June 15, 2003: Steve Trachsel’s one-hitter, José Reyes’ first home run lead Mets over Angels

The New York Mets took a road trip to play two interleague series in June 2003.1 They won two of three games against the Texas Rangers before heading to Anaheim for a series against the reigning World Series champion Anaheim Angels. The Mets were mired in fifth place in the National League East Division with a 29-35 record when they arrived in California.

New York took the first game of the series, 7-3, on June 13, with help from home runs by Timo Pérez and Jeromy Burnitz. Anaheim came back to win the second game, 13-3, scoring 10 runs in the first four innings against 27-year-old right-hander Jason Roach, who was making his major-league debut. The 16-hit, 4-homer win put the Angels at 34-31, 10½ games behind the Oakland Athletics in the American League West Division.

The Mets started right-hander Steve Trachsel in the final game of the series, on Sunday afternoon, June 15. The 32-year-old right-hander, in his third season with New York after signing a free-agent contract in December 2000, had lost his previous two starts, including a loss on June 5 when the Milwaukee Brewers hit four home runs off him. Raised in nearby Fullerton, California, Trachsel had dreamed of pitching at Edison Field, which was then known as Anaheim Stadium. “I pretty much grew up in this ballpark since third grade,” he said.2

Left-hander Jarrod Washburn was Trachsel’s opponent. Washburn, 27, led the Angels with 18 wins and a 3.15 ERA in 2002. He entered the game with a 6-6 record, with just one of those wins coming at home.

Washburn got the Mets out in order in the first, striking out two, but New York went ahead in the second inning. Between strikeouts of Cliff Floyd and Burnitz, Jason Phillips walked, Vance Wilson singled, and Tsuyoshi Shinjo walked to load the bases.

This brought up José Reyes. Ranked by Baseball America as the game’s number-three prospect entering the 2003 season,3 Reyes had been promoted from the Triple-A Tidewater Tides on June 10, a day before his 20th birthday, as a replacement for injured shortstop Rey Sánchez.

Reyes, who was hitting just .150 in five starts since his call-up, drove Washburn’s 10th pitch of the at-bat over the left-field wall for his first major-league home run to put the Mets in front, 4-0.4

Reyes pumped his fist in the air as he circled the bases. When he returned to the dugout, “[h]e was smiling from ear-to-ear, he was so excited,” said Phillips.5 It made Reyes just the second Met, after pitcher Jack Hamilton in 1967, to hit a grand slam for his first career home run.6

Trachsel had walked two batters in the first but got out of the inning on a 4-6-3 double play. He walked Brad Fullmer – who hit a grand slam of his own in the previous night’s game – with one out in the second but another double play ended the inning. Trachsel then retired the Angels in order in the third, fourth, and fifth innings.

The Mets increased their lead in the middle innings. Burnitz hit a solo home run, his ninth of the season, in the fourth. Reyes was left on second after a single and his first major-league stolen base in the sixth,7 but Burnitz followed Phillips’s one-out walk with another homer off Washburn in the sixth. Nine of Burnitz’s 10 homers in 2003 had come on the road.8

After Wilson singled up the middle, Angels manager Mike Scioscia went to his bullpen for right-hander Ben Weber. Weber got Shinjo to ground into a force out. Reyes singled for his third hit, but Roger Cedeño grounded out to end the Mets’ sixth.

Despite striking out seven, Washburn gave up a season-high seven runs in 5 1/3 innings, his shortest outing of the season. “I don’t think I threw as bad as the numbers say. I wouldn’t say it was my worst start of the year,” he said after the game.9

The Angels were hitless going into the bottom of the sixth, and Trachsel started the inning by inducing two groundouts. He got ahead of David Eckstein with a 1-and-2 count, but the Anaheim shortstop hit a blooper over second baseman Roberto Alomar’s outstretched glove, breaking up the no-hitter. Eckstein reached third when Cedeño let the ball get past him for an error.

“It was kind of an emergency hack, to tell the truth. I was fortunate enough to get a hit,” said Eckstein. “You’ve got a guy that relies on location and mixing things up. In the past, those are the guys that have been able to do well against us.”10

When asked about losing the no-hitter, Trachsel said, “I wasn’t really disappointed at all. I wasn’t even thinking about it. It was too far away.”11 He told reporters that he just focused on getting the shutout, which he kept alive by retiring Jeff DaVanon on a foul pop.

In the seventh, Trachsel dismissed the heart of the Angels’ batting order. Tim Salmon flied out. Garret Anderson – coming off a four-hit game, including two homers, a double, three runs scored, and four RBIs, a night earlier  – walked but was forced out on Troy Glaus’s grounder to third. Fullmer flied out to end the inning.

Scott Schoeneweis came in for Weber in the eighth. His second pitch of the inning hit Burnitz, and Wilson followed with a single. Shinjo hit into a force at second, moving Burnitz to third Reyes grounded out to Eckstein, picking up his fifth RBI of the game as Burnitz scored the Mets’ eighth run.

