In the book he did with Tim Brown, Imperfect: An Improbable Life, Jim Abbott said he noticed it after the sixth inning of his 1993 no-hitter.
“Teammates who might have mentioned a pitch here or there, grunted something about a good or crummy play, commented on another score in another town, began to keep those observations to themselves,” Abbott said.
David Cone, who liked talking to anyone before and during his 419 starts in the big leagues, remembered years after his 1999 perfect game that only Chili Davis would talk to him during that game.
“I would walk up to the clubhouse in the locker room in between innings and change my undershirt—the little routine that I had—even the clubhouse kids, anybody in there, just left,” Cone told the New York Post years later. “So I had the whole clubhouse to myself.”
Cone did get the perfect game, so maybe it worked.
A little more than a year before Cone threw his perfect game, David Wells threw one for the Yankees against the Minnesota Twins. Cone played a part in that one, too.
Wells’ other teammates began avoiding him as the game went on. At one point, Wells sat down next to Darryl Strawberry, and Strawberry got up and walked away. No one wanted to take a chance on being the guy who jinxed it.
No one except Cone.
Cone and Wells were already good friends, and Cone understood better than most that what Wells really needed was someone saying something to take his mind off the pressure of not having allowed a baserunner. So as the Yankees were batting in the seventh inning, adding their two final runs to make it a 4–0 game, Cone started talking.
“I think it’s time to break out the knuckleball,” he said.
Wells, of course, doesn’t throw a knuckleball. But he did enjoy the interlude.
Twenty years after the perfect game, thinking back on it, he could only recite three of the outs.
“That’s all I remember, besides David Cone yelling at me,” Wells said.
He did remember his feelings as the ninth inning began.
“You’re a mess,” he said. “Your stomach’s turning. You’re nervous as hell. You’re thinking, ‘Don’t make a mistake.’ That’s exactly what I was saying to myself.”
The unwritten rule on not talking to a guy throwing a no-hitter is so established that some players get uncomfortable even if it’s the pitcher initiating the conversation. When Giants rookie Chris Heston no-hit the Mets in 2015, Heston made an eighth-inning baserunning mistake that cost teammate Matt Duffy a run. In the top of the ninth, Heston went over to Duffy to apologize. Duffy was stunned.
“After the sixth, I didn’t want to go anywhere within five feet of him,” Duffy told Andrew Baggarly of the San Jose Mercury News. “We were in the dugout right before the ninth and he said, ‘Hey man, I’m sorry about that.’ I said, ‘Dude, uh, don’t worry about it. Don’t focus on that. It’s fine.’”
Heston must not have worried too much. He got the no-hitter.
Sonny Gray, on the other hand, did not get a no-hitter on Opening Day 2015. He carried it to the eighth inning, but Ryan Rua led off with a base hit. It probably wasn’t because Gray had talked to manager Bob Melvin in the dugout, but then again, why did Gray tempt fate by asking Melvin about his new warmup song?
“Get away from me,” Melvin said later, relaying what he told Gray in the dugout. “No one wants to talk about walk-up songs. No one wants to talk to you right now.”
34. Can You Bunt for the First Hit?
SO YOU DON’T TALK TO A PITCHER WHO MIGHT be throwing a no-hitter. And the manager is hesitant to take out a pitcher who still hasn’t allowed a hit (although pitch counts can now force his hand). You’ll also hear some official scorers who still maintain the first hit should be a clean one, and that anything close is an error.
That last one really shouldn’t be. A hit is a hit. What, should an umpire err on the side of calling the batter out if it’s a close play at first, or if it’s a third strike just on (or off) the black?
But what about bunting? Is it alright to bunt for the first hit?
That depends.
Tradition says you don’t. Do it against the wrong pitcher in the old days and you were likely to get a fastball in the back (or an even worse spot) the next time up.
Like so many other things, it’s much more complicated now. It’s more or less accepted that bunting is fine if the goal is to win the game rather than simply to deny the pitcher his shot at history. If it’s a close game, your team needs baserunners, and bunting for a hit is part of your game, go right ahead. If it’s 7–0 with two out in the eighth, that might not be the best spot for it.
