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.

 

The Homer Bailey No-Hitter

One of baseball's great cliches is that every time you go to a ball game, you might see something that you have never seen before, and tonight that was fulfilled as Marilyn and I watched the Reds' Homer Bailey throw a no-hitter against the Pirates.  There you see the evidence above - my score sheet and game ticket.  I saw my first Pirate game in 1959, and now, 53 years later, I have for the very first time witnessed a no-hitter.

Funny thing is that after the way this Pirates season has been concluding, and after some dicey looking skies this afternoon, it would not have taken a whole lot to make me skip going to this ball game tonight.  Also, I was strongly considering not bothering to take a score sheet along, but at the last minute I thought, what the hell, score the game.

I never consider the possibility of a no-hitter until the pitcher gets through the fourth inning, so when the Bucs went down 1-2-3 in the fourth, I began thinking of what might happen.  And as 1-2-3 inning followed 1-2-3 inning (Bailey only faced 28 batters tonight)  the tension, in my mind, anyway, began to mount.  I say "in my mind" because I never had the sense that the crowd was aware of what was taking place, and I was astonished to see people actually leaving the ball park in the seventh and eighth innings.

The fact that the score was only 1-0 made the crowd still root for a Pirate rally in the ninth, especially after the "hoist the colors" clip on the scoreboard before the inning began, and no doubt lessened the crowd's eagerness for Bailey to pull it off.  I wonder how the crowd would have been if the score was, say 7-0?  Anyway, once pinch hitter Michael McHenry flied to left for the second out leaving Alex Presley as the Bucs' last hope, I think at that point, the crowd began rooting for Bailey.  When Presley hit his pop up that second baseman Brandon Phillips would catch, I watched Bailey on the mound raise his arms, and it was neat to see the Reds' players, dugout, and bullpen mob him on the mound.  The PNC crowd also gave Bailey an appropriate tribute of cheers and applause when it was over, which was nice.

Lost in all of this was that this was that A.J. Burnett pitched a terrific game himself, one run in eight innings, in a losing effort, and that this was the Pirates 81st loss, so there will be no winning season in 2012.

Two months ago, we were looking at the schedule and thinking how important and dynamic this series with the Reds might be.  Well, it didn't turn out that way, but I am sure glad that I was in attendance tonight anyway.