Maybe Nine No-Hitters Are Just Results of Luck

To date, scientists in the field have tendered the following explanations for the record nine no-hitters dispensed by pitchers in the major leagues this year:

--The ball is smaller.

--Gloves are larger.

--Fences are softer, allowing flyhawks to crash into them and catch balls they would have been unable to catch crashing into hard fences.

--Talent is diluted.

--Spring training was shortened; batters never caught up.

--Barometric pressures have worked against the hitters.

--Official scorers are suspect, changing hits to errors.

--Whopping contracts are tempting hitters to go after bad pitches; one doesn’t get $3 million for walking.

This is a serious matter, especially pertaining to the ball Wade Boggs has assayed as an eighth of an inch smaller.

Whipping out his jeweler’s glass, Tom Lasorda inspects the ball and reports it hasn’t changed.

But that isn’t what he said in 1987 when a record 2,634 home runs were struck. By July 1, Mark McGwire alone had hit 28. George Bell had 27.

Through their spokesman, Sparky Anderson, selected for his Churchillian eloquence, Lasorda, Whitey Herzog and maybe half a dozen other managers announced:

“When certain hitters who are lucky to hit four homers all year have hit 16 by the All-Star break, we are not playing with the same ball as before.”

Mike Schmidt submitted it wasn’t the ball at all. It was the growing incidence of split-finger fastballs.

“When the split-finger doesn’t split, you’ve got a nothing pitch,” Schmidt testified. “The split-finger is making hitters rich.”

Yet Phil Niekro, a once vaunted warrior, now a coach with Atlanta, credits the split-finger for the no-hit epidemic today.

“It’s the pitch of the age,” Phil says. “It fools a lot of batters.”

Informed that Boggs sees the baseball as fractionally smaller this year, Niekro responds:

“When a ball collapses at the plate or travels 95 (m.p.h.), it seems smaller to everyone.”

Major league baseballs have been produced since 1977 by Rawlings, which sends the materials to a factory in Haiti for assemblage.

Told that voodoo has been practiced for centuries in Haiti, baseball scholars tapped the old scalp. Haitians wrapping the balls were giving them the spiritual dipsy-do.

Then as fast as it came, the home run explosion vanished.

“Everyone knew why,” a Rawlings man explained. “We had switched back to the old balls.”

“And there actually was no change in baseballs?”

“Of course not. The formula has been the same ever since we started making them.”

And Rawlings insists that the formula for the balls used in today’s no-hitters is identical to that the year all the home runs were hit.

So what created that rash of homers in ‘87?

“Very likely a passing surge of strength on the part of the hitters,” the Rawlings man answered.

Today, we may be witnessing a passing surge of strength by pitchers. The previous record for no-hitters in a season was seven, posted in 1917 when many prime hitters had entered the service of their government.

So, you ask, if the hitters entered the service, what were the pitchers doing?

The answer: They were throwing no-hitters.

If the Persian Gulf involvement should lead to conscription in America, hitters wish to drop the reminder it is the pitchers’ turn to go.

“You hear all these explanations for no-hitters, but no one mentions luck,” Niekro says. “I threw a no-hitter against San Diego in 1973. My stuff that day was nothing.

“But our second baseman makes a great stop on one play. And, on another, our shortstop flags down a tough grounder. The throw is late. They give the shortstop an error. It should have been ruled a hit. That’s what I mean about luck.”

He reflects a moment on the no-hit phenomenon, then continues:

“Ken Holtzman threw a no-hitter for the Cubs without striking out a batter. If everyone gets wood on the ball, don’t you think a pitcher needs luck? And look at that Andy Hawkins with the Yankees. He throws a no-hitter this year--and loses, 4-0.”

What happened in the Hawkins case was, the ball was so small that day the Yankees couldn’t field it.