The Top 6 No-Hitters of 2010
By Justin Klugh
2010 has been a year of pitching so good, it confuses you. Sure, it’s scary that guys like Tim Lincecum, Adam Wainwright, and Stephen Strasburg even exist, but what happens when the snotty upstarts with absolutely no history of proven success step in and hurl like the big dogs? Does it cheapen the accomplishment for those who aren’t stepping out of the shadows to do it? Or does it give inspiration to those dwelling in the back end of their rotations? […]
I’ll tell you what happens. Tim Kurkjian goes to work with a baseball boner. But, like some boners, the stellar pitching performances have been alarming, strangely timed, or just plain inappropriate.
“Holy cow. You know that A’s pitcher who was yelling at A-Rod?” my roommate yelled from the living room.
“Yeah,” I replied, assuming he was going to say something like, “He killed his wife.”
“He just threw a perfect game.”
Dallas Braden started 2010 off with a pretty big exclamation point: A perfect game. This was followed by several understandable question marks, namely, “Who the hell is Dallas Braden?”
Opening the door for literally anyone to make baseball history, Braden’s perfection came at the beginning of the season, and it was thrown by a guy that nobody knows, cares about, and who is a pretty terrible Major League pitcher. It turned the world upside down, and not in a good way. Braden’s spotlight-kidnapping during his one-way argument with Alex Rodriguez got him little more than a completely barren sketch on David Letterman.
Now, he’s 6-7 with a 3.63 ERA in 18 games. Meh. He’s faded rapidly into obscurity, and no, I’m not saying because he lacks name recognition, he doesn’t deserve the success. I’m saying he lacks the talent. I’m saying a lot of this was luck. It had to be. Apparently Braden’s only kegendary after a good bit of screaming.
Remember when Phillies benchling Eric Bruntlett had an unassisted triple play last year, and they asked to put his jersey from that day in the Hall of Fame? I guess everybody deserves a peak in the window.
NO-NO RATING: 2/10
Now, this… this makes sense.
I wrote on Opening Day that Roy was a “priest” of the game, in that his dedication, talent, and tunnel vision focus on the game of baseball (and the results thereof) more than earns him a place in history. This, however, makes Roy in the minority when it comes to perfect games and no-hitters this year.
Everybody knew that eventually Roy Halladay was going to toss a perfect game, just like everybody knows Cliff Lee fights bears with a spoon during the offseason. Roy is a systematic batter-killing machine; he is out there calculating, calibrating, and throwing nonstop. And he’s fast. Have you ever actually sat there and watched him work for a few innings? By the time he gets the ball back from his catcher he’s already halfway through his wind-up.
You could argue my Phillies bias might be showing. But Roy’s got the history to prove this was coming, and the future to validate its existence.
NO-NO RATING: 10/10
Compared to the previous two guys, Edwin falls somewhere in the middle.
He’s got talent, but it wasn’t a perfect game… not by a longshot. It took him 149 pitches, putting him squarely in the “A.J. Burnett” school of no-hitting, which, yeah, is still historical, but… it may be saying more about the lineup he faced than the pitching he put together when the opposition had 149 chances to hit the ball rather than the tighter pitch count one normally sees in this type of performance.
However, it did come against the Tampa Bay Rays, a heady lineup with a ferocious back swing; that had already been perfect game-d by Dallas Braden. For some reason, the Rays fell victim to this kind of behavior twice, and are still a dangerous team to pitch against, so Jackson gets props for that.
Here’s B.J. Upton, to let you know the Rays didn’t even realize the predicament until the 7th inning.
NO-NO RATING: 5/10
I don’t care that he’s in the middle of a downward slide right now; if you’re standing at the plate in a different team’s uniform with a bat, the dude hates you. He hates you with baseball.
With the season Jimenez is having, his no-hitter was just a blip on the radar. As consistently well as he was throwing, a no-hitter was bound to just sort of happen. Eventually, he’d throw nine innings in a row in the same game of hitless baseball. You don’t go 15-2 without this sort of thing being a logical conclusion.
“Absolutely filthy,” a Rockies announcer called one of his pitches. And that was a curious piece about this particular gem: Jimenez didn’t really start striking people out until the 6th inning. There were a population of grounders and pop-ups for the majority of the game’s first half, as Jimenez worked to just get outs and throw less pitches. He didn’t lean on himself too heavily, he used his defense, he used his team, and they—especially Dexter Fowler—came through.
This no-hitter was a team effort, making it all the more likable.
NO-NO RATING: 8/10
Armando gets bonus points for not tearing Jim Joyce’s throat out with his teeth; why don’t we start with that. Don’t get me wrong, nobody’s trying to take away the perfect game, except you know, the guy who did exactly that, but a perfect game is a perfect game because it is flawless. Apparently, that includes the flaws outside of the guy who is throwing it. We all know Jason Donald was out. But… will history?
Yes.
Then again, it was a bit over a month later that Detroit was cramming Armando back down into their farm system. Now, he’s 3-3 with a 4.43 ERA, 18 BB, 33 K’s. Geh.
“Why is he safe?” the Tigers announcer kept asking as the gutwrenching replay ran over and over again. If nothing else, this not-perfect-game could become historical for another reason, in the vein of instant replay in baseball.
NO-NO RATING: N/A
*Yawn* Oh, look, another no-hitter.
I’m going to bed.
Throwing the first no-hitter “in Tampa Bay Rays history” isn’t a really impressive stat, considering the team’s only existed since 1998. And if you consider the “Rays” a different team than the “Devil Rays,” they’ve only been around since 2008. So if you were trying to impress me, Matt Garza, you’ve failed.
Oh, right. The no-hitter. Yeah, that is impressive—he faced 27 hitters, and the only reason he’s not sitting on as high an echelon as Halladay and—*eye roll*—Braden is because he accidentally threw four balls to Brennan Boesch. Who was then thrown out on a double play.
Garza’s the real deal. He’s pitched in the World Series. He was the 2008 ALCS MVP. He even threw a one-hitter against the Marlins two years ago. Being the latest in a series of lockdown pitching from guys who were and weren’t necessarily warranted sourcesfor such a feat, maybe some of the wonder and awe exhibited by this no-hitter is lost outside of the Rays fanbase (A whole 17,000 made it out to Tropicana Field that night!).
Which is a shame, because the guy saw the minimum 27 batters at a point when the Rays, until now, had only been on the wrong side of these this season, and needed a reminder that they could hand out dominance as well as receive it.
NO-NO RATING: 9/10
While there’s no one here who doesn’t deserve applause for their efforts, there are certainly some who deserved it more than others. As this kind of thing becomes more commonplace, part of the thrill is subtracted. Guys like Braden and Galarraga, who’s success, while awesome, had analysts scratching their heads (sort of like a blogger who felt the need to judge others’ perfection), seem to land more on the “fluke” side.
Or maybe 2010 is just further proof that baseball doesn’t have to make any god damn sense, ever, if it doesn’t want to. That’s… probably why we keep watching.