by Jason Turbow
“Same seats, same thoughts—that’s the mantra,” said Bob Brenly, manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks when Randy Johnson threw his perfect game in 2004. “From about the fourth inning of that ballgame on I found myself sitting on the bat rack at Turner Field. [Second baseman] Matt Kata’s bat was sitting right next to my right leg, and before every pitch I would tap that bat just to knock wood for luck. The deeper we got into the game, I was afraid to stop doing it. I’m a firm believer in the baseball gods—you show them their due respect and they will reward you. So I didn’t move off that bat rack. I knocked on that bat on every pitch. My knuckles were raw by the end of the game, but I just felt that you can’t change anything.”
Ignorance of the rule is no excuse. When David Wells was with the minor-league Syracuse Chiefs in 1987, he struck up a fifth-inning conversation with teammate Todd Stottlemyre, who was charting pitches on his off-day. That one of their teammates was in the process of throwing a no-hitter didn’t affect him a bit. “Hey, Stott,” he said, “how many walks does he have?” Stottlemyre replied that an opponent had yet to draw a base on balls. “Wow!” said Wells. “He’s throwing a perfect game!” Chiefs trainer Jon Woodworth recalled Stottlemyre looking “like he was going to kill” Wells. The left-hander’s defense: In his twenty-four years on the planet, five of them in professional baseball, he had somehow never before heard the rule prohibiting discussion of no-hitters. The very next inning, the Syracuse pitcher gave up a two-out bloop single.
It’s a lesson Wells didn’t need to learn twice. In fact, he went so far as to become an evangelist for the idea. In his book, Perfect I’m Not, the pitcher laid out in the starkest possible terms the rule of which he once claimed ignorance:
Rule number one in baseball is that you never, EVER mention that a guy’s throwing a perfect game or a no-hitter until it’s over. If you mention it during the game, it’s a major jinx, the ultimate whammy. The pitcher on the mound will give up a hit to the next batter, and it WILL be your fault—guaranteed.
Some people find religion; David Wells found superstition. Like Blyleven before him, however, Wells held his view only in regard to other pitchers; he didn’t care a bit when it was him at the center of the maelstrom. During his perfect game in 1998, in fact, as Wells’s teammates on the Yankees edged farther away with each passing inning, he decided to take things into his own hands. Changing his undershirt in the clubhouse after the seventh inning, Wells saw David Cone, one of his best friends on the team. Highly in tune with the pressure of the moment, the left-hander approached his teammate, uncertain of what exactly he needed. “Can you believe what’s going on here?” he asked.
In retrospect, Cone feels that Wells simply wanted someone to talk to. In the moment, however, he was all too aware of the implications and at something of a loss for words—so he blurted out the first thing that came to mind, daring Wells to break out the knuckleball he liked to throw in practice but wouldn’t dare try in a game.
Wells laughed and returned to the dugout. After he finished his eighth perfect inning, Cone got on him again, this time in the dugout. “You showed me nothing,” he yelled as the nervous pitcher came off the field. “You didn’t use your knuckleball—you’ve got no guts!”
The tactic might have been taboo, but Cone knew his pal needed conversation more than he needed tradition, and Wells went on to finish the fifteenth perfect game in big-league history. “To me, that kind of stuff is more important than some superstition that says you can’t get near the guy,” Cone said later.
Cone was more than just talk, however. A year later, in the middle of his own perfect game, against the Montreal Expos, he handled a similar response with aplomb. Yankees catcher Joe Girardi was in the on-deck circle when the sixth inning ended, and had to scramble back to the dugout to don his equipment. With backup catcher Jorge Posada in the bullpen, there was nobody to catch Cone’s warm-ups. Designated hitter Chili Davis quickly assessed the situation and, not wanting Cone’s rhythm to be thrown off, grabbed a mask and filled in until Girardi could get properly armored.
The change hardly rattled Cone, who retired three Expos in order, but shortly after he returned to the bench, Davis sat down next to him. “Hey, man,” he said to the surprised pitcher, “I was a catcher in the minor leagues.” Cone was simultaneously perplexed and relieved as Davis began to recount his own bush-league glory wearing shin guards and a chest protector. “You should have seen me catch, man, I was great,” said the slugger, who pitched in more games as a major-leaguer—one—than he caught. “Don’t baby it up there next time I warm you up,” he teased. “Let it go. I can handle it.”
