July 2, 2004: Andrew Miller records every out by strikeout, but Cape Cod League game fogged out

A data scientist for Google by day, Chris Thoms lives in California’s Bay Area while overseeing official scorers in the Cape Cod League in Massachusetts. From the other end of the continent, he monitors games on choppy video and internet radio (even scoring a game off YouTube while on his honeymoon in Tokyo), and goes east each year to train a new crop of scorers.

Going back more than a century, the Cape Cod Baseball League evolved from teams with local talent into what is regarded as the top summer league for collegiate players. Cape Cod League alumni include

Billy Wagner, Carlton Fisk, Frank Thomas, Craig Biggio, Pete Alonso, Jeff Bagwell, Todd Helton, Chris Sale, Adley Rutschman, Shane Bieber, Kyle Schwarber, and Aaron Judge.

Thoms grew up on the Cape, where his dad, Charlie, was the general manager of the Chatham Athletics (since renamed the Anglers), and was featured in Jim Collins’s 2004 book, The Last Best League: One Summer, One Season, One Dream. Still a teenager in 1999,1 Chris became the official scorer for Chatham. His memories include a no-hitter in a game in which Buster Posey – then at Florida State University – played shortstop,2 but the scorecards he has framed and hanging on his wall in his home are from a game that is otherwise lost to history.

Near the southeast corner of Cape Cod, sometimes called the “elbow” of the cape, Chatham is surrounded by water on three sides and is the closest city in the league to the Atlantic Ocean. “The field is set in a bowl, and the fog rolls in and sometimes just stays,” Thoms said.3

A game between Chatham and the Falmouth Commodores on July 2, 2004, experienced this pattern. The starters were southpaws P J. Connolly for Falmouth and Andrew Miller for the home team. Miller had just completed his freshman season for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he had a 2.93 earned-run average with 88 strikeouts in 89 innings. His route to the Athletics came in part because of a relationship between Chatham coach John Schiffner and Mike Fox, the coach at North Carolina. Pipelines between summer teams and certain colleges are often built on such connections.

Miller was in his second year of pitching for Chatham – and of living with the Thoms family. With a dominant slider, the 6-foot-7 Miller became the sixth overall draft choice by the Detroit Tigers in June 20064 and eventually one of the game’s top relievers in a 16-year career in the major leagues. Against Falmouth, Miller faced a lineup that included future big-leaguers Jacoby Ellsbury and Cliff Pennington as well as Daniel Carte, who was the Cape Cod League’s Most Valuable Player in 2004.

The game began at 7:02 P.M. as Miller missed with a pitch to Ellsbury before coming back to strike out the Oregon State University outfielder. Chris Lewis was called out on strikes. After Pennington reached first on an infield single, Brian Bogusevic struck out to end the inning.

Connolly, like Miller, got through the bottom of the inning with nothing more than a single, and in the second, Miller struck out Carte, Mark Hamilton, and Jason Delaney. The Athletics broke through in the last of the second as Stephen Head singled and was sacrificed to second by future Chicago White Sox general manager Chris Getz. After Robby Jacobsen struck out and Jeff Grose walked, catcher Jake Muyco doubled to drive in Head and Grose.

Staked to a 2-0 lead, Miller started the third by striking out Barry Gunther and Danny Perales. He walked Ellsbury but got Lewis to look at a third strike for the second time, giving him nine strikeouts through three innings.

The K’s continued in the fourth although Pennington got on base when hit by a pitch to start the inning. Two pitches later, Pennington was running on a called strike to Bogusevic. He stole second and went to third on catcher Muyco’s overthrow. Bogusevic struck out, as did Carte, but the final pitch was wild, allowing Pennington to score as Muyco threw to first to complete the out on Carte. Miller followed by fanning Hamilton for his 12th strikeout of the game.

Chatham threatened in the bottom of the fourth as Head again led off with a single. Going for another sacrifice, Getz’s bunt was good enough for a hit, putting runners on first and second with no one out. Connolly came back by striking out Jacobsen and Grose, but Muyco battled him for a walk in a nine-pitch plate appearance. Matt Camp fouled off Connolly’s first pitch, and this became the trigger for time to be called.

