Foster Griffin's name probably wasn't on anyone's radar this spring. He was a former first-round Royals pick who hadn't stuck in the big leagues, spent three seasons in Nippon Professional Baseball, and signed back with Washington on a modest $5.5 million deal. Now he's the best story in baseball.
That's EIGHT consecutive starts in which Foster Griffin has allowed exactly 1 run! It's the first time this has happened in MLB history because of course it is.
That tweet is talking about a stat that sounds almost fake: 8 straight starts allowing exactly 1 run. Not 1-or-fewer, not 0-to-1 — exactly one run, eight times in a row. Codify's framing, "of course it is," gets at how absurd this run has become. Baseball has been played for over a century and nobody had done this before Griffin did it this month.
The streak has real substance behind it. Griffin set the Washington Nationals' franchise record (dating back to 2005) for consecutive starts allowing one run or fewer, and that mark now ties him with Pedro Martinez's run from September 1996 to May 1997 in Nationals/Expos franchise history. Getting mentioned in the same sentence as prime Pedro is not nothing.
Through 20 starts this season, Griffin sits at 2.68 ERA, tied for ninth among all MLB starters, and he picked up his 10th win along the way. He struck out 9 in one recent outing without issuing a walk, the kind of clean, efficient line that's defined his whole return from Japan. Nationals manager Blake Butera has trusted him as high as the No. 3 spot in the rotation during a key series against Oakland, and Griffin rewarded that trust with 7 innings of one-run ball.
It earned him his first career All-Star selection, which on its own would've been the headline of Griffin's season. Instead it's a footnote to a run-prevention streak that's rewriting the record book in real time. Advanced metrics do suggest some regression could be coming — his xFIP sits notably higher than his actual ERA, hinting his results have outkicked his underlying stuff a bit. But you don't get to 8 consecutive one-run starts on luck alone.
The bigger question now is how far this goes. Streaks like this eventually end — someone squares up a fastball, a defense misplays a ball, the law of averages catches up. But every start Griffin takes the mound right now is appointment viewing for a stat that's never existed before, and for a Nationals team that suddenly has a legitimate ace on its hands out of nowhere.