“It worked,” said Cone. “It was nothing profound, but at the time it was a real tension-breaker.”
The most famous no-hitter ever, of course, was Don Larsen’s perfect game in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series, which made his breach of etiquette in the middle of it all the more shocking to his teammates. As the game wound down, the New York bench was a silent picture of no-hitter decorum. Backup infielder Billy Hunter made sure to maintain his position on the bench, and when he returned from a seventh-inning sojurn to the water cooler to find Mickey Mantle there, he politely asked the superstar to move. Mantle far outranked Hunter in the clubhouse hierarchy, but he hardly outranked Bob Brenly’s baseball gods, and quickly obliged. With nowhere to sit, Mantle strolled by the dugout tunnel, where he saw Larsen hanging back in the shadows, cigarette in hand. The pitcher looked up. “Well, Mick, do you think I’ll make it?” he asked.
Mantle, stunned, could formulate no reply. For a moment he did nothing. Then he decided that, if the Code was strong enough for him to concede his spot on the bench, it was strong enough for him to keep his mouth shut. He didn’t say a word.
“Some people believe in jinxes, some don’t,” said Larsen later. “I don’t. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. I mentioned it, but nobody would talk to me. I didn’t care about that, either. I was just trying to win the ballgame.”
• • •
Bob Brenly might embrace the “same seats, same thoughts” mantra when it comes to no-hitters, but during Randy Johnson’s perfect game in 2004, he wasn’t allowed simply to sit still, tapping his knuckles raw on Matt Kata’s bat. As the manager, he had decisions to make.
Late in the 2–0 contest, Brenly wanted to insert a defensive substitute for left fielder Luis Gonzalez, but was hesitant to disrupt the game’s rhythm. He also considered having a pitcher warm up as the forty-year-old Johnson’s pitch count climbed in the late innings, but didn’t want the pitcher even to glimpse such a thing. “What should have been one of the easiest games to manage, I was losing my hair over,” he said. “I had never been involved in a game like that before, and I just didn’t want to do anything to screw it up. That was one of the most stressful games I’ve ever been involved with in my life.” Brenly and his coaches ultimately opted to maintain the status quo, and it worked out to everybody’s advantage.
Conversely, White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen paid no attention whatsoever to the rule when he inserted DeWayne Wise into center field as a ninth-inning defensive replacement during Mark Buehrle’s attempt to close out a perfect game against the Tampa Bay Rays in 2009. Buehrle may actually have been spooked by the change; the first batter after the substitution was Gabe Kapler, who hit a ball over the left-center-field wall that a leaping Wise managed to pull back into the park for the first out of the inning. No harm, no foul; Buehrle didn’t allow another ball out of the infield, recording two more outs and finishing off the seventeenth regular-season perfect game in big-league history.
For an example of what can go wrong when a manager begins to tinker, look no further than Cincinnati’s Davey Johnson. It was 1995, and the pitcher was David Wells, three seasons before he achieved perfection with the Yankees. The left-hander had taken a no-hitter into the seventh inning in Philadelphia, which was broken up when outfielder Tom Marsh connected for a one-out double. Wells, though, never blamed Marsh for the hit
. He blamed Johnson.
With left fielder Ron Gant suffering from leg problems, Johnson decided to realign his outfield before the inning, shifting center fielder Thomas Howard to left, inserting Darren Lewis into center, and removing Gant from the game. Wells just about blew his top, and in the process lost focus, giving up two hits and a run by inning’s end. When the pitcher returned to the bench, he was beside himself with rage. Without a word he threw his hat to the ground and head-butted Johnson, who barely flinched. “What the fuck are you doin’?” asked the manager, as if Wells had merely tousled his hair. “You don’t ever mess with the lineup during a no-hitter!” Wells screamed. “That’s a cardinal rule, dude! You don’t do it!”