The new wrinkle in the modern game is the shift. If the defensive team is still shifting and leaving the third-base line wide open, is it really against any unwritten rule for the batter to bunt?
That exact situation came up in a September 2014 game between the San Diego Padres and Philadelphia Phillies. Padres starter Andrew Cashner hadn’t allowed a hit when Domonic Brown came to the plate with one out in the fifth. Brown bats left-handed, and the Padres set up their shift with three infielders on the right side. And Brown bunted for the first hit of the game.
The fans at Petco Park booed Brown. Cashner stared at him.
“You can ask him what I thought of it,” Cashner told reporters after the game.
But Padres manager Bud Black wasn’t complaining. Black noted that it was a close game. The Padres led 1–0, which would also end up being the final score.
“There was more grumbling in the stands than in the dugout [about the bunt],” Black said. “Our defensive metrics say we’re going to shift on this fellow. He’s playing the game.”
The same thing happened in 2012, with the A’s playing the Red Sox. Oakland’s A.J. Griffin had a perfect game going in the fifth inning. But with the A’s shifting on Jarrod Saltalamacchia, Saltalamacchia bunted for the game’s first hit.
“I probably should have had the third baseman in,” A’s manager Bob Melvin admitted.
Not every pitcher gets upset when a bunt is the first hit, especially when it comes from a speedster like Jarrod Dyson. Dyson is so fast his Twitter handle is @mrzoombiya.
“Hey, that’s what I do,” Dyson explained to Bob Dutton of the Kansas City Star in 2013. “I zoom by you.”
Four years later, in June 2017, Dyson was playing for the Mariners, and Justin Verlander was bidding for a perfect game for the Detroit Tigers. At least he was until Dyson bunted for a hit with one out in the sixth inning of a game the Tigers led, 4–0.
“It was a perfect bunt,” Verlander said. “That’s part of his game. I don’t think it was quite too late in the game given the situation to bunt, especially being how it’s a major part of what he does. So I didn’t really have any issues with it. It wasn’t like I got upset about it.”
Verlander was more upset that Dyson’s bunt single started a three-run rally in a game the Mariners came back to win, 7–5.
Bunting is definitely a part of Dyson’s game. By the end of 2017, he had 46 bunt hits in his career. Compare that to Ben Davis. He may have never bunted for a hit, except for one game in 2001. He was playing for the Padres against the Diamondbacks that day, it was in the eighth inning, and D-Backs pitcher Curt Schilling still hadn’t allowed a hit. Davis bunted with two out and nobody on, and he reached base with the Padres’ first hit. The Diamondbacks weren’t happy. Manager Bob Brenly yelled at Davis as he stood at first base, and later called Davis “chickenshit.”
“I know there’s two schools of thought on it,” Brenly told reporters a few days later. “One, they’re trying to get the tying run to the plate to win a ballgame [the Diamondbacks led 2–0 at the time]. I can certainly understand that, but the way I was raised in this game, the guys who taught me how to play the game when I was coming up taught me there’s a certain respect for the game, respect for the opponents, especi
ally when they’re doing something exceptional. And there’s no question that’s what Curt was doing.”
The only problem with what Brenly said is that respect for the game means trying to win, and by bunting for a hit, Davis brought the tying run to the plate. Why should it be on him to help Schilling do “something exceptional?” Schilling would pitch out of the inning and end up with a complete-game three-hitter and a win, but at the time the Padres needed a baserunner to have a chance.
“I don’t think anyone should tell us to drop our weapons and raise our hands,” Padres manager Bruce Bochy said. “Ben did the right thing.
Brenly wasn’t convinced.
“They’re sure they’re right, and we’re sure we’re right,” he said. “I don’t know if there is a right or wrong.”
Years later, Davis told Todd Zolecki of MLB.com he had no idea why anyone would be upset with him. He said he went up to teammate Tony Gwynn and asked if he’d done something wrong.
“Man, forget those guys,” Gwynn told him, according to Davis. “You did nothing wrong.”
Bunting can cause issues even when a no-hitter isn’t at stake.
