Forty Summers Ago, Fernando Valenzuela Struck Out Five Straight All-Stars. He Was Only the Second Man Ever to Do It.

On a July afternoon at the Polo Grounds in 1934, a New York Giants left-hander named Carl Hubbell — a man who did not even throw especially hard — walked to the mound in the second All-Star Game ever played and did something that has echoed for more than ninety years. He struck out, in succession, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons, and Joe Cronin: five men who would all reach the Hall of Fame, the beating heart of the American League’s Murderers’ Row, retired one after another on a pitch most of them had never learned to hit. It remains the most famous half-inning in the history of the game’s midsummer showcase.

And for fifty-two years, no one came close to matching it.

Fifty-Two Years Later, in Houston

Then, on the night of July 15, 1986 — forty summers ago this month — another left-hander with a screwball walked to the mound at the Astrodome and did it again. Fernando Valenzuela, the Dodgers’ folk hero, the man who had made an entire city fall in love with baseball, struck out Don Mattingly, Cal Ripken Jr., Jesse Barfield, Lou Whitaker, and Teddy Higuera — five straight, tying Hubbell’s record exactly, screwball for screwball, half a century apart. Two men, and only two, have ever struck out five consecutive batters in an All-Star Game. Both of them threw the same beautiful, backward-breaking, nearly extinct pitch.

The Pitch That Links Them

About the screwball, because it is the secret of the entire thing. It breaks the wrong way — in toward a same-handed hitter, away from an opposite-handed one, the mirror image of a curveball — and it is thrown by twisting the forearm in a manner the human elbow was frankly not built to enjoy. It has always been rare, and it is now essentially extinct; a whole generation of pitchers has come and gone without a single reliable screwball artist among them. Hubbell threw it. Fernando threw it. And the record the two of them share may be safe forever precisely because the weapon they shared has all but disappeared from the game. In the forty years since 1986, no one has come close — not because the hitters got better, but because the pitch that beat them stopped being taught.

A List That May Never Grow

Fernando Valenzuela is gone now — we lost him in 2024 — and the screwball, in the way of these things, is quietly going with him. But for one inning forty summers ago, on the game’s brightest stage, he reached back across fifty-two years and touched a ghost from 1934, and the two of them — the soft-spoken Giant and the beloved Dodger, both left-handed, both throwing the pitch that nobody throws anymore — became the only two names on a list that may never grow. Most records are made to be broken. This one, four decades old and guarded by a lost art, looks made to last. On the night of another All-Star Game, it is worth remembering that some of the best things the summer of 1986 produced have only gotten better with the years.

This one is for Simone, on her birthday — herself a product of that very good summer, and living proof that the finest vintages of 1986 only improve with time. Happy birthday.

A note on the data: Carl Hubbell’s five consecutive strikeouts in the 1934 All-Star Game (Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons, and Joe Cronin, at the Polo Grounds on July 10, 1934) and Fernando Valenzuela’s five consecutive strikeouts in the 1986 All-Star Game (Don Mattingly, Cal Ripken Jr., Jesse Barfield, Lou Whitaker, and Teddy Higuera, at the Astrodome on July 15, 1986) are from the Society for American Baseball Research, the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and Baseball Almanac; both pitchers were left-handed screwball specialists, and their shared mark of five straight remains the All-Star Game record. Roger Clemens was the MVP of that 1986 game, played in his hometown of Houston. This issue publishes on the night of the 2026 All-Star Game.