Shutout

In baseball, a shutout refers to a game in which one team wins without allowing the opposing team to score any runs. If the starting pitcher can pitch the entire game without giving up a run he earns a complete game shutout. The currect record holder for most career shutouts is Walter Johnson with 110; the current active leader is Roger Clemens with 48 (tied with Kid Nichols for 25th all-time).

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Though less than half of Johnson's record, Clemens' total is not likely to be reached by anyone else for a long time if at all as even star pitchers rarely earn more than 1 or 2 shutouts per season today with the heavy emphasis on pitch counts and relief pitching. This causes pitchers to frequently be taken out of the game in the 7th or 8th inning even though the opposing team hasn't scored a run. For a pitcher to get a complete game shutout today, it usually means either he threw an unusually low number of pitches, or a large amount of runs were scored by the pitchers own team (allowing them to give the pitcher a "chance" to complete the game on his own), or the team has a need that day to keep an unusually overworked bullpen rested if possible.

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The term can also be used, however, to describe periods of time longer or shorter than one game. For instance, the efforts of a relief pitcher could be described as "three shutout innings" or a pitcher may have pitched a shutout over the "past 22 innings" (slightly over two full games.) See also: no-hitter and perfect game.

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Baseball: Baseball is a team sport, a bat-and-ball game, in which a hard, fist-sized ball is thrown by a defensive player called a pitcher, and an offensive player called a batter attempts to hit it with a tapered, cylindrical, smooth stick called a bat. The ball itself is also called a baseball. Scoring is a...

Pitcher: :This article is about the sport of baseball. For other references with this word, see pitcher (disambiguation)....

Complete game: In baseball, a complete game (denoted by CG) is the act of a pitcher pitching an entire game himself, without the benefit of a relief pitcher. A complete game can be either a win or a loss. As demonstrated by the charts below, in the late 1800's, it was common for most good pitchers to pitch a compl...

Shutout related Images and Photos (experimental)

Oklahoma - 2004 Red River Shutout