On the final day of August 2017 at Yankee Stadium, Eduardo Nunez of the Red Sox bunted for a hit in the first inning against Yankee starter CC Sabathia. Sabathia didn’t like it, and he let everyone know he didn’t like it.
“It’s kind of weak to me,” he said after the game, after cursing toward the Red Sox dugout on his way off the field at the end of the inning. “I’m an old man. They should go out there and try to kick my butt.”
The problem with that is there’s no rule against bunting for a hit, and no unwritten rule against it, either. There’s absolutely nothing there suggesting teams can’t bunt for hits when the pitcher is 37 years old, has bad knees, and is overweight.
Teams aren’t going to stop running because the pitcher can’t hold runners on or the catcher has a weak arm. Pitchers aren’t going to stop throwing curveballs because the batter can’t hit them.
Teams tried bunting on Jim Abbott, who was born without a right hand and had to shift his glove to his left hand, his pitching hand, after delivering the ball to the plate. To be able to pitch in the big leagues, Abbott had to show he could handle it, that bunting on him wasn’t going to be a successful strategy.
CC can handle bunts, too. If he couldn’t, he wouldn’t have lasted 18 years in the major leagues. If teams could beat him by bunting on him, they’d be doing it regularly. As it was, there were only seven successful bunt hits off him in 148.2 innings in 2017, according to Fangraphs. That was the most in the major leagues, but it was hardly an outrageous total. Drew Pomeranz allowed nine bunt hits in 2016, and Jered Weaver allowed 10 in 2014.
In 153 innings in 2018, Sabathia allowed just two bunt hits.
The Fangraphs numbers don’t go back far enough to tell us how many guys bunted successfully off Nolan Ryan. What we do know is that Ryan didn’t like it any better than Sabathia does. But instead of just complaining, Ryan would do something about it.
“I can remember the first time I faced Nolan Ryan,” Brett Butler, an outfielder who liked to bunt, told Boston’s WBUR radio in 2016. “And there’s a guy, a Hall of Famer that threw almost 100. I remember squaring around and taking a pitch—kind of gauging and seeing what was going on—and he yelled at me from the mound, ‘Swing the bat! Swing the bat or I’m going to hit you right in the head.’ Well, again, there’s intimidation involved in that. But the reason Nolan did that is that Nolan didn’t like to field the bunt.”
It wasn’t an idle threat, either. Ryan would throw at a guy who bunted. He might not actually hit him in the head, but he might try to take out his legs. He was willing to put that guy on base to make his point, counting on the pain as a message not to try to bunt the next time.
Pitchers today don’t do that. Sabathia doesn’t, and he might not want anyone else to, either. His teammate, Brett Gardner, had 51 career bunt hits through the end of 2018, again according to Fangraphs. Some of those hits, no doubt, have helped Sabathia win a game. You can bet Gardner chooses carefully when he’s going to attempt a bunt. You can bet he’s more likely to try it if the guy on the mound, or the first baseman or third baseman, has shown to be a little weaker fielding them.
When CC complained about Nunez’s bunt hit, and also about a similar attempt by Andrew Benintendi a couple of weeks before at Fenway Park, former Red Sox slugger Jim Rice hauled off on him on Boston’s NESN TV channel.
“What is he talking about? Bunting is part of the game,” Rice said on the Red Sox’ postgame show. “You try to get on the base any way you can. If you tell him to leave some of that chicken, that doughnut, and that burger weight, maybe his leg will be okay, that he can field that baseball. That’s just stupid.”
Even CC seemed to get a kick out of those comments, at least after he called Rice “bitter.”
“It’s just funny,” he said. “He’s right. I’m fat. He won that.”
For the record, Sabathia won both those games where the Red Sox tried to bunt on him. Maybe he should have asked them to bunt more.
Speaking of which, the Sabathia comments reminded some people of another game and another pitcher who might have had trouble moving off the mound. Remember Game 6 of the 2004 ALCS, when Schilling beat the Yankees while pitching after surgery on his ankle? Remember the TV cameras zooming in on Schilling’s right foot and ankle, showing what seemed to be blood seeping through his sock?
