April 20, 1974: Wayne Garland’s Opening Day no-hitter kicks off championship season for Rochester

The 1974 season turned out to be magic for the Rochester Red Wings of the Triple-A International League. The Baltimore Orioles’ top farm club finished first in the IL’s North Division with the most wins in the league,1 then beat the Memphis Blues and Syracuse Chiefs to claim the league’s playoff title, the Governors’ Cup, for the second time in four seasons.2

In retrospect, the tone for the season was set on its first day, April 20, in Charleston, West Virginia. Red Wings righthander Wayne Garland pitched an Opening Day no-hitter, humbling the Charleston Charlies 5-0. It was the first Opening Day no-no in the league’s long history.3

Garland, 23 years old, had passed up two previous draft selections – including one by the Charlies’ parent club, the Pittsburgh Pirates – before the Orioles chose him in the first round of the secondary phase of the June 1969 amateur draft.4 He rose through the Orioles’ system, going 10-11 with a 3.57 ERA for the Red Wings in 1973. One of those losses was a 6-2 Opening Day defeat by Charleston.5

Garland earned his first promotion to Baltimore in September 1973, when he appeared in four games. He then went to Venezuela to pitch winter ball, where his year began in tragedy. He was one of three players in the Orioles organization who was with 22-year-old pitcher Mark Weems when Weems drowned in the ocean on New Year’s Day 1974.6

Garland’s catcher for his second Opening Day crack at the Charlies was 26-year-old Jim Hutto. A Swiss Army knife in his 10th pro season, Hutto had played catcher, first base, third base, and both corner outfield positions in his only major-league season with the 1970 Philadelphia Phillies.7 Hutto had played for the Red Wings team that won the 1971 Governors’ Cup. He then spent parts of two seasons in the California Angels’ system before being traded back to the Orioles’ organization in June 1973.8

All nine of the Red Wings’ starters and seven of the Charlies’ starters reached the big leagues at some point. The most notable for Rochester was probably 23-year-old third baseman Doug DeCinces, whose 15-year major-league career included one All-Star team, a Silver Slugger Award, and a third-place finish in the 1982 American League Most Valuable Player vote.

The Charlies’ starters included two future major-league managers. Second baseman Tony La Russa, 29 years old, was playing out the string; he’d appeared in his final major-league game with the Chicago Cubs a season earlier. He went on to a 35-season big-league managing career in which he won 2,884 games, three World Series titles, and four Manager of the Year awards and earned election to the Hall of Fame. Starting at third was 27-year-old Art Howe, who broke into the majors with Pittsburgh later that season. Howe played in the majors for 11 seasons and managed there for 14, winning 1,129 games and two American League West Division titles with the Oakland Athletics.

Charleston’s starting pitcher was Jim McKee, a 6-foot-7 righty from Ohio who’d been the first player from Otterbein College (now University) to reach the majors.9 McKee was beginning his sixth and final pro campaign. He’d had chances with the Pirates the two previous seasons, going 1-1 with a 4.78 ERA in 17 appearances. In 1974, he finished with a 10-12 record and 3.61 ERA in 23 Triple-A games, all starts.

McKee’s wildness helped the Red Wings build a 2-0 lead in the top of the first in front of a disappointing crowd of 2,188. Rochester’s first hitters, shortstop Bob Bailor and center fielder Tom Shopay, walked. Neither swung at a pitch as McKee missed the strike zone with 10 of his first 11 offerings.10 Right fielder Steve Hovley singled to center field, scoring Bailor and sending Shopay to third. Three batters later, a groundout by first baseman Mike Fiore brought Shopay home.

Charlies first baseman Charles Howard, a 30-year-old in his 12th minor-league season, drew a walk off Garland to open the bottom of the second inning. This moment of offensive promise didn’t last long, as Garland retired the next 15 Charleston batters. The Charleston Sunday Gazette-Mail praised the pitcher’s “pinpoint control” and “quick-breaking slider.”

McKee started the third inning but didn’t get far into it. Hovley drew a walk and cleanup hitter DeCinces belted a pitch over the center-field fence, doubling Rochester’s advantage to 4-0. A double by Fiore chased McKee in favor of Dominican-born righty Juan Jiménez, who shut down the Red Wings’ offense with four innings of three-hit shutout pitching.

Howard was still the Charlies’ only baserunner when La Russa came to the plate to lead off the bottom of the seventh. On a checked swing, La Russa bounced a roller to DeCinces at third, who mishandled it and threw too late for the out. Official scorer Shorty Hardman ruled it an error. Center fielder Dave Augustine grounded into a double play to clear the basepaths.11

Up next, Howard drilled a long fly to center field, where Shopay got a glove on it but dropped it. (“I just nonchalanted a little too much and the ball popped out of my glove,” he said later.)12 Again, Hardman ruled the play an error. And again, the Charlies couldn’t do anything with it: Catcher Pete Koegel struck out to end the frame. After the game, Altobelli called Shopay’s drop “the only questionable ball” in terms of official scoring decisions. “[Hardman] did a hell of a job,” he added.

