The Longest Lasting Battery in Baseball

It’s difficult to imagine the Cardinals without Adam Wainwright and Yadier Molina, and impossible to imagine one without the other.

There is no forever in baseball statistics.

The concept is too fraught to mean anything: Every record, as the saying goes, is made to be broken. The game simply keeps moving. The players fade, and trends evolve, but the sport always finds a way to get better—faster, smarter, harder. When the balance of power shifts toward pitching, eventually, inevitably, it will swing back toward hitting. There are plenty of records that will stand for decades. But everyone knows it’s folly to take the over on forever: Watch long enough, and everything can happen twice, or maybe even more.

Yet even in all of that—even up against the stubborn reality of forever—it feels all but impossible to imagine a future version of baseball where any pitcher and catcher will ever do what Adam Wainwright and Yadier Molina did on Wednesday.

The Cardinals teammates made their 325th start together as a battery. (They won, 4–1, over the Brewers.) In doing so, they broke a record that had stood for nearly half a century, originally set by Mickey Lolich and Bill Freehan of the Tigers from 1963 to ’75. No one else came particularly close in the decades since. And it now feels only reasonable to wonder: How could anyone ever do this again?

It’s a record that requires significant talent from both players as a baseline: You don’t last in MLB until age 40 (Molina) and 41 (Wainwright) without it. But there are lots of records that require talent. This one takes far more. It requires a particular confluence of health and luck and timing. In an era of player movement, it requires staying with the same team for the entirety of a career, both by choice (free agency) and by circumstance (trades). It requires that a pair mesh personally and professionally—enough so that no one thinks to pencil in the backup catcher when the pitcher is on the mound. It requires not just that one player feels like a bona fide institution for his team, part of the roster for more than a decade and performing at a high level all the while. It requires that two do so.

This is exactly what Wainwright and Molina have done. It feels difficult to imagine the Cardinals without them and impossible to imagine one without the other. Which meant that to watch them break the record on Wednesday was to watch history, and also to watch a game you might have seen five years ago, or 10, or 15.

Wainwright threw 98 pitches over five innings. Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol did not give him a chance to start the sixth—a fair call, given that when the pitcher left the mound in the fifth, St. Louis was up just 2 to 1 over Milwaukee, a narrow lead against a division opponent. Although Wainwright had limited the damage, he’d allowed quite a bit of traffic on the basepaths, and the effect was obvious. A hundred pitches typically lasts him beyond the sixth inning—Wainwright entered Wednesday averaging 6.1 innings per start at 99 pitches—but here it didn’t put him close. To choose not to send him back out for the sixth made all the sense in the world.

Yet it was hard not to want more—to believe that he could go one more inning, then another, perhaps all night. Even as Wainwright had gotten himself into jams throughout the evening, he had repeatedly gotten himself out of them, and it seemed like he might be able to go forever. He wasn’t blowing guys away; he wasn’t overwhelming, or tricking, or outmaneuvering anyone. He was simply doing what he’s always done. Wainwright was pitching. And, of course, it was working.

His fifth and final inning was perhaps his most effective. It was the only one in which he did not allow a baserunner. He made quick work of the middle of the order, with a grounder to third handled expertly by Nolan Arenado, followed by a pair of flyouts. It all felt very practical. Wainwright got the results he needed without a single swinging strike (let alone a strikeout) and without ever touching 90 mph. The performance was functional, which made it quite impressive in its own way, but none of it could have been called sexy. Yet there was still one moment that dazzled here.

Wainwright’s first pitch of that fifth inning was his 84th of the night. It was a gentle, looping curveball, making a smooth arc down into the zone. Here was his signature pitch—a marvel of geometry—looking as brilliant as ever. The impact was obvious in the batter left staring, in the umpire calling strike, in the scoreboard’s adjustment to 0–1. But it was obvious most of all in Molina. He knew exactly where the curve was going, just how it would fool the hitter, and it found his mitt with a clean, satisfactory thwack. He didn’t need to move at all. If the pitch itself was beautiful—and it was—its reception was just as much so. The catcher made it look so easy: He didn’t have to adjust, or react, or communicate. He simply understood. The sequence lasted all of half a second. But it captured exactly what it means to know someone and be known in return.

Then Molina tossed back to Wainwright, and they kept going.

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