Javier Báez led off the fifth. Michael Soroka started him with a strike, then another, then a third. Báez swung through it.
Kerry Carpenter followed. Three pitches, three strikes, swinging strikeout. Then Gleyber Torres, same thing.
Nine pitches, three strikeouts, no balls called. That is an immaculate inning, the first of 2026.
What makes it rare is what it requires: three hitters, each failing completely, in sequence. One foul ball with two strikes and the at-bat extends. One take that draws a ball and the inning is no longer immaculate. Every pitch has to be a strike — called, fouled, or swung through — and it has to happen immediately, nine times running, with no reset. Soroka never threw a fourth pitch to any of the three.
The scorecard tells you how. Seven of the nine pitches were in the strike zone. Two were not. Those two had to be swung at, because a pitch outside the zone that a hitter takes is a ball, and there were no balls. Both were chased. All three strikeouts were swinging.
Seven in nine is an unusually high rate for an immaculate inning. The feat counts outcomes, not locations: a recorded strike can be called, fouled, or chased off the plate. "Nine strikes" does not mean nine pitches in the zone, and usually it doesn't. Most immaculate innings run on chases and fouls. This one ran mostly on Soroka throwing where the hitter had to defend, and the hitter not being able to do anything with it.
His full line for the night: five innings, 10 strikeouts, four hits, one walk, 89 pitches. The fifth inning used nine of those pitches and produced three of those strikeouts. Arizona won, 9–6.
<!-- the mentor passed it with notes: - Mechanical flag: 'defined by outcomes not by location' shares a 6-gram with a prior piece — it's lifted close to the assignment's own wording, which is fine as fact but worth rephrasing once more in the writer's own words to avoid a stock line hardening into a tic across every immaculate-inning piece. - The inference that the two zone-misses were 'chased' and swung at is sound math (9 pitches − 7 in zone = 2, and all three K's were swinging, no balls called) but is not itself a pack number — keep an eye that future drafts don't extend this kind of arithmetic into something the box score can't actually support. - Good discipline: never claims Soroka 'painted corners,' correctly treats the immaculate inning as an outcomes event, keeps the load-bearing number (7) bolded and alone, skips biography per the Moments ruling, and closes on the scoreboard fact rather than a manufactured verdict. --> <!-- THE PACK — every number here is off the reconciled card for this game and nothing else. The writer does not recall a stat; if it is not here it does not exist. Michael Soroka struck out the side on nine pitches the 1st immaculate inning of 2026 Nine pitches, three strikeouts, one pitcher, and no ball ever called. MEANS: An immaculate inning is defined by OUTCOMES, not by location. A strike there means a strike was RECORDED — a foul counts, and so does a swing at a pitch nowhere near the plate. So 'nine strikes' does not mean nine pitches in the zone, and the count of pitches actually in the zone is usually far lower. Never write that he painted nine corners. - pitches: 9 - strikeouts: 3 - pitches in the strike zone: 7 - inning: 5 - struck out: Javier Báez, Kerry Carpenter, Gleyber Torres - opponent: Detroit Tigers -->