PHOENIX — The pitch that ended it was a fastball: 102.6 miles per hour, caught on the outside corner, swung through and missed. It was the third strike against the third batter of the sixth inning. Nine pitches, three strikeouts, and no balls. In a season rebuilt from the inside out, Justin Martinez had just written himself into Arizona Diamondbacks history.
The 25-year-old right-hander retired Wyatt Langford, Evan Carter, and Jake Burger in succession on Friday night, becoming the fifth pitcher in franchise history to record an immaculate inning. He also completed one of the most unusual footnotes in a year of Arizona baseball: for the first time since the Diamondbacks were founded in 1998, a single season had produced two immaculate innings.
The game itself went to Texas, 6-2, the damage long done before Martinez ever threw a pitch. Langford had already left his mark with a solo homer in the fifth inning, part of a six-run Rangers rally that shredded three Arizona relievers and put the contest effectively out of reach. Ezequiel Duran’s two-run single punctuated the uprising. By the time Martinez walked from the bullpen to start the sixth, he was working in a loss, his nine pitches carrying no bearing on the outcome.
They carried every other kind of bearing.
Of the nine pitches, five drew swinging strikes, three more caught the corners for called strikes, and one foul ball. Fewer than 110 immaculate innings have been thrown in major-league history, according to Yahoo Sports, making each one a rarity regardless of context. Martinez’s fastball, sitting at 100 mph and topping 102.6 on this night, is the kind of velocity that shortcuts a batter’s decision-making before the brain can finish the command to the hands. Langford, who had homered ninety minutes earlier, did not come close.
The comparison that haunts every immaculate inning is inevitability, and Martinez understood it immediately. Michael Soroka had thrown Arizona’s first of the season back on March 30, a performance celebrated at the time as a rarity. Nine pitches, nine strikes, three outs. As mathematically clean as baseball gets. Only now, the franchise had seen it twice in one year. Soroka set the template; Martinez is the season that followed it.
“Nine pitches,” Martinez said afterward. “You think about that later, not in the moment.” Each pitch, he said, was its own decision, nothing more.
What makes the achievement more layered than the box score suggests is where Martinez was twelve months ago. Tommy John surgery, the procedure that replaces the ulnar collateral ligament and effectively rewires a pitcher’s arm, cost him the bulk of the 2024-25 stretch. He spent the recovery in the minor leagues this summer, returned to Arizona’s active roster in mid-August, and has pitched eight times since without allowing a single earned run. In a season when Kawhi Leonard’s recovery from his own physical setback has defined another sport’s preseason narrative, Martinez’s return has the specificity that makes a comeback feel real rather than managed.
The Diamondbacks need the wild card almost as a mathematical necessity at this stage. Around the sport, autumn arrivals are stacking up: Luka Doncic and the Los Angeles Lakers begin their preseason work as the NBA calendar inches forward, while tennis offered its own championship tension as Elena Rybakina advanced to the US Open final in Flushing. The US Open women’s semifinals determined who would compete for the title; Arizona’s final weeks will determine whether they compete for anything at all.
Stephen Curry limped through an overseas exhibition this week, a reminder that recovery timelines are approximations and the body keeps its own schedule. Martinez, more than most, understands that. The arm says it works now; the nine pitches Friday said so emphatically.
The history is recorded: the fifth immaculate inning in Diamondbacks franchise history, the second of 2026, delivered in a 6-2 loss, in the sixth inning, against a pitcher the team was not certain it would get back. That it happened at all, from that specific arm, on that specific night, is the part the record book will not hold.
