August 29, 1980: No-hitter caps nightmarish season for Rocky Mount Pines

It was the best of teams, it was the worst of teams.

On August 29, 1980, the Durham Bulls – the first-place team in the North Division of the Class A Carolina League – met the Rocky Mount Pines, just a few days away from finishing one of the worst seasons in professional baseball history. The independent, cash-strapped, player-short Pines closed the season with a 24-114 record, 59 games out of first place, with a winning percentage of .174.1

It would have been remarkable if the Pines had won: For one thing, they would have kept Durham from clinching a share of the second-half division title. An upset, however, was not in the cards. Instead, 3,075 Durham fans watched pitcher Rick Behenna throw a no-hitter at the woebegone Pines while two of his teammates reached statistical milestones. As Durham celebrated, Rocky Mount swallowed another in a long series of embarrassments.

Durham, an Atlanta Braves farm team, entered the game with a second-half record of 39-28, two games up on the second-place Winston-Salem Red Sox.2 The team was owned by longtime minor- and independent-league owner and commissioner Miles Wolff Jr., in his first season as an owner. Manager Alan Gallagher’s team boasted 11 players who had already appeared in the majors or were on their way there, including several who would soon be familiar to Atlanta fans.3

Outfielder Albert Hall entered the game with 99 steals, far and away the most in the league. He had already broken Carolina League game and season records for thefts.4 Second-year outfielder Brett Butler, one season away from the majors, hit a sizzling .366 with a .513 on-base percentage in 66 games. Nineteen-year-old first baseman Gerald Perry tied for the team lead with 15 home runs and led with 92 RBIs, also scoring his 100th run on August 29. Another team member, catcher Brian Snitker, played only three games for Durham but later became the World Series-winning manager of the parent Atlanta club.5

Behenna was one cog on a pitching staff led by reliever Ike Pettaway and starter Mike Smith, who tied for the team lead with 11 wins. A fourth-round pick by Atlanta out of a Miami high school in June 1978, Behenna was in his third pro season. He struggled at times with Durham, losing seven games in a row at one point,6 and finished with an 8-13 record and 4.15 ERA in 27 games, all starts. He’d taken a no-hitter into the ninth inning against Salem on April 16 but lost it on a single.7 Behenna’s batterymate against Rocky Mount was 24-year-old Steve Stieb, whose younger brother, Dave, later became the longtime ace of the Toronto Blue Jays’ pitching staff.

While Durham players enjoyed the kind of season that ends with champagne, Rocky Mount players endured the kind of season that ends with lawsuits.

Owner Lou Haneles and manager Mal Fichman had planned to partially stock their independent team with players provided by major-league clubs. When that plan fell through, they had to sign free-agent players released by other organizations, as well as players recruited through a baseball school. Two general managers resigned by the end of May, and the outmanned, undertalented Pines played so poorly that Sports Illustrated magazine ran a story on their catastrophic season – listing such lowlights as an 18-game losing streak, a home game with 44 fans, and separate points where Haneles and the players each considered quitting.8 At season’s end, Haneles filed unsuccessful antitrust lawsuits against, among others, Commissioner of Baseball Bowie Kuhn, the Carolina League, and league President Jim Mills.9

A few of the Pines pushed through the team’s problems and had decent seasons. First baseman Steven Swain led the team in home runs (7) and RBIs (45) while hitting .251. Starting pitcher William Baltz, a former Expos and Blue Jays farmhand, led the team with eight wins against 13 losses, posting a respectable 3.40 ERA and completing nine of his 23 starts, including a shutout. While reliever Michael Brown’s numbers were less impressive –3-9/4.07, with 113 walks in 157 innings – he shouldered a heavy load, appearing in a league-leading 78 games.

