ANALYSIS : No Hits--and a Lot More

The little things surprised Jim Abbott Sunday. There was a newspaper photographer in the lobby of his Upper East Side apartment when he left for work. There were Western Union telegrams stacked in his locker, some sent by disabled children who are his friends. His teammates autographed the pitching rubber from Saturday’s game and gave it to him. Dave Righetti called from St. Louis, where his San Francisco Giants are playing, to tell him of the special significance of pitching a no-hitter as a Yankee, as Righetti had 10 years ago. Mark Langston sent a bottle of Dom Perignon to the clubhouse.

“It seems like I’m now going to go through a whole new set of experiences,” Abbott said, and he didn’t appear to mind.

Attention is something he knows all about. He is the man without a right hand. As a major league pitcher, he has been a novelty and an inspiration; a productive, credible player, but one who had not accomplished anything of grandeur.

Until, in the middle of a pennant race, on a dark, rainy Saturday afternoon in the Bronx, wearing the pinstripes in Yankee Stadium, he threw a no-hitter against the Cleveland Indians.

Even a man such as Abbott, who thought he had lived through everything there was to live through on a baseball diamond, was stunned.

“I never expected this to happen,” he said to the endless stream of reporters coming by in the clubhouse before Sunday’s game. “The fact that it happened in a pennant race makes it even better.”

It was a challenge to put what had happened in perspective, Abbott knew. He came into the game with a 9-11 record and a 4.31 earned run average. The previous time he pitched, in Cleveland six days earlier, he had given up seven runs on 10 hits in 3 2-3 innings. Twice this season, he had gone more than a month without winning, but he also held the Chicago White Sox hitless through 7 1/3 innings in a game May 29 before Bo Jackson singled.

On his 1993 ledger, the bad outweighed the good. He had come to the Yankees in an offseason trade, and was so troubled by his performance this year he couldn’t sleep, often talking to his wife into the early morning hours.

So, as a baseball man, he was quite naturally thrilled to do what every pitcher dreams of doing -- and pulling it off in September, when it matters most.

This is the baseball side of the story. Sunday, as Abbott sat passively in the dugout watching another Yankees victory, no one wanted to forget what he had done -- and no one much cared that he had done it with just one hand. Replays on the big screen relived Wade Boggs’s diving stop of what looked like a certain hit in the seventh; the final putout on the last of 17 grounders Abbott coaxed from the Indians; Abbott’s uniform-tugging insistence that his catcher Matt Nokes join him for a curtain call outside the dugout.

The fans cheered it all as if it were live, unwilling to let go. They were so thrilled and so cheerful that you wondered if you really were in New York. It seemed more like Mayberry.

Take Abbott’s feelings for Nokes. Perhaps fans have become so sick and tired of baseball superstars and their egomaniacal displays that they just melted when they saw someone actually share credit in a moment of glory. New Yorkers admitted to getting goose bumps when they watched Abbott, who had been waving to the crowd, reach into the dugout, grab hold of Nokes’s shirt and pull him out for a hug and a bow.

“He deserved to be out there as much as I did,” Abbott said.

More proof of how Abbott touched Yankees fans came whenever Cleveland’s leadoff hitter, Kenny Lofton, came to the plate Sunday. The fans were all over him; booing, yelling, protecting their man, Jim Abbott.

Leading off the ninth inning Saturday, Lofton bunted. The ball went foul, and on the next pitch he swung away and grounded weakly to second. The attempted bunt was a matter of strategy on the Indians’ part; Lofton is a very quick guy, and Abbott needs a split second to move his glove from the stub on his right arm to his left hand to field a ball, then take the glove off to throw to first. In that amount of time, Lofton could have ruined the no-hitter.

But the Yankees -- and their fans -- didn’t like what Lofton did.

“I thought it was unusual,” Nokes said, unable to disguise his contempt for Lofton.

“I’d rather not talk about it,” Abbott said. “It wasn’t a hit, so it turned out okay.”

This is where the story turns. Abbott, the baseball player, becomes Abbott, the man who has lived all his 25 years with a disability. He didn’t have to make even one play in the field Saturday. If he had to, he probably would have gotten the out, because he usually does. Growing up in Michigan, he spent his summer days firing a ball at a wall 50 feet away so it would come back to him quickly and force him to field it.

But, to the Yankees and their fans, Abbott is different. After all, who plays baseball with only one hand? They love what he has accomplished, living life the way he has to. It isn’t pity they shower on him, but they don’t treat him like any other player either. Theirs is a patronizing, sentimental respect.

So Abbott’s no-hitter was only partially about baseball. The rest of it was about something else.

Sunday, in the wheelchair section between third and home, Albert Cortez, 37, sat in his motorized chair with a drink-holder near his face and a straw reaching toward his mouth. He has been totally paralyzed for seven years, since his spinal cord was severed in a car accident.

He had been planning to come to Saturday’s game with his son and brother-in-law, but changed his mind and came Sunday.

“I wish I would have been here to see it,” Cortez said. “I watched it on TV at home and was cheering like crazy. Just to get a no-hitter with two hands is something. But what he did with one hand . . . . “

Anthony, Cortez’s 7-year-old son, reached for the binoculars hanging on his father’s wheelchair. He wanted to look for Abbott in the dugout.

“A guy like Jim Abbott means a lot to a guy like me,” Albert Cortez said. “You feel good about it, you really do. I missed the no-hitter, but I will always remember I was almost there.”