What A Day At The Ballpark!

One of the great baseball cliches of all time is that "Every time you go to a ball game, you might see something that you've never seen before."  Such was the case yesterday  when old pal Bill Tarrant and I and 10,557 other paying customers ambled over to PNC Park to watch the Pirates play the  Cincy Reds.  Surely a ball game between two of the worst teams in the National League would produce nothing but ennui, but, hey, it would be chance for two old friends to catch up and bullshit with each other for a couple of hours.

Predictably, the Pirates lineup struggled with Reds hotshot 21 year old prime prospect pitcher Hunter Greene, who was throwing a lot of pitches, albeit many of them at 100 mph.  At the same time, Pirates journeyman hurler Jose Quintana was not doing bad either, and neither team had managed to put a run across the plate.

After the fourth inning, you took note of the fact that Greene had yet to surrender a hit to the Pirates.  I don't think that there is anything in all of sports that builds up drama and tension like the inning by inning progress of a pitcher working on a no-hitter, and that was certainly the case yesterday as Greene completely stymied the Pirate bats.   As the innings piled up, there were two questions: (1) Would the Pirates ever manage to get a hit against Greene, and (2) given how the game is played today, would Reds manager David Bell leave his team's prized pitching prospect in the game as the pitch count kept climbing into the 80's, 90's, and finally topping 100 in the eighth inning.

Well, by now you know what happened.   Greene came out to pitch the eighth where he would be facing the lower half of the Pirates lineup, hardly a Murderers' Row.  After retiring the first batter, he walked two batters, and Bell went to the bullpen.  After another walk loaded the bases, Ke'Bryan Hayes hits a slow grounder to second, which was bobbled ever so slightly on the throw to the short stop for the second out, and Hayes beat out the throw to first.  No double play, and the run scores on a fielder's choice.  Bucs lead 1-0 and still haven't recorded a hit.  David Bednar comes out of the Pirates pen to retire the Reds in order in the ninth.  The Pirates win the game while the Reds throw an no-hitter.

So, yeah, we went to the ball park yesterday and saw something that we had never seen before.  In fact, we saw something that, relatively speaking, very few people have ever seen.  Winning a game while being no-hit by the opposition is extremely rare.  Rarer than a perfect game.  Rarer than an unassisted triple play. Yesterday's game was only the sixth time in the Modern Era history of the game that this has been done.  The last time it happened was in 2008.

The beauty of baseball is that an insignificant game between two pretty bad teams still has the possibility of producing an amazing experience.  I'm glad that we were there for it.