yankees, struggled through three shaky outings -- a 6.48 ERA over 16.2 innings -- and by early May, New York had seen enough. New York put him on waivers, and this time the Boston Braves claimed him. Manager Bill McKechnie handed him a rotation spot in Boston and got five more useful seasons out of the left arm the Yankees had given up on. Zachary pitched until 1936, finishing his career with the Dodgers and the Phillies -- a 19-year run that started with the 1918 Philadelphia Athletics, long before Ruth ever set foot in the Bronx.

He never got the record book to himself for long -- these things never last in baseball -- but nobody's caught the 12-0 mark in nearly a century of pitchers trying, and Zachary's the answer to a Yankees trivia question that has nothing to do with Babe Ruth at all.