Indians Lookback: Favorite All-Time Indians One-Game Pitching Performance

Over the years we've all been privy to a number of great outings by some great Indians pitchers in their organization.

From Cy Young award winners like Corey Kluber, Cliff Lee and C.C. Sabathia, to young guns like Carlos Carrasco, Danny Salazar and Mike Clevinger, the team over the past few seasons has been built on their great pitching rotation.

Today as part of our "Lookback" series, we ask our panel of writers about some of the best pitching performances they have seen from the Indians over the years, with some interesting picks from our staff.

Sit back and enjoy our staff picks, and feel free to leave comments with what you think was the best one-game outing you've seen from an Indians pitcher.

Dave Alligood

Baseball is a game that naturally encourages its fans to memorialize their favorites: favorite player, favorite moment, favorite season, and so on. Baseball is also a game that transcends the action on the field by interweaving the game with a fan’s very identity.

“I am an Indians fan because . . .” Most life-long baseball fans started at an early age, and often with the encouragement of a parent or other family member. These thoughts stuck out as I recalled my favorite Cleveland Indians pitching performance.

I had to look up the details on Baseball-Reference.com because my memories remained more as impressions rather than facts.

Tuesday June 7, 2011, was seemingly a mundane game during a mundane stretch of the early season. The Indians were in first place just ahead of the Tigers at the time. They hosted the Twins, who were scuffling at the bottom as was usual those days.

I was excited to watch Carlos Carrasco pitch, at the time a young pitcher trying to establish himself in the rotation. I cannot say I knew much about him other than there was buzz about his potential.

I do know I had seen him pitch one or two times previously but cannot recall if he was the starter or came out of the bullpen. But I was impressed with his stuff.

Regarding the game, Carrasco did not disappoint as he pitched into the ninth inning, allowing just one walk and three hits while holding the Twins scoreless. Chris Perez pitched the final two outs of the game to get the save.

The Indians scored their only run in the fourth inning when Carlos Santana scored on a groundout by Shelley Duncan.

Francisco Liriano, who had pitched a no-hitter just a few weeks before, took the loss. It was a classic pitchers’ duel, a 1-0 result where both starters kept the offense off-balance all night.

As memorable as the game was, what makes it my favorite is the background. My younger daughter was a huge baseball—and specifically, Indians—fan. Unbeknownst to me, she had been participating in a class project where a pair of Indians tickets was one of the prizes.

She worked for months to earn the points to win those tickets just so the two of us could attend a game together.

She did not know Carlos Carrasco at the time, but he has since become her favorite pitcher as well as a family favorite. And it all started that Tuesday evening in June. Moments like this make baseball such a beloved game.

Mark Warmuth

I would love to say I attended Len Barker's perfect game, and the truth is, a softball buddy of mine called and asked if I wanted to go, but it was too cold to go down to the yard. I regretted that decision around the third inning. Barker's stuff was that good.

However, I was in attendance on May 13, 2015 for Corey Kluber's unreal performance against the St. Louis Cardinals.

Kluber was the defending AL Cy Young Award winner, and early on, I was paying more attention to the fact he was throwing a no-hitter (which I've never seen) than the number of strikeouts he was putting up.

But when he whiffed the side in both the third and fourth, I knew he was piling them up too. He finally gave up a hit in the top of the 7th to Jhonny Peralta of all people, and had 18 strikeouts after 8.

He was at 113 pitches, and I still don't know why Tito didn't let him come out for the 9th.

Alex Hooper

Josh Tomlin does not have classically “electric” stuff, but the Little Cowboy was electric in Game 2 of the 2016 ALCS against Toronto.

Tomlin was awful down the stretch that year, but Trevor Bauer’s drone accident forced him into action. You never knew who to heap the most praise upon when Cleveland pitching found some ingenious way to get hitters out, and that night Tomlin threw a ton of breaking stuff and got a lot of groundouts.

He went 5 2/3 innings, to the Shaw-Miller-Allen trifecta, and put the Tribe in the driver’s seat on the way to the World Series. There are surely plenty of gems from CC Sabathia, Cliff Lee, Corey Kluber or Carlos Carrasco to choose from, among others, but it was the unexpected ones that you remember.

The Ryan Merritt game will surely get another mention somewhere. Tomlin has also been supremely easy to root for. He’s been difficult to watch at times because of his sky-high home run rate, but there was always a reason he stuck around. When he was good, he was masterful.