Wells is lucky he never played for manager Preston Gomez, who not only juggled the lineup while his pitcher was throwing a no-hitter—the guy he juggled was the pitcher himself. It was 1970, and Gomez was managing the San Diego Padres when Clay Kirby held the Mets hitless through the first eight innings of a game. The problem was that Kirby had allowed a first-inning run on two walks and three stolen bases, and trailed 1–0. Kirby and all ten thousand paying customers couldn’t believe it when pinch-hitter Cito Gaston emerged from the dugout to bat in the pitcher’s spot. “My father was there,” said Kirby. “It was the first game he’d ever seen me pitch in San Diego. He was madder than I was.” Reliever Jack Baldschun took over in the ninth, and took all of four pitches to give New York its first hit in a game it would win 3–0.
As if to prove it wasn’t a strategic fluke, Gomez did the same thing four years later while managing the Houston Astros, pulling Don Wilson after eight no-hit innings for a pinch-hitter with his team trailing 2–1. Never has a man been more inclined to prove the theorem that winning takes precedent over any part of the Code.
Short of being pulled from a game, no pitcher had to endure more while chasing a no-hitter than Kenny Rogers. In 1994, the Rangers ace was hurling a perfect game against the California Angels when, in the fifth inning, a full-fledged bonfire broke out in his team’s dugout. It had been set by Rangers players Chris James and Gary Redus, and was directed not at Rogers but at designated hitter Jose Canseco. For kindling, the duo used the red, ratty high-top cleats Canseco refused to relinquish in favor of new ones. James absconded with the shoes before the game, forcing Canseco to don another pair, and when the slugger responded by hitting two home runs in the first three innings, the decision was made to ensure that his old shoes would never return. A bottle of rubbing alcohol was procured from the trainer’s room, and somebody found a match. Right there by the bench, the immolation began—all while Rogers pitched.
As the flames grew, members of the Rangers bench started dancing around the pyre. “I looked over there from first base and said, ‘What the hell’s going on?’” recalled Texas first baseman Will Clark. “Then I heard what they had done. I couldn’t see, I was laughing so hard.” On the mound, however, Rogers was so focused that he never noticed the plume of smoke emerging from the dugout, and remained oblivious until he was told what had happened once the game was over. “I like that,” he said. “We’ll burn the rest of his shoes if that’s what it takes.”
Players on the bench might be required by code to refrain from discussing a no-hitter in progress, but logic dictates that broadcasters be held to a different standard—after all, it’s their job to describe the action. For some, though, that’s not motivation enough. “I won’t even mention it,” said Angels broadcaster and former player Rex Hudler. “I’ll let my partner do it.”
Hudler has copious precedent on which to base his opinion. During the first televised World Series, in 1947, Yankees right-hander Bill Bevens pitched hitless ball into the ninth inning of Game 4 against the Dodgers; with virtually no precedent on which to rely, broadcaster Mel Allen refused to reference the feat. “Obviously, what I said or didn’t say in the booth wasn’t going to influence anything that happened on the field,” he said. “But I’ve always known that players on the bench don’t mention a no-hitter; they respect the dugout tradition. And I’ve always done the same. It’s part of the romance of the game. It’s one of the great things that separates it from the other sports, like the seventh-inning stretch or ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame.’”
For the purists in the audience this was just fine, save for one fact: Allen worked only the first half of the game. The later innings were given to Dodgers broadcaster Red Barber, who wasted no time in altering the tone. Among the first things out of his mouth when he entered midway through the fourth was the line score: “Dodgers: one run, two errors, no hits.” Allen, said Barber, “nearly fell out of the booth.” Barber continued to report the feat throughout the game, his comfort level possibly buoyed by the run Brooklyn scored in the fifth without benefit of a hit, courtesy of two walks, a sacrifice, and a fielder’s choice. In the ninth, long after Barber gave up the goods on the air, Bevens issued two more walks (one intentional) and a two-out double by Cookie Lavagetto to score both runners, the difference in an improbable 3–2 Brooklyn victory.
As the winning run scored, Barber’s on-air comment was, “Well, I’ll be a suck-egg mule.” His audience certainly thought so. “There was a hue and cry that night,” said the broadcaster. “Yankee fans flooded the radio station with angry calls and claimed I had jinxed Bevens. Some of my fellow announcers on sports shows that evening said I had done the most unsportsmanlike broadcast in history.”
