Blogtrek

The Messy No-Hitter

I am not much of a fan of sports. When the sports comes on the network channels, I switch to another channel. I resent it, further, when basketball or football games go longer than they should and start wiping out the local news on the weekends. Fortunately I have the Web here to find the news whenever the networks see fit to bomb them out with sports.

However I do have an affinity for baseball, which dates from my childhood days. I especially like finding unusual things about baseball. For example, what I might term the minimum games (some would say "extreme" games, but that word is used far too often). These are the shutout, the no-hitter, and the perfect game. A pitcher (or team) shuts out the opponent when the opponent scores no runs. A pitcher earns a no-hitter if the opponent gets no hits. A perfect game is where no one on the opposing side at all reaches first base. Such a game must be 27 straight outs. Recently a no-hitter was pitched by a committee of pitchers.

A pitcher always wins a shutout, since a team must score runs to win. A pitcher always wins a perfect game, since a team must get runners on base to score runs to win. However, a pitcher need not win a no-hitter. It is easy to get on base without a hit. Usually a no-hitting pitcher will win, but sometimes he doesn't. In 1961 Harvey Haddix of the Pittsburgh Pirates pitched 11 straight perfect innings. That's right, 33 straight outs against the Milwaukee Braves. Unfortunately, the Pirates could not score and so the score remained 0-0 and Haddix had to continue to pitch and pitch. In the 12th inning, the Braves got runners on base and won with a 3-run homer (actually that was a 1-run double, but that's another story). So the longest number of perfect innings was pitched by a pitcher who lost.

Today I saw a web page which has a collection of what are called "messy" no-hitters. This included the one in 1990 by Andy Hawkins in which he pitched an 8-inning no-hitter but allowed the White Sox to score 4 runs, while his Yankees reversed the pattern and got no runs on 4 hits. But the one that took the cake was one in 1967 between Detroit and Baltimore. Barber of the Orioles pitched 8 2/3 innings in which the Tigers did not get a single hit. But they did walk 10 times, got hit by the pitcher twice, and were the recipient of a wild pitch once. Further, Barber pitched 300 pitches, about half of which were balls. But what stuck out about this game was his statement afterwards: "They probably didn't get a hit because I didn't throw anything close enough to the plate." It shows that sometimes an achievement is not that much of an achievement, but it also shows there is more than one way of achieving your goals in baseball. This game shows that it may be possible to throw all out-of-zone pitches and still win, provided you get them to swing once in a while into strikes and outs. I will mention other baseball situations like this in future blogs; they show that goals in baseball are not that clear-cut.