Pitching in the Death Zone

It's one of the most desired goals of any pitcher; the masterpiece of any career. It's also one of the most difficult feats to achieve, not just in baseball but in any sport. This elusive ambition? Throwing a perfect game. Tossing a no-hitter that retires all 27 opposing batters in order. No base hits. No walks. No fielding errors at all. Very few have thrown a perfect game and no one's done it twice.

Then there's Ed.

Ed didn't throw a perfect game. He threw 14.
And he doesn't even play baseball.



Around 2:00 p.m. Nepal time on May 12 of last month, Ed Viesturs tossed his 14th no-hitter, but the mound he stood on was 8,091 meters high. He had just summited Annapurna, arguably the most dangerous mountain on the planet. At that moment, he became the first American to summit all fourteen 8,000-meter peaks and only the second man in history to do it without the use of supplemental oxygen.

Kinda puts tossing a cow skin with seams into perspective, huh?

Contrary to popular opinion, Everest isn't the hardest mountain to climb. Even K2 (the second highest peak in the neighborhood) takes a backseat to Annapurna. The Big A is the tenth highest mountain in the world, but it's considered the most lethal of the 8,000-meter club. For every ten climbers who reach the summit, four die. Some of us may be allergic to math, but we know what a 40% fatality rate means. While the number of deaths on Everest is higher, the ratio of deaths to summits is far less. Around one outta ten.


So why is Annapurna so damn hard? Because it's technical with a capital "holy shit we gotta run up THAT?" You have to scale hard ice and steep rock at very high altitude. Not to take anything away from the other nine peaks in the band, but all reports put Annapurna as a straight ass-whip of a climb. Hell, this was Ed's third attempt at tagging the summit and, for a guy who's climbed Everest four times (twice without supplemental O2), that should tell you something.

Ed climbed it alpine style — fast and light without cumbersome O2 bottles or even the help of Sherpas. That's like pitching a no hitter while holding your breath for five innings and getting no run support whatsoever. I'd like to see Pedro try that one.


And forget the ballpark. Ed plays in the Death Zone. Within seconds of entering it, the body begins to deteriorate. The air above 26,000 feet is so thin that simply placing one foot in front of the other is a challenge. As the blood oxygen saturation level in the body falls, the breathing increases and the heart speeds up in a last-ditch attempt to pump more blood made red with oxygen into the brain. That lack of O2 can impare judgement; confusion may set in. Some people eventually hallucinate. Some find themselves fighting for every breath. And some simply find it easier to lay down and die.

While the BDS has no experience running up the side of a Himalayan peak, we do have our fair share of experience running around a number of Colorado 14'ers and even Alaska's Denali. All told, we have tagged 12 of Colorado's crown jewels without losing our own and found ourselves running around the base of Denali awed by a mountain so freakin' large that it creates its own weather patterns.

Then we realize Ed's climbed bigger ones than than. Fourteen of them. Without help. And 99% of the world doesn't know it. So if someone throws a perfect game this season, tell your friends it's not as impressive as the fourteen some guy named Ed threw.