When Tomlin was on, it did not feel like a game of the homer-or-strikeout years of now, it felt like a Greg Maddux game. Especially en route to the World Series, or another solid performance in Game 3 of the Fall Classic.

Casey Drottar

To me, it has to be Fausto Carmona (or Roberto Hernández if we want to get technical) and his 2007 ALDS start against the Yankees. Otherwise known as "the night of the midges."

It's one thing to excel like he did in his first ever postseason start (9.0 IP, three hits, one earned run), but to do so while surrounded by a hoard of small bugs made it an absolute spectacle.

Watching the way Carmona handled the on-mound infestation compared to the reaction of Yankees reliever Joba Chamberlain (who entered that postseason with a 0.38 ERA) is something I can still vividly picture to this day.

New York's rookie phenom looked so jarred, soaked in bug spray and taking a second to swat midges out of his face before every pitch. As for Carmona, it didn't even look like he noticed the swarm.

He just kept mowing down New York's imposing line-up and putting the Indians in position to grab a 2-0 series lead. It's without a doubt one of my favorite Indians memories.

Honorable Mention: It's not any specific performance, but what Andrew Miller did during Cleveland's 2016 World Series run still ranks as one of the best playoff viewing experiences I've ever taken in.

The level of confidence I felt whenever he trotted to the mound remains unmatched to this day, in baseball or in general. You just knew you were in for an endless stream of batters tripping over themselves while trying to hit his slider.

T.J. Zuppe

If I went by strikeouts or game score, the easy answer would be 18 strikeout, one-hit performance against the St.Louis Cardinals in 2015.

But I think context has to matter somewhat, and I can't think of many starts more important than a World Series battle in mind. With that in mind, Kluber's game one record setting performance against the Cubs in the 2016 Fall Classic is probably my favorite pitching performance I've seen in person.

Kluber struck out eight in the first three innings, a World Series record, and his two-seamer had Chicago as befuddled as myself when trying to fold a fitted bed sheet. His combination of swinging (10) and called strikes (24) helped him power through six innings, allowing four hits and recording nine strikeouts.

Perhaps if not for the likelihood that he would need to pitch on three days rest in games four and seven, he would have pitched deeper (and he was STILL gassed by the time he made it to the final contest).

I've witnessed more impressive line scores in playoff games - Fausto Carmona's nine-inning, one-run gem against the New York Yankees (and bugs) in game two of the 2007 ALDS comes to mind.

But, I'll never forget just how unsolvable Kulber looked in game one, or just how much the come-back action on his two-seam displayed the sort of movement typically reserved for wiffle balls.

Matt Loede

There are times during the late 1990's when the postseason frankly was getting a little boring it seemed for the Indians, and in 1998 that was the case it felt like when the Indians played Boston in games one and two in the ALDS at Progressive Field.

The Tribe was crushed by Pedro Martinez and Boston in game one at home, losing badly 11-3. The following day it was Dwight Gooden for the Indians against knuckleballer Tim Wakefield in game two, an afternoon affair as the Tribe looked to tie the series at one.

Gooden pitched for two seasons for the Indians, and in 1998 went 8-6 with a 3.71 ERA. Mike Hargrove gave him the ball in game two, but he didn't have it for long. Joe Brinkman, one of the most controversial umps in the game, seemed from the first pitch of the game to be squeezing Gooden, and three pitches in Brinkman tossed Hargrove, and then Gooden shortly thereafter after a disputed play at the plate that gave the Sox an early lead.

Enter Dave Burba. The veteran went 15-10 for the Indians in 98, and he quickly took some warmup pitches and was thrown into the fray in a game that he never expected to pitch in.

Burba was excellent considering the circumstances. He went 5.1 innings, allowing three runs on four hits with two walks and four strikeouts. The Indians offense had beat up Wakefield, piling on five runs in the second after the Tribe scored a run in the first to make it 6-2 Tribe.

They gave Burba more than they would need, as he earned the win and the Tribe went on for a 9-5 win to tie the series at a game apiece. They beat Boston 4-3 and 2-1 in the next two games in Boston to win the series three games to one to advance to the ALCS against the Yankees.

If Burba doesn't come on and pitch a masterful game allowing just a couple of runs while the Indians offense did they damage, they may have never advanced to play New York.