Introduction: No-Hitters (2017)

Pitching a no-hitter is a dream for every major-league pitcher — once they have already realized their first dream, which is to make it to the big leagues in the first place.

Over the course of nearly 150 years of major-league baseball, and thousands upon thousands of games played, fewer than 300 pitchers have thrown an official no-hitter. The figure through the 2016 season is maybe 294 or 295 or so, depending on your definitions. And if you include a handful of no-hitters that were deemed not to be no-hitters, the figure climbs to a little over 300.

The number of games played, using Retrosheet standards for what constitutes a major-league game and counting forfeits (both played and unplayed) is 213,307 games through the end of the 2016 season.1

If we go by 295 no-hitters, that’s more or less one no-hitter every 723 games, or 0.0013829. It’s a rare thing.

Fewer than half the pitchers in the National Baseball Hall of Fame have thrown a no-hitter. Many of the biggest names in pitching have never done it. We won’t mention names here, but chances are that our average reader can easily name a few.

Some pitchers have pitched more than one. It’s just the way things are in baseball.

About a year or so after work for this book got underway, there appeared a book we would like to highly recommend: Baseball’s No-Hit Wonders, by Dirk Lammers. It’s a really fat book, and it takes on the story of the no-hitter, looking at it from various perspectives and with a lot of good humor. We are pleased that Dirk and his publisher at Unbridled Books have granted us permission to include his chapter on Negro League no-hitters here. There are a lot of angles from which he looks at no-hitters and, again, we highly recommend the book.

This SABR Digital Library book focuses on pitchers who threw no-hitters and the no-hitters they threw. Naturally, we couldn’t present biographies of everyone who ever threw a no-hitter nor could we present Games Project accounts of all of them. That wasn’t our goal. What we wanted to do is to put together a book that encouraged SABR biographers to add another 30 or 40 bios to SABR’s BioProject and a similar number of games to the Games Project. Assembling the books we do is a labor of love meant to stimulate research and build up SABR’s body of work.

We wanted the book to touch on a variety of matters, and we wanted to have it span the decades so that there was some representation of the earlier eras of baseball right up to more recent years. Why isn’t Cy Young in the book? His bio was already written, and we were trying to stimulate new research so we selected some other people instead. We tried to hit certain themes — first no-hitter in each league; first no-hitter thrown at 60 feet 6 inches; first in which the losing team scored a run; first pitcher to debut with a no-hitter; first extra-inning no-hitter; etc. You’ll find those all in here and maybe a surprise or two as well.

Red Sox fan BILL NOWLIN has never seen the Red Sox held hitless but has been fortunate to see Red Sox pitchers throw four no-hitters — Dave Morehead, Derek Lowe, Jon Lester, and Devern Hansack.* He has written or edited more than 60 books, mostly about baseball, and has served on SABR’s Board of Directors since 2004. He’s also in the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame.

 

Notes

1 Email from Tom Ruane, March 15, 2017.