IN THE EIGHTH inning of the Cincinnati Reds' game on May 7, Tucker Barnhart found himself in the midst of a true conundrum. On one hand, he was catching the game of his life, with Wade Miley, a soft-tossing left-hander, throwing a no-hitter. Barnhart didn't want to do anything to disturb the dynamic or, baseball gods forbid, jinx the moment. On the other hand, he really had to pee.
Barnhart figured he'd rather use the bathroom than spend the final moments of a potentially historic happening squirming behind the plate. And Barnhart wants to emphasize that what Miley did -- and what five other starters have done in this year's unprecedented run of no-hitters across baseball -- is a matter of history, yes, but it's more. It remains special enough that he, a grown man, actually wondered whether it might've been appropriate to deny nature's call.
"Going through it and feeling the stress of every single pitch, I don't feel like there was any less meaning," Barnhart says. "I would assume -- and this is purely assumption -- that the common fan would be like, 'Oh, another no-hitter today.' But being there for it, understanding what I was going through, the meaning to me isn't lessened whatsoever.
"To me, there's no way they will ever lose their luster. It's still a Major League Baseball game. It's still a Major League Baseball team not getting any hits. If I'm lucky enough to catch another one, I'm never going to forget it."
Neither will Reds reliever Lucas Sims, who himself spent the top of the ninth huddled inside a bathroom trying to rejigger the Reds' offensive juju and break a scoreless tie. (They did.) Reliever Art Warren, back at the team hotel, started running through downtown Cleveland so he could revel with his teammates if Miley finished the job.
Here's how cognizant the Reds were of not screwing this up for Miley: Even though the bullpen at Progressive Field is more than 400 feet from the mound, nobody dared string together the words "no" and "hitter" out loud. As the Reds' relief corps streamed onto the field to mob Miley following the final out, left-hander Amir Garrett yelled, "What are we doing?" He didn't realize Miley had thrown a no-hitter and never had seen anybody celebrate a shutout quite like this.
Back at the hotel that night, the Reds traded stories as they feted Miley. Even though he did most of the work, they all felt like a little piece of it was theirs, too. Nobody sits around and knocks back beers and laughs about what just happened for a three-hitter or a two-hitter or a one-hitter. No-hitters are still a cause for celebration with players -- and the mystique about them for fans shouldn't be lessened one bit, either.
FOR ALL OF the consternation about the deluge of no-hitters in 2021, the act itself -- recording 27 outs without allowing a single hit -- remains a miracle. Even when the leaguewide batting average is .237, the worst in MLB's 150 years of recorded history. Even as pitchers enter seemingly every game with an overwhelming advantage against hitters. Even with the ball deadened and the fielding slick and our senses now conditioned to expect something that, entering this season, had been accomplished only 305 times in more than 220,000 games played. Six no-hitters in 693 games means no-hitters in 2021 are happening about 6¼ times as often as they have in years past.
Even so, the binary among players remains true as it ever did: As much elation as finishing a no-hitter brings, being on the receiving end is awful. The frequency of no-hitters has done nothing to lessen the embarrassment of being on the wrong side of one.
"It still absolutely sucks," says Kyle Seager, and more than anybody in baseball today, he is equipped to talk about no-hitters. In Seager's 11-year career with the Seattle Mariners, he has participated in nine no-hitters, the most for one player with a single team. Only Bert Campaneris, with 11, has played in more.
The first for Seager was Philip Humber's unlikely perfect game against the Mariners in 2012. Then Seager went on a streak of four no-hitters thrown by Seattle. He has spent the past four on the wrong side, including two this season: by Baltimore's John Means and Detroit's Spencer Turnbull.
"If you finish a game with one hit and you lose 3-0, it stings a whole lot less," Seager says. "You try to look at it like you're playing to win the game and we lost. If you look at it from that perspective, you're going to play 162 and lose some, then it's more tolerable. That's the line you want to use. But it's not just losing. You got dominated. Nobody wants that. And this year it's happened a lot."