It’s not like he had no experience with the subject—Barber encountered a similar situation during the first major-league game he ever worked. It was opening day for the Chicago Cubs in 1934, and pitcher Lon Warneke hadn’t allowed a hit into the ninth inning. At the time, Barber didn’t actively disdain the ban on mentioning a no-hitter—he’d simply never heard the rule. “I broadcast Warneke’s mastery as he performed it,” he wrote in a bylined article for the Christian Science Monitor in 1988, and no one seemed any the worse for it—save, of course, Warneke himself, who gave up a hit in the ninth. Barber was also behind the microphone four years later for the first of Johnny Vander Meer’s back-to-back no-hitters. True to form, he talked about Boston’s dearth of hits against Cincinnati’s right-hander at least once each inning as the game unfolded, this time jinx-free.
All that was merely an opening act, however, for the most famous contest in World Series history—Don Larsen’s perfect game in 1956. During that game, Mel Allen worked alongside Brooklyn’s young announcer, Vin Scully. As Scully watched the game unfold, the public reaction to Barber’s handling of Bevens’s failed no-hitter was at the forefront of his mind. “In those days people did not mention ‘no-hitter,’” Scully said. “And Mel, he did the first five innings, said, ‘He’s retired 10 in a row, 12 in a row,’ so I picked up the thread and in the second half, I was doing the same thing: ‘Twenty-two in a row, 24 in a row.’ … Today, I would have come on in the fifth inning and said, ‘Hey, call your friends, he’s pitching a no-hitter.’”
Broadcasters who insist on omitting the small detail that a no-hitter is in progress are often forced to come up with increasingly creative workarounds. Take Bob Wolff, who handled the national radio broadcast for Larsen’s perfect game. Like Scully, Wolff knew all about the deluge Barber had faced after chatting about Bevens’s no-hitter in ’47, and did not want it repeated on his account. “I thought that if I ever did a no-hitter, I could avoid all that if I used synonyms,” he said. “If you keep saying ‘no-hitter,’ what’s your punch line? I wanted to tell the whole story, but I was superstitious myself. So I said things like, ‘18 up, 18 down,’ ‘The only hits so far are by the New York Yankees,’ and on and on. There was no question [to listeners] what was going on. Not one phone call, not one letter. I didn’t use the words until the climax, and then I said, ‘A no-hitter, a perfect game!’”
“It’s just those three words,” said Allen during Dave Righetti’s no-hitter for the Yankees in 1983. “He’s pitching a … you know.”
Among the ranks of modern broadcasters, those who refrain
are usually ex-players, but even among them opinion is divided. “Because I came from the playing field, my partner told me that it’s our job to share what’s going on in the game, to alert the viewers to what’s happening,” said Hudler. “But if the pitcher gave up a hit I’d say, ‘Awww, I jinxed it,’ because I still have that player’s attitude.”
Jim Kaat, another ex-player, took things a step further when broadcasting Dwight Gooden’s no-hitter for the New York Yankees in 1996. Kaat’s partner, David Cohen, refused to mention what was going on; Kaat, treating it like he did as a player, would not even leave his seat. “I usually make a couple pit stops [during the course of a game],” he said, “but I never moved.” Phillies broadcaster Scott Graham was even more extreme during Kevin Millwood’s no-no against the Giants in 2003. When Graham’s wife, sitting in the stands with their two young sons, told him that their boys were getting antsy and needed to go home, he gave her specific instructions … that were remarkably short on specifics. “Listen to me,” he said, pointing to the scoreboard and issuing as direct an order as he felt able. “You can’t leave here until that number under the ‘H’ changes.” Even in casual conversation, the broadcaster was unable to risk a jinx.
The counter to this sort of superstition, of course, is common sense. “It certainly is not a rule in broadcasting to not talk about it,” said player-turned broadcaster Steve Lyons. “If you want people to stay tuned, it’s almost the opposite. If you want people to stay tuned, you should probably mention, ‘Hey, hang in there, don’t go anywhere—guy’s throwing a no-hitter.’” This is especially true on the radio, said longtime A’s broadcaster Ray Fosse, where “you can’t see a line score.”