Baseball Way Back: Will pitch clock games match the fastest game in MLB history?

It is tempting to imagine how Chicago pitching legends Greg Maddux and Mark Buehrle would have fared under MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred's new pitch clock.

When Maddux was with the Braves, he pitched a complete game over his old team, using a mere 77 pitches in a complete game 4-1 win over the Cubs on July 22, 1997.

The game, a makeup for one that was snowed out in April, took only 2 hours and 7 minutes to play, less than the 2 hours and 21 minutes of the first game at Wrigley Field under the pitch clock on Thursday.

And the 1997 game would have been even quicker had Geremi Gonzalez, Ramon Tatis and Terry Adams combined not thrown nearly twice as many pitches as the former Cub.

Fans at U.S. Cellular Field on April 16, 2005 barely had time to make their way through the concession lines before Buehrle and Ryan Franklin of the Seattle Mariners finished their pitchers' duel. The game lasted a spiffy hour and 39 minutes. The Sox won 2-1 on 2 Paul Konerko solo home runs, while the Mariners avoided a shutout when Ichiro Suzuki scored on an Adrian Beltre ground out in the ninth.

More than a decade later, on July 6, 2015 at U.S. Cellular Field, Buehrle, now a Blue Jay, locking horns with his successor as White Sox ace, Chris Sale, dueled for an hour and 54 minutes, before the Sox emerged as 4-2 victors. The Sox battled back from a 2-1 deficit, busting out with 3 runs in the bottom of the eighth on a run-scoring single by Jose Abreu and a 2-run double by Melky Cabrera off Buehrle.

None of the runs given up by Buehrle were earned, by the way.

The aim of the pitch clock is to make the game more appealing to younger fans and recruit new ones.

Ironically, by making baseball "relevant" to today's society and more up-to-date, the pitch clock's deployment is actually old school, taking baseball back to its dead ball roots when there were no night games and players routinely finished nine innings before sundown.

It will be interesting to track the duration of games throughout the season. Perhaps fans will get used to arriving back home from a night game in time to watch the news at 10.

But even with the pitch clock, one record, for the fastest nine-inning game in MLB history, is likely to stand.

The Phillies and the New York Giants, under acting manager Christy Mathewson, gave a new meaning to the phrase "getaway day" on Sept. 28, 1919. Nearly 20,000 fans at the Polo Grounds in New York watched Jesse Barnes of the Giants earn his National League leading 25th win in 51 minutes in the first game of a Sunday doubleheader on the last day of the season. The second game actually was supposed to have been played the next day, but was moved up to draw a larger Sunday crowd.

The Giants, who finished in second place behind the pennant-winning Reds, easily defeated the cellar-dwelling Phils 6-1, boosted by a 2-run single by Benny Kauff.

Future White Sox manager Lena Blackburne scored the Phillies' only run.

Fifty-one outs, one per minute, were recorded that day.

According to the account in The New York Times, "There was no unusual effort yesterday to make a speed record until the Phils' half of the ninth. At that time it became apparent to the players that they could do something unusual, and for a half inning they hustled. Even with two out in this closing inning, (Phillies first baseman Fred) Luderus poked a hit to centre field, and he did not attempt to walk into any putout. (Phillies shortstop) Dave Bancroft did. He took a half swing at a ball, which rolled to (Giants second baseman Larry) Doyle, and the game was over. Bancroft's effort with two down in the ninth was the only part of the game in which real effort was lacking."

The Giants also won the bottom half of the twin-bill 7-1, showcasing such rookies as future Cubs manager Frankie Frisch.

With the season over, acting Giants manager Mathewson would be off to cover the 1919 World Series as a journalist. During that infamous series, Big Six would aid scribe Hugh Fullerton in spotting suspicious plays.

In the wake of the Black Sox scandal, baseball would hire as commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Landis would blacklist players who had sullied the game, including not only the "eight men out," but also the offensive star of the 51-minute game, Kauff, after he was acquitted in a 1921 auto theft case.

Now that baseball is bringing back quicker games, perhaps Manfred might want to reconnect with the game's roots in other ways. How about making the spitball legal again?