Routine Moments in Baseball History: The Worst Day a Pitcher Can Have

Welcome back to Routine Moments in Baseball History, a running weekday feature that looks back at plays that have been ignored by the history books because history books only talk about things that are important or interesting. Today's installment is "The Worst Day a Pitcher Can Have." 

Dan Spillner might have felt pretty good when he took the mound for the San Diego Padres in St. Louis on August 8, 1975. Sure, he was 4-9 with an ERA hovering above 4.00, and sure the Padres of the 70s tended to lose between 90 and 100 games a year, but he was a 23-year-old major league starter, a tall, handsome professional athlete who could throw a baseball as hard as anyone in the world and played in a city that was sunny all the time. The Cardinals were tough at the top of the lineup, but he wasn't worried. There's nothing like being watched by 23,000 fans in a strange city on a humid summer day to make you feel invincible.

Then Lou Brock came to the plate and smashed a single to left field.

Then Willie Davis slapped another single, this one to right.

Then Ron Fairly shot a ground ball past the shortstop. Another single. Brock scored from third.

Then Ted Simmons poked a ball up the middle—close enough for Spillner to touch—and it bounced over second base into the outfield as Davis touched home plate.

Then Reggie Smith hit a fly ball—a fucking fly ball, he didn't even connect with it!—and it dropped into that stupid fucking space between the third baseman and the left fielder, another single, of fucking course, and Fairly scored as the crowd's cheers went from a full-throated roar to a kind of bemused laughter.

Then Ted Sizemore, the light-hitting second baseman, hit a ground ball that again found the gap between the third baseman and the shortstop, and as Simmons scored Spillner was already looking toward the dugout, and the manager, John McNamara, was already at the top of the dugout steps waiting to come out to the mound and call in a reliever.

Just like that, Dan Spillner's day was over—six hits, four runs, all of them earned, no outs, ERA of infinity. Later he might have argued, in some anonymous St. Louis bar to whoever would listen or just in his hotel room to himself, that he really didn't pitch that badly. It wasn't like he was just hanging some fat junk out there, and the Cardinals didn't make great contact. It was just every ball found a fucking hole, you know? And every time he got the ball back from his fielder's he'd think, OK, settle down, you're doing fine, just get the next out, but WHAM—another swing sprayed another hit somewhere a fielder wasn't. It was like the batters had uncovered the secret to controlling exactly where the ball goes once it leaves the bat.

If Spillner had been superstitious he'd have felt the need to do something to get the stink of such a snake-bitten outing off—get real drunk, light something on fire as an offering to the baseball gods, have sex with an ugly woman as a "slump buster." More likely, he just sulked in the clubhouse for a long time, found some shoulder to cry on, and went to sleep trying to wipe his mind clean of the memory. His next start was against the Mets in New York, and he was already looking forward to it.

That game would be a disaster too—he'd get torched for four runs in the first and only make one out before getting pulled—but at least he had no way of knowing that then.

This has been Routine Moments in Baseball History. Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.