40 years ago today, Roger Clemens' 20 K's made history

Editor’s note: All quotes from Roger Clemens in this story are from his 1987 autobiography with Peter Gammons, titled “Rocket Man: The Roger Clemens Story.”

BOSTON -- For Roger Clemens, a day that ended with career-transforming history started with a ruthless headache.

“I had a bad temple headache that stayed with me all day,” Clemens recalled. “I was really antsy, jittery. I was supposed to have started two days earlier in Kansas City, but it rained.”

On April 29, 1986, at a cold and somewhat damp Fenway Park, Clemens transferred his headache to the opposing Seattle Mariners, who whiffed at one high-octane heater and nasty curveball after another.

It was 40 years ago that Clemens, at 23 years old, went from promising young pitcher to legend in the making. He became the first pitcher in history to strike out 20 batters in a nine-inning, Major League game, achieving the remarkable feat while walking none and allowing three hits. Right-hander Tom Cheney had 21 strikeouts for the Washington Senators in a 16-inning game in 1962.

• These pitchers struck out 20 batters in a game

Hall of Famers Nolan Ryan, Steve Carlton and Tom Seaver were among those who had 19 – setting a high bar for Clemens to make history.

But he cleared that bar impressively with an awesome display of power for a pitcher who had just undergone surgery on his right rotator cuff from Dr. James Andrews the previous August.

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Wearing No. 21 in his home white Red Sox uniform, Clemens looked baby-faced and lanky that night compared to the imposing hurler that fans came to know for most of his career, going on to win 354 games, notching 4,672 strikeouts and capturing a record-setting seven Cy Young Awards.

The stage was set for excitement from the first inning, when Clemens took Spike Owen, Phil Bradley and Ken Phelps each to a full count and struck out all three.

Clemens’ pace then slowed slightly, racking up two K's in the second and another in the third, giving him six punchouts through three frames.

But what started as a routine pitching performance began turning into a show in the fourth inning, when Clemens kept bringing the heat and got a fortuitous error from teammate Don Baylor. At that point in Baylor’s career, he was almost exclusively a designated hitter, but Red Sox manager John McNamara started him at first base that night, and it might have just changed the course of history. Baylor went back on a routine foul ball off the bat of Gorman Thomas and dropped it. Naturally, Clemens responded by punching out Thomas looking for his third strikeout of the inning.

“Don never did look as if he had that thing under control, and he knocked it down like a goaltender making a save,” Clemens recounted. “Debbie Boggs turned to [my wife Debbie] and said, ‘Good, now he can strike him out.’ It didn’t bother me.”

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If you had to pick one point of the night where the game went from epic to extraordinary, it was the fifth inning, when Clemens sat down Jim Presley, Iván Calderón and Danny Tartabull in succession on called third strikes.

That made it 12 K's through five innings.

Around this time, the late Larry Whiteside, a fixture on the Red Sox beat for The Boston Globe at the time, decided he had seen enough dominance from Clemens and drove across town to the Boston Garden, where the eventual NBA champion Boston Celtics dispatched the Atlanta Hawks, 119-108, to take a 2-0 lead in this best-of-seven Eastern Conference semifinal series.

For years after, Whiteside’s colleagues would playfully chide him for walking out on Clemens and his quest for history.

Tongue in cheek, Whiteside would quip, “It’s not like he had a no-hitter or anything.”

In the sixth, the array of K's continued when he struck out Dave Henderson and Steve Yeager to make it eight straight punchouts, which was an AL record at the time.

“I’ll admit, at that point, I started thinking about the strikeouts,” said Clemens. “But I was also thinking about outs because it was a scoreless game.”

Oh, that’s right, Clemens would need his team to score for his performance to truly stand up in the annals of baseball history.

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For a second, it looked like history might be cut off not by a lack of runs but an injury.

After striking out Bradley for the third time to open the seventh, Clemens, without warning, ran off the mound toward the dugout.

McNamara was looking at his scorecard and nearly keeled over when he saw Clemens about two feet from him.

“McNamara nearly had a heart attack,” Clemens said.

Turns out, he just needed a tongue depressor to knock the mud out of his cleats. His spikes cleaned off, Clemens struck out Phelps. But then came the lone blemish of the night, when Thomas hit one of his 268 career homers over the wall in center to make it 1-0, Seattle. Though he had 16 strikeouts through seven, Clemens suddenly didn’t care. He slammed down his glove in frustration when he got back to the dugout, knowing he had put his team down by a run.

Not to worry though, right fielder Dwight Evans was there for him. In the bottom of the seventh, the man known as “Dewey” answered the missile by Thomas with one of his own, mashing a three-run homer into the bleachers in center.

When Evans got back to the dugout, Clemens put him into a bearhug and lifted him in the air.

“I tackled him,” Clemens remembered. “He said he felt like I was trying to burp him.”

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In the top of the eighth inning, there was another interesting development. The young man who would frequently put “K” cards on the back wall of the bleachers during Clemens’ starts had somehow been absent. But he appeared in the eighth inning, and quickly caught up so he could be ready for the final acts of the drama in real time.

“He was watching the game on NESN that night in Newton, and got his mother to drive him down after the seventh, and got to the park right before Dwight’s homer,” Clemens said. “When he had started lining up cards in my rookie year of 1984, the ballclub tried to stop him. But I told them to leave him alone.”

In the eighth inning, Clemens achieved Red Sox history by tying Bill Monbouquette’s club record of 17 by striking out Calderón on a pitch that “did something crazy,” according to Clemens. Then Henderson became strikeout victim No. 18, giving Clemens the new team record.

By the ninth inning, the paltry crowd of 13,414 at Fenway sounded like a packed house. The place was going mad, witnessing something it had never seen before.

“I was sitting up in the clubhouse with [teammate Al Nipper] and Nip said, ‘Now I can tell you. Do you realize what you’re doing? You need two strikeouts for 20 and the record.’ I shrugged,” Clemens said.

And then he swiftly took care of business. Owen, who played with Clemens on a national championship team at the University of Texas, couldn’t hold his swing for the record-tying No. 19.

Up stepped poor Bradley, the one guy who was absolutely helpless the whole night.

Bradley’s golden sombrero was complete when he took the third strike for No. 20, and late, legendary Red Sox broadcaster Ned Martin exclaimed, “A new record. Clemens has set a Major League record for strikeouts in a game – 20!”

With a chance at 21, Clemens had to settle for a grounder to the shortstop from Phelps, prompting Martin to say, “What a performance by the kid from the University of Texas.” The Red Sox won the game, 3-1.

******

Clemens’ Red Sox teammates mobbed him on the mound. In a sweet moment, Clemens then wandered over to the stands to present the baseball to his wife, who was so excited that she left her purse on her seat. “I’ll get mobbed if I take this ball from you,” Debbie said.

Clemens hugged his wife, took the ball back and gave it to her later.

Shortly after, teammate Bruce Hurst dubbed Clemens “Rocket Man.” Later, it would just become “Rocket.”

While Clemens was the first to strike out 20 in a nine-inning game, he wouldn’t be the last.

A decade later, on Sept. 18, 1996, in his final win and shutout in a Boston uniform, Clemens tied his own record at Tiger Stadium.

Kerry Wood got his 20 as a rookie for the Cubs against the Astros on May 6, 1998. Hall of Famer Randy Johnson logged 20 on May 8, 2001, a game his Diamondbacks won in extra innings against the Reds. Max Scherzer is the most recent pitcher to punch out 20, doing so as a member of the Nationals on May 11, 2016, against the Tigers.

But Clemens will always be the first (and second) to do it, and his performance against the Mariners is still the stuff of legend 40 years later.