Schilling pitched seven innings that night at old Yankee Stadium. He gave up four hits. Not one of them was a bunt. The Yankees never tried. Yankees manager Joe Torre didn’t even put Kenny Lofton in the lineup that night, even though Lofton was a good enough bunter that he once had 15 bunt hits in a season.
Three years later, as some in New York are happy to point out, Lofton did try to bunt in the playoffs. By that time, Lofton was playing for the Indians, and he bunted against Roger Clemens, a 45-year-old pitcher with hamstring trouble. Clemens aggravated the hamstring trying to field the bunt, in what turned out to be the last major league game Clemens ever pitched.
Clemens and the Yankees didn’t complain about Lofton trying to bunt. They understood it was part of his game, and part of the game of baseball.
There’s nothing in the rules against it. Not in the written rules, and not in the unwritten rules, either.
Except, sometimes, when the pitcher hasn’t yet allowed a hit.
35. You Don’t Pull a Pitcher Before He Allows a Hit (Unless You Do)
NOLAN RYAN, AS MOST BASEBALL FANS KNOW, threw seven no-hitters in his Hall of Fame career. No one else has thrown more than four. What most fans don’t know is that Ryan actually started 15 games in which he didn’t give up a hit. There were six games when he left early because of injuries, and a game in 1976 when he wasn’t even supposed to start but faced one batter because Angels manager Dick Williams mistakenly put him on the lineup card.
The pitcher on the card had to face one batter before he could be removed, so Ryan took the mound at Comiskey Park, threw two pitches and got Chet Lemon to ground out before Williams replaced him with Gary Ross, who was supposed to start that day.
“I definitely had my no-hit stuff,” Ryan joked to reporters after the game.
And then there was the game on April 9, 1990, the one and only time a manager chose to pull Nolan Ryan from a game when he was pitching a no-hitter. Even then, there were special circumstances. The owners had locked out the players in a labor dispute that wasn’t settled until March 19. Spring training lasted only two weeks. So after Ryan threw 91 pitches in five innings on Opening Day, Rangers manager Bobby Valentine decided that was enough.
“I was hoping for rain and a five-inning complete game,” Valentine explained afterwards. “I even called the weather report and if it was going to rain before 10 o’clock, I was going to send him back out there.”
But there was no rain. Ryan, who was 43 years old at the time, admitted to reporters that night he was exhausted and couldn’t have finished the game.
That’s what it took to get Nolan Ryan out of a game when he hadn’t allowed a hit. Nowadays, with almost every pitcher and almost any manager, it takes much less. Four times in the 2017 season alone, a manager pulled a starter who hadn’t allowed a hit (and wasn’t hurt). It happened five times in 2016, with Dodgers manager Dave Roberts pulling Rich Hill after seven perfect innings.
“I’m going to lose sleep tonight,” Roberts said. “And I probably should.”
It’s happening to managers more and more often. By the 2018 All-Star break, there had already been seven games where a pitcher threw six no-hit innings and didn’t go any further.
In the case of Julio Teheran of the Atlanta Braves, it was a hamstring cramp that combined with his high pitch count (95 through six innings) to force him from the game. Nathan Eovaldi was making his first start back in the big leagues after recovering from a second Tommy John surgery when Tampa Bay Rays manager Kevin Cash told him six innings and 70 pitches were enough.
“He just kind of stared at me,” Cash told reporters. “He wouldn’t shake my hand.”
But with the advent of pitch counts and the belief that throwing too many pitches risks injury, managers start doing math when their pitcher gets to the fifth or sixth inning without allowing a hit. Is the count at that point in the game low enough that he can realistically get through nine without getting to a number that is unacceptable.
Sean Newcomb of the Atlanta Braves had thrown 88 pitches in six no-hit innings in July 2018 against the Los Angeles Dodgers. Braves manager Brian Snitker sent Newcomb out for the seventh and then sent him out for the eighth with a pitch count at 100. Newcomb had never thrown more than 111 pitches in any of his previous 39 major-league starts, but Snitker allowed him to begin the ninth inning after he had already thrown 117 pitches.
Unwritten Page 14