On a normal Friday night in May, I would be watching the Red Sox. However, last night my roomie Christopher Kain and I saw Rodriguez in concert.
Darvish was actually working on a perfect game into the seventh, but Ortiz would reach base when the ball landed between Rangers rightfielder Alex Rios and rookie second baseman Rougned Odor.
Rios was charged with an error even though he didn’t touch the ball. On the MLB Network, Harold Reynolds went ballistic, said it was the worst umpiring call since Don Deckinger in Game 6 of the 1985 World Series and Jim Joyce’s botched call of would have been Armando Galarraga’s perfect game in 2010. But it wasn’t a question of whether Ortiz was out or safe. Umpires don’t determine whether a player is credited with a hit or not. Reynolds anger ought to have been directed to the official scorer. There’s no doubt Darvish got the benefit of the doubt with the hometown scorer.
But what I kept thinking about wasn’t if Darvish’s no-no should have ended earlier, but rather how he has a new neighbor in
Dave Stieb. Of course,
I am not the first to have made this observation. But if you grew up in Canada in the 1980s and followed the Toronto Blue Jays, Stieb was arguably its best known member. His 140 victories in the 1980s ranked him second only to Jack Morris who had 162 while wearing a Detroit Tigers uniform.
Stieb also had a propensity for being nearly unhittable. Four times, Stieb took a no-hitter into the ninth inning only to be denied. On three of those occasions, Stieb came within an out of earning a no-hitter. Two of them were in consecutive stars and the other was very nearly a perfect game.
Stieb’s first flirtation took place on August 24, 1985 against the Chicago White Sox
when Rudy Law led off the ninth with a home run. In that game, Stieb was pitching against future Hall of Famer Tom Seaver. Three years later, Stieb came within an out of baseball immortality in consecutive starts against the Cleveland Indians and the Baltimore Orioles. But
Julio Franco and
Jim Traber would deny him with singles twice in less than a week.
Stieb would finally get his no-hitter the following year when he returned to Cleveland on September 2nd. The relief on Stieb’s face is visible when he gets Indians second baseman Jerry Browne to fly out to right fielder Junior Felix to end the game.
As for Darvish, he was dominant striking out 12 batters en route to a convincing 8-0 victory for the Rangers.
In seven starts in 2014, Darvish is 3-1 with a 2.33 ERA. He has fanned 54 batters while walking only 13 in 46 1/3 innings pitched. Like Stieb, this won’t be his last chance at throwing a no-hitter.
