Mariners History: 40 years since the dark day of Roger Clemens' 20-K masterpiece

Before April 29, 1986, no major league pitcher had ever struck out 20 batters in a nine-inning game before. Then Roger Clemens did it for the Red Sox at Fenway Park, and we're sorry to reveal after 40 years that he did so against the Mariners.

Yeah, it was a bad day for a squad that was going through a bad time. The Mariners had rolled into Boston at 7-12 after getting swept in Oakland, with the long flight east surely adding to their misery. The last thing they needed was a cold, damp evening, but the baseball gods nonetheless threw one of those into the mix.

As for Clemens, what is there to say other than he was just plain nasty that night? You'd need a time-traveling DeLorean to get the Statcast metrics on his stuff, but his fastball seemed to be teleporting to home plate.

As Dan Shaughnessy wrote in The Boston Globe, “Watching the Mariners try to hit Clemens was like watching a stack of waste paper diving into a shredder." He wasn't wrong, but it's still worth noting that it was a game the Mariners could have (and perhaps should have) won.

Albeit without the high strikeout count, Mike Moore matched Clemens with scoreless frames through the first six innings. Gorman Thomas then gave Seattle the lead in the top of the seventh with a solo homer, resulting in a 22-percent win expectancy swing in the visiting team's favor.

It was only after Dwight Evans answered with a three-run homer in the bottom half of the seventh that Clemens was fully on his way. He got there by striking out four of the last six batters he faced, ultimately retiring Ken Phelps on a groundout to end it.

The legacy of Roger Clemens' 20-strikeout mastery of the Mariners, 40 years later

In retrospect, that 1986 Mariners squad coming up against Clemens in that moment looks like a case of butter meeting a hot knife.

The '86 Mariners eventually matched the worst start in club history when they dropped to 9-20 through 29 games. And by the end of the year, they had lost 95 games and racked up an American League-high 1,148 strikeouts.

As for Clemens, 1986 might as well be the year that "The Rocket" was born. He went on to win the AL MVP and the first of his seven Cy Young Awards that year. He would have been a first-ballot Hall of Famer in 2013 if not for, you know, all the steroid suspicion.

Regardless of that, Clemens at least spared the Mariners from being alone in infamy when he notched another 20-strikeout game against the Detroit Tigers in 1996. The feat was later replicated by former Mariner Randy Johnson in 2001 and by Max Scherzer in 2015.

According to game score, there has technically been a better game pitched against the Mariners. John Means' no-hitter in 2021 is the best, followed by Clemens' 20-strikeout game and Philip Humber's perfect game from 2012 — which Félix Hernández followed with a perfecto of his own a few months later.

So, at least there's that. But unless you appreciate good pitching as much as you like the Mariners, we can't recommend revisiting April 29, 1986 for a good time.

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