You never know when a nugget of gold is going to unexpectedly fall into your lap.

That was my good fortune the other day, courtesy of Bob Brady, the keeper of the flame of the Boston Braves Historical Society. One of his periodic emails popped up on my computer and it included an attachment of an article about a game played between the Braves and the Cincinnati Reds in Crosley Field, the Reds old ballpark, on Aug. 10, 1944.

What in the world, you may be asking (and rightfully so), could be so interesting about a ballgame played almost 76 years ago, smack in the middle of World War II, by a hapless team that left town way back in the fifties? The Braves, with almost two months to go in the '44 season, had already fallen behind the league-leading St. Louis Cardinals by 32 games and were in their usual position, struggling to stay out of the National League cellar.

On the mound for them that evening (it was a night game, Crosley Field was the first park in the major leagues with lights and was in its 10th year of holding them) was Red Barrett, who the Reds had dealt to Boston the previous year and who entered the game with a so-so record of six wins and 11 losses.

Barrett was on his game that night, hurling a complete game two-hit shutout as the Braves won, 2 to 0. But this is the remarkable thing about his performance: he threw only 58 -- that's right, 58! -- pitches in the entire game. That's fewer than seven pitches per inning.

It is the all-time record for the fewest pitches thrown in a full nine inning game. Barrett faced only 29 batters that night, 27 made outs and he gave up two singles. That comes to an average of only two pitches per batter for the entire nine innings. It's safe to say that Red was pitching to contact that night; he had no strikeouts and gave up no walks (there were no double-plays, either). Cincinnati's hitters, obviously, were swinging at everything he threw.

The time of the game was only -- are you ready? -- one hour and fifteen minutes. It is not the fastest nine-inning game in baseball history (at the close of the dead-ball era a game beween the Philadephia Phillies and the New York Giants on Sept. 28, 1919, took just 51 minutues to complete) but 1:15 is the shortest night game ever played at the major league level. It averaged out to just a tad more than four minutes per half inning, and that includes the downtime between innings.

Such a quick game time could not have been achieved without the cooperation of the Reds pitcher that night, their ace, Bucky Walters, who, working as rapidly as Barrett, gave up just six hits, walked one, struck out one, and had an error committed behind him in a complete game effort. It also required the cooperation of the hitters on both teams, none of whom could be accused of trying to work the count. There were no extenuating circumstances, either, such as it being a get-away game in which one or both teams had a train to catch. It was just the second of a four-game series.

The article Brady forwarded was by Jack Zolby, writing for SABR (Society of American Baseball Research), and it was a revelation to me. I had thought that I was pretty much up to speed on my Boston baseball history but I was blissfully unaware of Barrett's record-setting masterpiece. It might have snuck by totally unnoticed by everyone but for the fact that Jack Grayson, a scribe for the Cincinnati Times-Star, was also the official scorer for that game. He mentioned in his game story that Barrett had thrown only 58 pitches. Since he was the official scorer, he would have had reason to keep count of the number. Box scores back in the '40s did not include pitch counts in the game summary. But because Grayson had included the number in his report it is recognized as the all-time record.

The game took place years before the present day fixation on pitch counts. Nowadays, they are routinely put up on scoreboards and regularly updated by announcers, to say nothing of appearing in box scores.

Harold Kaese, who wrote about the Red Sox and Braves for almost four decades in The Boston Globe, wrote a history of the Braves, beginning with the team's founding in 1871 and going all the way to it's departure for Milwaukee in 1953. The book is everything you ever wanted to know about the Boston Braves and more, but it makes no mention of Barrett's record-setting performance. No one cared about pitch counts back then.

Kaese does allude briefly to a game three years later, on June 9, 1947, when Barrett threw a one-hit shutout at Braves Field in a 1 to 0 win over the Chicago Cubs, the lone hit being a single to left by opposing pitcher Hank Borowy. He gave up a walk, struck out one, and two runners reached on errors by first baseman Earl Torgeson, so his pitch count, again, not recorded in the official box score, could not have nearly as low as three years previously.

That 1947 game took one hour and forty five minutes to complete, a little below average for back then but unthinkably fast in today's world.

Barrett, who died in 1990 at the age of 75, led the National League in wins in 1945 with 23, although 21 of them were for the Cardinals, to whom the Braves traded him early that season.

He finished his 11 year career with a total of 69 wins and 69 losses pitching for three National League teams, the Reds, the Braves (twice), and the Cardinals. Eleven of his victories were shutouts and in one of them he established a record which was almost completely unnoticed and cerainly was under-appreciated. But in all likihood it will never be broken.

- Dick Flavin is a New York Times bestselling author; the Boston Red Sox "Poet Laureate" and The Pilot's recently minted Sports' columnist.