I relished the text I sent out to my hardcore foursome in the eighth inning on Friday, April 29, 2022. “Mets game on if possible. You’ve been alerted.” No other words were needed. All tuned in. The Mets got their second no-no. No lives were ruined in the attempt of watching a potential Mets no-hitter.
There was a time, long ago, when some of these same obsessed friends and I would freeze when a potential Mets no-hitter went beyond the sixth inning. Then you were supposed to hop into your car and drive to Shea Stadium, without tickets, with no word to loved ones as to where you’d gone, and be there in person when the impossible happened. Fortunately for me, it never came up. I never had to explain why I went to wash my hands and didn’t come back for three hours.
I was, however, actually sitting at Shea Stadium on June 9, 1998, when Rick Reed took a no-hitter into the seventh. Wade Boggs broke it up with a two-out double in the first game ever between the Mets and the expansion Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Reed completed the three-hitter, throwing 121 pitches.
The last part is the rub. Managers like Bobby Valentine were well aware of pitch counts in the 1990s, but they certainly were not married to them. In MLB in ’98, there were 302 complete games and 101 route-going shutouts. Last year there were 50 complete games and 29 complete-game shutouts—and I was surprised to see that many. The world is changing, baseball along with everything else. As lofty as those 1998 pitching totals were, go back a quarter century before that. With fewer teams and thus fewer opportunities in 1973, with the advent of the DH and lots of other interesting stuff, there were 1,061 complete games and 236 CG SHOs.
So what does that have to do with a combined no-hitter by the Mets? Well, some say that a five-man no-hitter is not as impressive as the one-man variety—and maybe it isn’t. Johan Santana’s 2012 gem also included a ball that clearly landed fair, but that was before instant replay was fully adopted. And while Santana went the distance in a star-spangled night, the reality is that he was never the same after the 134-pitch effort against the defending world champion Cardinals to end the Mets’ 50-year no-hit drought, at the time the longest any team had gone before finally tossing a no-no (the Padres had even more staying power before finally getting their first no-hitter last year). Johan’s previous outing before the no-hitter, a complete-game shutout against San Diego at Citi Field, was a much cleaner affair. He allowed four Padres hits and threw just 96 pitches, allowing fewer baserunners than he did in the no-hitter (when he walked five Cardinals).
Johan got the Mets’ monkey off their backs, but he was never quite the same. Santana went 3-6 with an 8.27 ERA in what were the final 10 starts of his career. He shut it down in August, never to fully ramp it up again. Johan attempted multiple comebacks, but he did not pitch again after 2012. I know Mets manager Terry Collins was worried about what might happen to Santana that night, and I do not blame him or any of us who so wanted Johan to finish it.
I love the days of the four-digit complete games in the big leagues, of the swash-buckling stud pitchers going toe to toe, of starters going 10, 12, 14 innings to get a win for their team. I appreciate that generational pitchers like Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan had body parts that wore out from age—finally—instead of from overuse. Just like Tom never expected to approach Cy Young’s career mark of 511 wins—he was exactly 200 short—maybe we too should adapt. Starting with me. Even if I don’t like it. A No-Han is more storybook, but I like it better when the story has a happy ending for the guy who made it happen.