Veteran righty Daryl Patterson took over from Jiménez in the seventh, and the Red Wings tacked on one last unearned run in the eighth. La Russa threw away Fiore’s grounder for the Charlies’ only error.13 Patterson hit left fielder Curt Motton with a pitch, then gave up a line-drive single to right field by second baseman Rob Andrews that drove in Fiore for a 5-0 Rochester lead.

Charleston’s Ed Ott started the bottom of the inning by grounding to Andrews, who booted it for the Red Wings’ third error. A wild pitch by Garland allowed Ott to take second base, just the second time the Charlies had gotten a runner that far. But Garland retired the next three batters – including shortstop Mario Mendoza, who hit a borderline fair-or-foul roller that DeCinces decided to field. “I thought it was going foul, but it kicked back in fair,” DeCinces said afterward. “I knew he could run, so I just threw the ball as hard as I could and got him out. I would have looked kind of stupid if I let it roll and it hit the bag.”14

After a shutout inning by the Charlies’ Jim Sadowski in the top of the ninth, a streaker dashed across the field during the break.15 It didn’t faze Garland, who retired the last three batters – probably left fielder Bill Flowers, La Russa, and Augustine – to nail down his no-no.16 A Charleston newspaper called the game “convincing … untainted by wildness or solidly hit, line-drive outs.”17

After wrapping up the game in 2 hours and 7 minutes, Garland signed autographs for fans at Watt Powell Park, then faced reporters. “Jimmy Hutto deserves a lot of credit. Jimmy called a real good game,” he said. “I was surprised toward the end, though. Hutto asked me if I was getting tired, and I wasn’t.”18 Hutto acknowledged the consensus in the Red Wings’ clubhouse that Garland was headed for the majors: “We all know we’re going to lose him.”19

It didn’t happen immediately. Garland made six starts with the Wings and went 2-2 with a 5.40 ERA. The call to Baltimore finally came on May 26, when a death in the family forced Orioles reliever Don Hood to the bereavement list.20 Garland remained with the O’s the rest of the season; he posted a 5-5 record with a 2.97 ERA in 20 games, including six starts.

On July 15, he took a no-hitter into the ninth inning against the defending World Series-champion Oakland Athletics, but Oakland erupted for four hits and five runs to take the win.21 In his only postseason game, Garland also made a relief appearance against the Athletics in Game Two of the American League Championship Series on October 6.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Red Wings pushed on toward their title. The only blot on the season was the death, six days after Garland’s no-hitter, of Morrie Silver, a Rochester businessman who led a campaign to keep the Red Wings in the city in the mid-1950s and later served as their general manager.22 Rochester’s ballpark had been renamed for Silver in 1968; the Red Wings wore sleeve patches in his honor in 1974.23

Garland spent 1975 in the Baltimore bullpen, then broke through with a 20-win season in 1976 that made him one of baseball’s hottest free agents. Fed up with Orioles manager Earl Weaver, Garland signed a 10-year, $2.3-million contract with the Cleveland Indians, the third-biggest free-agent deal in major-league history at the time. Nagged by arm and shoulder injuries, including a torn rotator cuff, Garland won only 28 games across five seasons before retiring.24

Acknowledgments

This story was fact-checked by Gary Belleville and copy-edited by Mike Eisenbath.

Sources and photo credit

In addition to the specific sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org for general player, team and season data. Neither Baseball-Reference nor Retrosheet offers box scores for minor-league games, but the April 21, 1974, editions of the Charleston (West Virginia) Sunday Gazette-Mail and the Rochester (New York) Democrat and Chronicle printed box scores. Joseph Wancho’s SABR Biography Project article on Wayne Garland also served as a primary source.

Image of unnumbered 1973 Baltimore Orioles photocard of Wayne Garland downloaded from the Trading Card Database.

Notes

1 Rochester won the North Division with an 88-56 record, while Memphis won the South Division with an 87-55 record.

2 Baseball-Reference BR Bullpen, “Governors’ Cup,” accessed June 2025, https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Governors%27_Cup. Memphis was a Montreal Expos farm club, while Syracuse was affiliated with the New York Yankees.

3 Game stories in the Charleston and Rochester newspapers, cited later in these endnotes, differed on the length of the IL’s history: Charleston said 88 years, Rochester said 91. As of 2025, Minor League Baseball dated the IL’s founding to 1884, which would make the 1974 season the loop’s 91st. Rob Terranova, “Then and Now: International League,” MILB.com, posted March 17, 2022, https://www.milb.com/news/international-league-then-and-now.

