Last Wednesday, the Boston Red Sox and the not-Oakland A’s went into the bottom of the 9th tied in Sacramento, with the visitors going for the 3-game road sweep. When Shea Langeliers put a charge into a middle-away splitter from Aroldis Chapman to lead it off, and shortly thereafter when he scored the winning run, he did something that no one had done since July 23 in Philadelphia: Record a hit off of Chapman.
At 37, the lefty Red Sox closer is having a dominant year to cement himself as one of the best relievers of the generation. His 1.26 ERA leads MLB relievers and would be the lowest of his career if the season ended today. His 1.70 FIP would be his lowest since 2016, and his 1.96 xERA would be his lowest of the Statcast era. He has recorded 30 saves and blown just 2, the second one being the game in question here. Chapman has been good enough that he warrants a comparison to the best reliever seasons still hanging in our short-term memory. His 2.5 fWAR is 2nd in the league to Cade Smith, but Smith has thrown 10 more innings and his ERA estimators are marginally higher than Chapman’s, while his actual ERA is over 3. There have been 2375 qualified reliever-seasons since the start of 2010. Chapman’s 2.5 fWAR ranks 38th with a couple weeks to go. His 0.68 WHIP ranks 10th. His 1.70 FIP ranks 29th. His 1.99 SIERA ranks 59th. The Red Sox have been lucky enough to be blessed with these outlier-type seasons from their closers throughout the past 15 years. No wonder they’ve won the World Series 3 more times since the shattering of the Curse of the Bambino.
His Baseball Savant page looks almost as if he tried to exactly replicate the Red Sox’ color scheme. His xERA is in the 100th percentile. He gets 97th-percentile chase and 98th-percentile miss despite showing arguably the best command of his career. His 53.4% zone rate is his highest since 2016, his 58.3% first-pitch zone rate is the highest of his career, and his 6.2% BB-rate is his lowest ever. Pitch models like him too – his 5.33 PLV is the highest of his career, and the 6th-best among everyone who has thrown at least 500 pitches in 2025. He hasn’t given up home runs at this low of a frequency since 2018. It’s virtually impossible to find a hole in his season.
The hitless streak, though, is the main storyline amidst all of that. On that note, I have a somewhat hot take: Chapman’s August 2025 was the best month by a reliever in the history of baseball. Baseball has been around a long time. Over 150 years! I still think it holds up. The run began on July 26 and ended with Langeliers’ double on the afternoon of September 10. It lasted 17 games, 14.2 innings, and 49 batters. Only 2 relievers have ever faced more consecutive batters without allowing a hit, and both got up to exactly 50: Ernesto Frieri with the Angels in 2012, and Ron Marinaccio with the Yankees in 2022. Only 1 reliever has ever gone more consecutive games without allowing a hit, and he got just one appearance farther than Chapman did: Tim Byrdak of the 2012 Mets. While Chapman was just 1 off the record for batters faced and games played without allowing a hit, the innings pitched record? It’s all his.
No disrespect to Marinaccio, but he wasn’t always a high-leverage guy for the Yankees that year. The other 4 guys on this list were, but it can also be contended that Chapman endured the most pressure-packed innings of the bunch. If we take all these hitless streaks and sort them by saves recorded during them, he remains on top.
Chapman has the best K/BB ratio of this group as well. Only Frieri had more strikeouts during his streak (27) than him. His ERA was at a ridiculous 0.98 before he came back down to Earth that day in Northern California. This was 46 days of pure dominance, and it happened for one of baseball’s best teams of the past few months in the thick of a high-stakes wild card chase.
It’s all a pretty satisfying exclamation point for someone who has more of a legacy than most active players in the league, except it won’t be his last chapter either, as he recently signed a 1-year extension with Boston that will pay him $13M in 2027. He’s a machine that has quite the hall of fame case for whenever it’s all said and done. He’s 13th on the all-time saves leaderboard and needs 35 to reach 400 at the time of writing. Achieving that would move him up to 9th ahead of Dennis Eckersley, which feels very possible if he’s going to pitch at least a couple more years. His 2.53 career ERA ranks 6th all-time among relievers with at least 500 innings, as does his 25.5 fWAR, and his 39.9% K-rate is 2nd in that sample behind only Josh Hader. JAWS, a metric developed by sabermetrician Jay Jaffe to assess how qualified a player is for the hall of fame based on their career WAR with an emphasis on their 7-year peak, has Chapman 13th all-time among relievers. The top 6 (Rivera, Eckersley, Wilhelm, Gossage, Hoffman, Wagner) are all in the hall of fame already. He has 2 World Series rings, and though he may have given up some memorable home runs in the postseason, his 2.37 ERA/2.93 FIP in 49.1 career playoff IP deserve credit.
After all this, he is still a mere mortal. In his very next appearance after the A’s finally solved him to win it in the 9th, he gave up another run to his former team in the New York Yankees. While not totally unbeatable, the fact that Chapman has managed a career-best season at age 37 is nothing short of remarkable given both his track record and his longevity despite long being one of the game’s hardest throwers. The season he’s having was punctuated by an extended second-half stretch in which he didn’t allow any hits, a run so good that I needed to whip out the all-time leaderboards to assess it. Having a hot closer is partially how teams run into championships, and the Boston Red Sox may not necessarily be the favorite, but the tense atmosphere of the postseason can be a breeding ground for close games – it’s possible, even likely, that they’ll go as their veteran closer goes.
All figures entering September 15, 2025.