None of the Pines played in the majors, though catcher Joe Breeden coached with the Marlins and Blue Jays for six seasons between 1995 and 2004. Breeden played out of position on August 29, starting in left field because the team was down to eight nonpitchers as a result of injuries. While the Bulls employed a designated hitter, Rocky Mount was forced to send its pitchers to the plate because it had no position players to spare, and the team’s trainer reportedly dressed as an emergency backup.10 (Two days later, in the season’s final game, Durham Herald sportswriter Ron Morris – possessor of what he called “a throwing arm to match Cheryl Ladd’s” – signed a contract with the Pines and made his only pro appearance as a pinch-hitter and right fielder.11)

The starter on August 29 was lefty Bob Bresnen, a former Detroit Tigers farmhand who’d graduated from Archbishop Moeller High School in Cincinnati – the school that produced Hall of Famers Barry Larkin and Ken Griffey Jr. For the full season, Bresnen posted a record of 1-7 with a 4.21 ERA in 12 games, including nine starts. Control was a challenge: Bresnen walked 45 hitters against 31 strikeouts, also throwing 12 wild pitches and hitting six batters.

Durham began to run away with the game in the first inning. Leadoff hitter Hall drew a walk, then stole second on Bresnen’s third pitch to second baseman Kevin Rigby. Rocky Mount catcher Ray Jablonski couldn’t get a handle on the ball, and Hall cruised comfortably into second with his 100th stolen base of the year. The game paused while his teammates poured onto the field and fans rose in a standing ovation.12

Butler drove in Hall with a single one out later, and Perry singled in Butler to give Durham a 2-0 first-inning lead.13 Durham doubled its lead in the second inning on a walk by third baseman Johnny Lee, singles by Hall and Rigby, and a run-scoring error by Pines second baseman Joe McCann, one of 28 miscues for him that season.14 Meanwhile, Behenna dominated Rocky Mount in the early going, giving up nothing close to a hit in the first four frames.15

The Bulls chased Bresnen before he could retire anyone in the fifth, scoring two more runs for a 6-0 lead.16 Lefty reliever Michael Morgal pitched the rest of the way for Rocky Mount. He allowed single runs in the sixth and eighth innings to bring Durham to an 8-0 advantage. The final run scored on the fifth homer of the year by Durham right fielder Ronnie Rudd, one of five Bulls with multiple hits.17

The next night, Morgal allowed an extra-inning, game-winning hit to Butler. Then, in the season-closing game on August 31, he gave up three hits and two runs in the eighth inning.18 The final pitcher in Pines history, Morgal left pro baseball after the 1980 season.

Breeden came the closest to breaking Behenna’s no-no. In the sixth inning, he smoked a low line drive to shortstop, where Miguel Sosa made a “spectacular” backhand catch.19 Going into the ninth, the Pines had hit only two balls to the outfield. Behenna had walked two batters and struck out seven. Lee and Rigby had also made errors behind him.

Second baseman McCann began the ninth with a looper to the outfield that Butler tracked down for the first out. Right fielder Gary Cicatiello followed with a routine fly to Butler for the second out. Third baseman Ed Connors, down to his last strike, worked Behenna for a base on balls. That brought up center fielder John Lohse, who’d played two seasons in the Philadelphia Phillies organization. On a 2-and-1 count, Lohse hit a routine grounder to Sosa, who flipped to Rigby covering second base to seal the 2-hour 5-minute no-hitter.

Behenna and Stieb embraced while their teammates and the fans erupted, just as they had for Hall earlier in the game. Afterward, Behenna credited his teammates’ glovework: “That was a hell of a play by Sosa. Rigby made a couple of good plays … then Butler. They wanted it as much as I did.”20

After two more minor-league seasons, Behenna made his major-league debut in April 1983. Success proved elusive on the big-league level, as he compiled a 3-10 record in 26 games across three seasons. Basestealing threat Hall never became a big-league regular in a nine-season career. Faring better were Butler, who played 17 seasons, and Perry, who played 13; each made a single All-Star team.