4 Specifically, the Pirates chose Garland in the fifth round of the June 1968 draft out of high school in Nashville, Tennessee, while the St. Louis Cardinals chose him in the secondary phase of the first round of the January 1969 amateur draft out of Gulf Coast State College in Florida.

5 Jim Castor, “Wings Lose Opener,” Rochester (New York) Democrat and Chronicle, April 14, 1973: 1D.

6 The others were Bob Bailor and Don Hood. All four players had spent time with the Red Wings in 1973. Doug Brown, “Hood Finds Cards, Scoresheet in Apartment – No Weems,” Baltimore Sun, April 5, 1974: B9.

7 Hutto is listed in Baseball-Reference as appearing at every defensive position except center field and shortstop at least once over the course of a 12-season pro career. He was most often used at third base (440 games), catcher (374 games), and first base (249 games).

8 In return for Hutto, the Angels received Dave Leonhard.

9 As of June 2025, only three players from Otterbein had made the majors, and the two others enjoyed more success than McKee. Pitcher Kent Mercker played parts of 18 big-league seasons, winning a World Series ring in 1995. Outfielder Paul O’Neill appeared in 17 seasons, playing on five World Series-winning teams with the Cincinnati Reds and New York Yankees. “Otterbein University (Westerville, OH) Baseball Players,” Baseball-Reference, accessed June 2025, https://www.baseball-reference.com/schools/index.cgi?key_school=abcb754d.

10 Unless otherwise noted, all play-by-play action in this story is taken from A.L. Hardman, “Garland No-Hits Charlies in Opener,” Charleston (West Virginia) Sunday Gazette-Mail, April 21, 1974: 1C, and Larry Bump, “Wings’ Garland Pitches No-Hitter,” Rochester (New York) Democrat and Chronicle, April 21, 1974: 1D.

11 The Rochester game story says: “Garland started a double play to clear La Russa from the basepaths,” but it’s not clear whether Augustine grounded back to Garland, or whether Garland “started a double play” in the sense that he got Augustine to hit into one. The box scores in the Rochester and Charleston newspapers acknowledge that Rochester turned a double play, but do not include specifics on which fielders were involved.

12 Larry Bump, “Opposing Fans Hail Happy Hero,” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, April 21, 1974: 1D.

13 Bump, in “Wings’ Garland Pitches No-Hitter,” specifies that La Russa’s error was throwing, not fielding.

14 Bump, “Opposing Fans Hail Happy Hero.”

15 Bump, “Opposing Fans Hail Happy Hero.”

16 Game accounts do not specify the final three hitters. However, we know that Ott reached on an error to start the eighth, and that Garland retired the next three batters, who were third baseman Art Howe, shortstop Mario Mendoza, and pinch-hitter Jim Campanis in the pitcher’s spot. That means the top of the order – Flowers, La Russa, and Augustine – would have been up in the ninth.

17 Mike Whiteford, “Wings’ Pitcher Deserving,” Charleston Sunday Gazette-Mail, April 21, 1974: 1C.

18 Bump, “Opposing Fans Hail Happy Hero.”

19 Whiteford, “Wings’ Pitcher Deserving.” Hutto got a call-up of his own in September 1975, appearing in four games with the Orioles as a catcher and pinch-hitter. It was his last big-league experience.

20 “Tragedy Forces Hood to Miss Start,” Baltimore Sun, May 27, 1974: C5.

21 Bob Ibach, “For Three Hours a No-Hitter … then Six Minutes of Catastrophe,” Baltimore Evening Sun, July 16, 1974: C5.

22 Jim Castor, “Silver: He Rescued the Red Wings,” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, April 27, 1974: 1B.

23 News stories following Silver’s death said the Wings would wear black armbands, including Jim Castor, “Friends Say Last Good-Bye to Morrie,” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, April 30, 1974: 1D. A review of photos of the 1974 Wings shows that their jerseys had identical stripes on both sleeves with no extra band visible, but that players wore a dark circular patch on their left sleeves. Representative photos showing the patch – and, in some cases, the sleeve stripes – can be seen in the following editions of the Democrat and Chronicle: May 28, 1974: 1D; August 9, 1974: 1D; August 30, 1974: 1A; and September 12, 1974: 1D. Meanwhile, two photos of Red Wings players on April 27, 1974: 1D show no arm patches, suggesting that the team was not wearing them before Silver’s death.

24 Joseph Wancho, “Wayne Garland,” SABR Biography Project, accessed June 2025, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/wayne-garland/.