Hill: SABR member McGill searching for missing Minor League no-hitters
From SABR member Benjamin Hill at MiLB.com on February 24, 2016, on SABR member Chuck McGill:
Dating back to the 1880 season, there have been more than 4,200 no-hit games pitched in the Minor Leagues. Or, to put it more accurately, there have been more than 4,200 no hit-games that we know about.
Chuck McGill is on a quest to find them all.
For the past six years, McGill, a Vermont resident who works for the National Weather Service, has been on an Internet-based hunt for previously undocumented no-hitters. It’s an often tedious but occasionally thrilling task, and his hard work has paid off. Using a variety of archival newspaper websites, McGill has scoured untold thousands of box scores en route to finding more than 500 Minor League no-hitters that, until his intervention, had been lost to the annals of time. These newly discovered no-nos are added to his publicly shared “Minor League No Hitters” Google spreadsheet, which includes copious information on thousands of such ballgames.
Some of his McGill’s favorite findings include a 1908 game in the Three-I League in which both pitchers threw no-hitters, as well as a similar occurrence in a 1910 Northern State of Indiana League game. He also found three undocumented no-hitters authored by turn-of-the-20th Century southpaw Harry Kane, which brought Kane’s career total to five (tying him with fellow Deadball Era hurler Walter Justis for the most in Minor League history).
From a baseball history standpoint, this is clearly a worthwhile pursuit. But how does one become involved in such an off-the-beaten-path endeavor?
“I was looking for something to focus on, some sort of research project,” McGill said. “I had rejoined SABR [the Society for American Baseball Research] in 2010 and was trying to figure out something to do that hadn’t been done before. The Major Leagues have been covered in any way you can cover them, there’s not a whole lot there.”
Read the full article here: http://www.milb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20160224&content_id=165244922&fext=.jsp&vkey=news_milb&sid=milb
Originally published: February 24, 2016. Last Updated: February 24, 2016.