Schilling Joins the Almost No-Hitter Club
When I get a call from my father saying to me "Are you watching the game? You should be WATCHING the GAME right now.", I know he can only mean one thing. Someone is throwing a possible no-no, but he can't mention it for superstitious fear of cosmic intervention. Such was the case yesterday when Curt Schilling took the mound yesterday in hopes of achieving a different but equally uncommon task (recently, at least): snapping a Red Sox losing streak.
Schilling won the game, and almost pitched his first career no-hitter as he went 2 outs into the 9th before Shannon Stewart smacked a first pitch fastball into right field for a single. There are lots of articles out there covering this in much more detail than I, complete with video highlights and play-by-play breakdowns and recaps of the game, so no more about that.
What I would like to note, however, is that with his performance yesterday, Schilling became the fourth Red Sox pitcher since 1900 to allow a hit for the first time in a game with 2 out in the 9th. According to "Lost in the Ninth" (a pretty impressive website about...wait for it...losing no hitters and perfect games in the ninth inning), the four instances are as follows, with date, pitcher, team, opposing team, and opposing player who got a hit (all singles except for Scott):
- 6/13/1933—Whit Wyatt, Boston vs. St. Louis, Tedd Gullic
- 4/14/1967—Billy Rohr, Boston at New York, Elston Howard
- 7/2/1975—Rick Wise, Boston at Milwaukee, George Scott (HR)
- 6/7/2007—Curt Schilling, Boston at Oakland, Shannon Stewart
The Billy Rohr game is an integral part of Red Sox lore these days, especially since this year marks the 40th anniversary of the "Impossible Dream" season of 1967. This was a game immortalized by Ken Coleman's call of a Carl Yastrzemski catch to preserve the no-hitter for Rohr in his first major league start...against the Yankees in Yankee Stadium, no less. I've included a segment of the famous "Impossible Dream" record below that talks about that game and includes the now infamous "he dives and makes a tre-MEN-dous catch". (For more clips from the album, check out fleetwoodsounds.com.)
Even our own beloved Jerry Remy once broke up a no-hitter with 2 outs in the 9th, though not with the Sox. On May 26, 1976, while playing for the then-California Angels, he came up to the plate in a scoreless game to face Ken Brett of the Chicago White Sox and smacked a single to break up the no-no. The Angels went on to lose a heartbreaker, 1-0 in 11 innings.
When thinking of no-hitters broken up with 2 outs in the 9th inning, one game sticks out in my mind even more strongly than the Billy Rohr game. That game took place on September 2, 2001, and it was Red Sox-Yankees at Fenway. I had gone out of my way to get some box seats for the game, as I wanted my girlfriend at the time to come to a game with me and she would settle for nothing less (she also pretended to be a Yankee fan to irk me, sign #1 she wasn't right for me).
Come time to leave, all of a sudden she doesn't want to go. I was beside myself, and though I tried all I could to get her to go, her resistance continued to equal the strength of my attempts. Eventually, she won and we both stayed at her place. After a couple of hours she was fast asleep (arg), I turned on the TV to check in on the game, only to see that it was the 9th inning and Mike Mussina was pitching a perfect game. A PERFECT GAME! Bearing witness to an event so rare in baseball would have superseded the fact that it was being done to the Red Sox, and for maybe the second time in my life, I was in a state of shock. All I could do was look at the TV, then over at the sleeping girlfriend, then back to the TV, over and over again, shaking my head back and forth. Ridiculous.
This story has a happy ending, though, as Crazy Carl Everett stepped up to pinch hit with one out to go, and with 2 strikes (1 strike away, Moose) got a single to break up the perfect game. The fans at Fenway became riotous, and I couldn't help but applaud and belt out my own shout of approval, waking up my girlfriend and anyone else in the immediate vicinity. Too bad...
In case you didn't know already, let this be even more evidence that TLM (who by the way shares Red Sox season tickets with me) is the best girlfriend ever.
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