Trachsel continued to work toward a shutout, despite some eighth-inning drama. With one out, he threw inside to catcher Bengie Molina, who barely missed getting hit. Molina began to walk toward Trachsel before Mets catcher Wilson got between them. Scioscia stormed out of the dugout to argue that Trachsel deliberately tried to hit Molina and should be ejected. Home-plate umpire Rob Drake gave warnings to both teams.12

“It looked pretty flagrant when they threw that pitch behind Bengie, and I was a little baffled why the umpire wouldn’t have seen that it was obvious,” Scioscia said after the game. “I didn’t think they were going to be so dumb,” said Molina. “Because we barely hit Burnitz, one of us is going to get hit for that or thrown at? That’s stupid.”13

Trachsel’s only comment when asked about the pitch afterward was that it was “(a) bit inside.” Mets manager Art Howe told reporters, “I don’t know if it’s obvious or not. We’re going to take care of our own.”14 He also noted, “Scioscia’s been known to go out and argue and hope the pitcher loses his grip.”15

Trachsel retired the Angels in order on three fly balls in the ninth. After Shinjo caught Salmon’s fly ball to center for the third out, he tossed the ball into the stands. When Trachsel asked Shinjo for the ball, he learned that it was gone. Shinjo said he would’ve saved it for a no-hitter but not a one-hitter and didn’t see what the big deal was. “Nice job, Shinjo,” said Trachsel. “I guess they must have one-hitters all the time in Japan.”16

“That’s a heck of a lineup that he shut down,” Howe said after the game.

After Trachsel’s struggles in his previous two starts, where he allowed seven runs in each, he was asked about what he did differently. “The big difference is the ball was down in the zone. I had an idea where it was going,” said Trachsel of his 119-pitch effort. Known for working at a slow pace, he dispatched the Angels in a relatively brisk 2 hours and 38 minutes.

The one-hit complete game was the second in Trachsel’s career. His first was on May 13, 1996, with the Chicago Cubs, a 6-0 win over the Houston Astros at Wrigley Field. It was also the first complete game for a Mets pitcher in 2003.

In the Mets’ 42nd season of existence, the franchise remained without a no-hitter. Still, Trachsel had authored their 24th one-hitter and first complete-game one-hitter since David Cone’s on September 20, 1991, when he beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 1-0.17

Trachsel, who had left 20 tickets for family and friends at Edison Field, improved his record to 5-4 and lowered his ERA to 4.76. He continued to pitch well for the remainder of the season, including another one-hit complete-game shutout, against the Colorado Rockies on August 18. Trachsel finished 16-10 with a 3.78 ERA, the best season of his six-year tenure with the Mets.18

Reyes stayed in the Mets lineup through late August, when a sprained ankle ended his season. In nearly three months in the leadoff spot, he batted .307 with 32 RBIs and 13 stolen bases in 69 games.19 Reyes was eighth in the voting for the 2003 NL Rookie of the Year.20

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Bruce Slutsky and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Photo credit: Steve Trachsel, Trading Card Database.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author used the Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org websites for the box score and other material.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/ANA/ANA200306150.shtml

ttps://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2003/B06150ANA2003.htm

Notes

1 Interleague play began in 1997. The major leagues set aside specific periods during the regular season for American and National League teams to play each other. At that time, teams played 20 games against teams from the other league, with most of the games being played against teams from one division in the opposite circuit. Divisional pairings changed yearly, and the 2002 season was the first that the National League East Division, including the Mets, was matched against the American League West Division, including the Angels. Starting in 2024, each team played every other team in both leagues.

2 Ben Bolch, “Trachsel Finds Angels Soft Spot,” Los Angeles Times, June 16, 2003: D5. Trachsel had pitched in the ballpark one previous time, as a member of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 2000.

3 The complete Baseball America rankings for 2003 are found at “2003 Baseball America Pre-Season Prospect Rankings,” The Baseball Cube, https://www.thebaseballcube.com/content/prospects_mlb/2003~BA/. Accessed March 2025.

4 Reyes hit 145 home runs in his 16-season major-league career. Only one other was a grand slam: on August 6, 2006, against Scott Mathieson of the Philadelphia Phillies.

5 Adam Rubin, “Making Case to Stay,” New York Daily News, June 16, 2003: 68.

6 Hamilton hit a grand slam against the St. Louis Cardinals on May 20, 1967. The right-hander had just eight hits, all singles, in his first five years in the majors before his grand slam.

7 Reyes stole 517 bases in his career, leading the league three times.

8 Burnitz, who was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers on July 14, went on to hit 31 home runs in 2003. Twenty-one were on the road.

9 Ben Bolch, “Trachsel Finds Angels Soft Spot.”

10 Bolch.

11 Rafael Hermoso, “Trachsel Supports the Star Turn by Reyes With a One-Hitter,” New York Times, June 16, 2003: D1.

12 Drake was a minor-league umpire who was filling in for an umpire on leave. He was added to MLB’s umpire staff in 2010 and remained an umpire through the 2024 season.

13 Ben Bolch, “Trachsel’s Insider Trading Causes Anger,” Los Angeles Times, June 16, 2003: D5.

14 Adam Rubin, “Back on Trach With One-Hitter,” New York Daily News, June 16, 2003: 66.

15 Hermoso, “Trachsel Supports the Star Turn by Reyes With a One-Hitter.”

16 David Lennon, “One Hit, Two Stars,” Newsday (Long Island, New York), June 16, 2003: 49.

17 The Mets got their first no-hitter when Johan Santana beat the Cardinals 8-0 at Shea Stadium on June 1, 2012.

18 The Mets came in last in the five-team NL East with a 66-95 record. The Angels were third in the AL West at 77-85.

19 Reyes injured his hamstring early in the 2004 season and had a back problem near the end of the season that limited his playing time to 53 games. He also played second base most of the season after the Mets signed Kazuo Matsui to play shortstop. Reyes became the Mets’ regular shortstop in 2005, a position that he held through 2011.

20 Dontrelle Willis of the Florida Marlins won the NL Rookie of the Year Award in 2003.