The Main Event
- September 21, 1981 – Steve Carlton struck out Andre Dawson with the bases loaded for his 3,118th career strikeout, then the all-time NL record; the Phillies lost anyway, 1-0 in 17 innings.
On September 21, 1981, the Philadelphia Phillies and Montreal Expos played a game that took nearly six hours, ran 17 innings, and ended with the Phillies on the losing end of a 1-0 score. Almost nobody remembers it that way. What people remember is the third inning, when Steve Carlton struck out Andre Dawson with the bases loaded to become the National League’s all-time strikeout leader, passing a mark held by Bob Gibson. It was one of those nights where a milestone completely overshadowed the final score, even though the game itself, a stubborn, scoreless slog at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, turned out to be plenty dramatic on its own.
Setting the Scene in Montreal
The 1981 season was split into two halves because of a midseason players’ strike, and both the Phillies and Expos were jockeying for playoff position when they met that Monday night. Steve Carlton, at 36 years old and in the middle of a season that would finish at 13-4 with a 2.42 ERA over 190 innings, took the mound for Philadelphia. Ray Burris, a free agent pickup having a quietly strong second half for Montreal, started for the Expos. Both men were sharp from the first pitch, and the game settled into the kind of pitchers’ duel that makes fans forget to check the clock. Neither team scored through ten full innings.
The record chase happened early, tucked inside those scoreless innings. In the second inning, Carlton struck out Expos third baseman Larry Parrish, pulling him level with Bob Gibson’s career total of 3,117 strikeouts, the standard that had stood as the National League benchmark. He did not have to wait long to pass it. In the third inning, with the bases loaded, Carlton struck out Andre Dawson for career strikeout number 3,118, moving past Gibson and into sole possession of the National League record.
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It was a fitting way to break the record, considering the situation. A bases loaded strikeout is one of the toughest outs in baseball to execute under pressure, and Carlton delivered it against Dawson, who was already establishing himself as one of the most dangerous hitters in the league and would go on to a Hall of Fame career of his own. Carlton kept pitching and kept missing bats the rest of the night, finishing the game with 12 strikeouts, which pushed his career total to 3,128. That total moved him into fourth place on the all time list, behind only Walter Johnson, Gaylord Perry, and Nolan Ryan, all of whom he would eventually pass before his career ended in 1988 with 4,136 strikeouts, a total that still ranks among the best in baseball history.
The record chase itself carried a nice bit of symmetry. Carlton had recorded his 3,000th career strikeout less than five months earlier, on April 29, 1981, against this same Montreal team, when he struck out Tim Wallach. Five months later, the Expos were back in the batter’s box as Carlton climbed past yet another legend.
The Strikeout That Wasn’t Done With Andre Dawson
The most interesting at-bat of the night, though, might not have been the record-breaking strikeout at all. It was what Dawson did the next time the game truly mattered. Fourteen innings after he struck out with the bases loaded to make history for Carlton, Dawson came up again in a moment just as tense, this time with the winning run on third base in the 17th inning. Rather than making history for Carlton’s strikeout ledger a second time, Dawson hit a soft dribbler toward third base. It looked like nothing off the bat, but it was more than enough. The same hitter who had been on the wrong end of the Phillies’ biggest storyline of the night ended up delivering the game’s only run a few hours later, a fairly poetic bit of a baseball’s tendency to circle back on itself.
Nine Pitchers, One Run, Seventeen Innings
Getting to that moment took a small army of arms. Carlton and Burris both worked deep into the game, matching zeros for ten innings before the bullpens took over the load. For the Phillies, Ron Reed followed Carlton out of the bullpen, and Sparky Lyle, the veteran left-hander who had built his career on late-inning relief work, entered in the 13th inning to help keep the game scoreless. Jerry Reed eventually took over and was on the mound in the 17th when Montreal finally broke through, which made him the losing pitcher.
Montreal’s bullpen told an even more interesting story. After Burris departed, the Expos turned to Jeff Reardon, who was in the process of becoming one of the game’s premier closers, followed by veteran left-hander Woodie Fryman and then Stan Bahnsen. It was Bryn Smith, though, who got the win, despite entering the game so late that he faced only two batters. Smith had made his major league debut barely two weeks earlier, on September 8, 1981, and this outing gave him the first victory of a career that would eventually produce more than a hundred wins and an 18-win season for Montreal in 1985. Between the two teams, nine pitchers combined to throw 17 innings and allow a single run, a genuinely remarkable pitching effort that got lost in the shuffle of Carlton’s milestone and the game’s marathon length.
How Montreal Finally Scored
The winning rally in the 17th needed both timing and speed. Rodney Scott, the Expos’ second baseman and one of the fastest players in the league, led off the inning with a single and immediately stole second base. Warren Cromartie and rookie outfielder Terry Francona, who was only a month into his own playing career and decades away from the managerial success that would define his baseball life, each drew walks to load the bases. That set the stage for Dawson’s tapper to third, which allowed Scott to race home ahead of a throw from Mike Schmidt, the Phillies’ Hall of Fame third baseman, and end the game.
A Night That Meant More Than the Score
The win helped keep Montreal in position to overtake St. Louis for the National League East’s second half title, a chase the Expos would ultimately win, sending them to their only postseason appearance in franchise history in Montreal. They beat the Phillies in the Division Series before falling to the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series. For Carlton, the game became one of the signature moments in a career that already included multiple Cy Young Awards and would end in Cooperstown. A loss for the Phillies, in other words, turned into one of the more memorable nights of the entire 1981 season for reasons that had almost nothing to do with the final score.
Philadelphia Baseball Events for September 21
- September 21, 1911 – Grover Cleveland Alexander threw a shutout in his fourth consecutive start, a club record.
- September 21, 1960 – Signed minor-league free agent Adolfo Phillips.
- September 21, 1964 – The Reds’ Chico Ruiz stole home to break a scoreless tie, starting the Phillies’ 10-game losing streak that cost them the pennant — one of the biggest collapses in major-league history.
- September 21, 2007 – Manager Charlie Manuel and six players visited President Bush at the White House while in town to play the Nationals.
- September 21, 2008 – Chase Utley and Pedro Feliz both homered in a 5-2 win over the Marlins, the team’s 17th consecutive game with at least one home run, breaking a team record set in 2002.
- September 21, 2014 – Marlon Byrd struck out twice, reaching 180 for the season a day after Ryan Howard did the same, making them the first teammates in ML history to each fan 180+ times in a season.
Philadelphia Baseball Birthdays for September 21
- Dick Buckley (born 1858) – Catcher who closed out his seven-year big-league career with the Phillies in 1894-1895.
- Max Butcher (born 1910) – Right-handed pitcher for the Phillies in 1938-1939 during an 11-season MLB career.
- Ed Walczak (born 1915) – Second baseman who got his only MLB look in September 1945, starting at second base for the Phillies right after his discharge from the Army Air Forces.
- Bill Wilson (born 1942) – Relief pitcher who made 179 appearances for the Phillies from 1969-1973, once famously shifting to third base mid-game in 1971 before returning to the mound to finish off a win.
- Danny Cox (born 1959) – Right-handed pitcher who joined the Phillies for 1991-1992 during an 11-year career that also included the Cardinals and Blue Jays.
- Antonio Bastardo (born 1985) – Left-handed reliever for the Phillies from 2009-2014, best remembered for a dominant 2011 (6-1, 2.64 ERA) and a stint as interim closer.
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