Thoms said he didn’t remember the conditions at the start of the game, but this one had become typical as fog poured in around the third inning. “They try to play through it, but when an outfielder loses a fly in the fog, they stop the game.”5 In this case, Thoms said it was a pop foul disappearing in the clouds that halted the game. Play did not resume, and under rules of the time, games called by weather before becoming regulation became a “No Game.”6

As he did after every game, Thoms called the Cape Cod Times and told them there was no official result from Chatham but that they might be interested that Miller had struck out 12 batters in four innings.7 The only players who didn’t strike out every time were Ellsbury and Pennington,8 the future major leaguers. The Times called back a few minutes later to confirm that every Falmouth out was from a strikeout.

Although Miller’s performance didn’t enter the record books, he impressed the scouts, who represented seven major-league teams9 and gathered behind the backstop with radar guns. It also resonated with those who were there. A dozen years later, Hayden Bird of Boston.com did a retrospective and asked Schiffner for his recollections, eliciting the comment, “How can we talk about something that never happened?”10

Thoms got experience with scoring in a big-league park when the Cape Cod League All-Star Game was played at Fenway Park in Boston. He kept scoring for Chatham in the summer while in college and graduate school. His career then took him to Washington, DC, and the Bay Area, where in 2013 he became one of the scorers for home games of the San Francisco Giants and Oakland Athletics.

“I’ve found any sort of baseball difficult to beat Cape Cod baseball,” Thoms said. “I got my start in the Cape League as just a kid with an interest in baseball and no real idea how detailed you need to be in order to do official scoring right. My time on the Cape is really the thing that got me in the door for the surreal MLB gig.”

Author’s Note and Sources

Much of the content for this article comes from getting to know Chris Thoms as a fellow official scorer and from a profile I did with him for the newsletter of the SABR Official Scoring Committee, June 2018, Vol. 3, No. 2. The quotes and information from him, unless otherwise noted, are from the interview for that newsletter. The article also relied on Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org for pertinent information.

Photo credit: Andrew Miller, Trading Card Database.

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Kevin Larkin and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Notes

1 Chris was 18 and just out of high school when he started scoring in the Cape Cod League.

2 Posey was the shortstop for the Yarmouth-Dennis Red Sox July 16, 2006, when the Y-D pitcher, Terry Doyle from Boston College, no-hit the Chatham A’s at Red Wilson Field in Yarmouth. Doyle struck out 12 and walked a batter in the sixth, the only Chatham baserunner. The lineup Doyle faced included future major leaguers Danny Espinosa, Allan Dykstra, and Corey Brown. He threw 129 pitches, “a count that will never be seen again in the CCBL,” said Thoms. (Email from Chris Thoms, March 15, 2024.)

3 Telephone interview with Chris Thoms, December 18, 2023.

4 Miller was expected by some to be the first overall pick in the draft, but some of the smaller-spending teams backed off and he fell to the sixth spot.

5 Telephone interview, December 18, 2023.

6 Rule 4.10(c) in 2004 read, “If a game is called, it is a regulation game (1) if five innings have been completed; (2) If the home team has scored more runs in four or four and a fraction half-innings than the visiting team has scored in five completed half-innings; (3) If the home team scores one or more runs in its half of the fifth inning to tie the score. Since then, the rules have been changed to make these suspended games.”

7 Email from Chris Thoms, November 28, 2023.

8 Ellsbury played at Oregon State and Pennington at Texas A&M. A year later, the Boston Red Sox drafted Ellsbury with the 23rd overall pick, and he played 11 seasons in the majors. In 2011 he was runner-up to Justin Verlander for American League Most Valuable Player. Pennington was drafted by Oakland two picks ahead of Ellsbury in 2005 and, like Ellsbury, had an 11-year major-league career.

9 The reference to scouts from seven major-league teams was made by Brian MacPherson, a league intern, in a July 6, 2004, posting on the Cape Cod Baseball League website, https://www.capecodbaseball.org, accessed February 24, 2024.

10 Hayden Bird, “The Legend of Andrew Miller’s Cape Cod League ‘Fog Game,’” Boston.com, October 30, 2016, https://www.boston.com/sports/boston-red-sox/2016/10/30/the-legend-of-andrew-millers-cape-cod-league-fog-game.