Chicago Cubs: Why Kerry Wood’s 20K game stands out

Chicago Cubs: Just looking beyond the box score, one can look back on May 6th, 1998, and see why that game stands out in franchise history.

Now more than ever, people are watching old reruns of games with there being no sports actively going on. Plenty of Chicago Cubs fans enjoyed watching the rerun of Kerry Wood‘s 20 strikeout game from 1998 on ESPN this past Saturday afternoon.

Baseball fans, players, and analysts have spent years breaking down that performance, which broke the NL record for strikeouts in a single game. Going by the Bill James Game Score, a method of measuring the effectiveness of a starting pitcher in a game, it is calculated as the best nine-inning game pitching performance in baseball history.

There are other reasons why this game stands out in Cubs and Chicago Sports history outside records and metrics. Often these factors can be overlooked considering the performance itself is all that matters, but it is still fun to look back at what helped make the game even more special.