Pines manager Fichman went on to the majors too, in a way. The man dubbed “Mal Function” by the Rocky Mount newspaper managed 12 more seasons in minor and independent leagues, then served as an independent-league scout for the San Diego Padres, Philadelphia Phillies, and Arizona Diamondbacks.21

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Bill Marston and copy-edited by Len Levin.

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 provides box scores of minor-league games, but the August 30, 1980, edition of the Durham (North Carolina) Morning Herald published a box score.

Image of 1981 TCMA Durham Bulls card #15 downloaded from the Trading Card Database.

Notes

1 The Pines also tied a game.

2 Carolina League second-half standings as published in the Durham (North Carolina) Morning Herald, August 29, 1980: 2B.

3 This list includes Gallagher himself, who appeared in seven games.

4 Ron Morris, “Hall Happy Quest Over,” Durham (North Carolina) Morning Herald, August 30, 1980: 2B.

5 Still another Bull, pitcher Dom Chiti, missed the majors as a player. But as of 2024, he had spent 12 seasons as a big-league coach between 1991 and 2023.

6 Ron Morris, “Behenna No-Hits Rocky Mount,” Durham Morning Herald, August 30, 1980: 2B.

7 “Behenna No-Hits Rocky Mount.”

8 E.M. Swift, “It’s Been Some Rocky Year,” Sports Illustrated, September 1, 1980: 58, https://vault.si.com/vault/1980/09/01/its-been-some-rocky-year-the-spunky-rocky-mount-nc-pines-are-easily-the-worst-team-in-organized-ball-and-maybe-the-worst-in-history.

9 The summary of the Pines’ problems is condensed from a variety of sources, including Associated Press, “Rocky Mount Franchise Likely Shifting to Wilson,” Durham Morning Herald, December 24, 1980: 3B; Joe Tiede, “CL Locates New Owner,” Raleigh (North Carolina) News & Observer, December 24, 1980: 17; “1980 a Big Year in Nash County Sports,” Nashville (North Carolina) Graphic, December 30, 1980: 6; and Al Myatt, “Unpaid Bills a Lever for Pines Owner Haneles,” Rocky Mount Telegram, September 10, 1980: 29. The last of these stories includes an excruciatingly detailed presentation of Haneles and Fichman’s comments on various of the Pines’ shortcomings and missteps.

10 Al Featherston, “Behenna No-Hits (Who Else?) Pines,” Durham (North Carolina) Sun, August 30, 1980: 8A. In October 1980, the Rocky Mount (North Carolina) Telegram also referenced trainer Bob Bill being “pressed into action.” Box scores for the season’s final few games indicate that Bill did not play.

11 Ron Morris, “Pro Baseball Debut Is One for the Book,” Durham Morning Herald, September 7, 1980: 5B. Ladd, an actress and singer, was well-known at the time as a star of the network TV show Charlie’s Angels.

12 Featherston.

13 Action extrapolated from the box score and Featherston. The story says Butler and Perry had first-inning RBI singles. The first-inning batters who came between them, Rigby and shortstop Miguel Sosa, are not credited with runs scored – so Butler must have driven in Hall, and Perry must have driven in Butler.

14 Featherston.

15 Morris, “Behenna No-Hits Rocky Mount.”

16 Extrapolated from the box score. Bresnen pitched only four innings, but was saddled with six runs allowed, five earned. That means the two runs that scored in the fifth inning must have been charged to him, since the Bulls had scored only four runs through the first four innings. Featherston reported that Bresnen had a plane to catch and would have been removed from the game early anyway.

17 “Behenna No-Hits Rocky Mount.”

18 “Pines Finish With Losses,” Rocky Mount Telegram, September 1, 1980: 6.

19 This description, and the next paragraph’s description of ninth-inning action, are based on both “Behenna No-Hits Rocky Mount” and Featherston. The Rocky Mount newspaper ran only a brief item on the game that added little to the accounts from Durham.

20 “Behenna No-Hits Rocky Mount.”

21 “Mal Fichman,” Baseball-Reference BR Bullpen, accessed March 25, 2024, https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Mal_Fichman.