It's not just the Mariners, who, through 47 games, are hitting exactly .200 as a team -- which would shatter the record for worst team batting average in a single season. Miley was the second pitcher to no-hit Cleveland after White Sox left-hander Carlos Rodon did the deed April 14. And the Texas Rangers are also the bread in the no-hitter sandwich: victimized first by San Diego's Joe Musgrove and most recently by the Yankees' Corey Kluber.
The 33-year-old Seager, an All-Star, a Gold Glove winner and one of the most productive players in Seattle history, regards his no-hit fortunes as a fluke, baseball's randomness just playing another trick. At the same time, he sees the changes in the game, the ones that had MLB coming into Sunday with 12,229 strikeouts against 10,676 hits -- an unfathomable dynamic. The strikeout-to-hit ratio is up 6.1% from the shortened 2020 season. It's 12.4% higher than in 2019. It's 40% larger than in Seager's rookie season in 2011. It has grown 68.3% in the past half-century.
However much hitters have accepted the strikeout as the cost of doing business in modern baseball, the no-hitter is not in the same category. When hitters notice that it's the fifth or sixth inning and there's still a zero in their team's hit column, the nerves kick in. When it's their guy spinning one, they abide by all of the unwritten rules. Don't talk to the pitcher. Don't change a thing. And don't ever, ever, ever utter those two words married by a hyphen.
"It's a weird dynamic, right?" Seager said. "The anxiety is real. I just hope it's not a once-a-week thing. If you have 15, 20 in a year, it takes away from how special they are. And I'm not sure that's good for baseball."
SEAGER IS NOT alone in this worry -- that too much of a good thing makes for a bad thing. Dodgers starter Clayton Kershaw, author of one no-hitter in his magnificent 364-start career, doesn't want the splendor of the no-no to be spoiled by their rate of occurrence. Even though there hasn't been a no-hitter every day, no-hitter alerts these days start at the five-inning mark and kill phone batteries with their regularity and volume.
Still, it's worth understanding that even in this environment, so seemingly conducive to no-hitters, the accomplishment itself is beyond improbable. Consider Miley's no-hitter, in which he struck out eight batters. That meant 19 of Miley's outs came on batted balls. The leaguewide average on balls in play this season is around .289. Which is to say that every time Cleveland put a ball into the field, the MLB average said it had a 71.1% chance of turning into an out. The likelihood of 19 events at 71.1% all turning into outs: 1 in 652. It doesn't get much better when plugging in the BABIPs of each Cleveland player who put a ball in play that day: 1 in 510. Similar odds had been in place for each of Miley's previous 250-plus starts. He just found his one.
And that's what makes players wonder if baseball is just catching a mega-heater on no-hitters. These sorts of things have happened in less pitcher-friendly times. In 2015, from June 9 through Aug. 30, pitchers combined for six no-hitters. In 2012, from April 21 to June 13, there were five no-hitters -- two of them perfect games.
In August of that season, with Seager starting at third base, Felix Hernandez threw the third perfect game inside of four months. And it's instructive that at the time, The Wall Street Journal, not exactly the bastion of hot-take artistry, asked whether the perfect game was "getting too easy."
There hasn't been one since. The nine-year perfect-game drought is the longest since the 13-year gap between Catfish Hunter's and Len Barker's.
So while it's fair to say that baseball's environment today accelerates the likelihood, throwing a no-hitter, Rays reliever Collin McHugh says, is "waaaaaay harder than it looks right now." He spent years as a starter and held a no-hitter in such reverence that "I always wonder what I would do in that last play or strikeout. Like, would I yell or smile or cry or what?" If he were to throw one now? "Not different at all," McHugh says.
A no-hitter still is the sort of thing that makes it into the first line of a pitcher's obituary. Those lucky enough to throw a no-hitter sometimes affix the date next to their signatures. It's a brag whose gravitas remains -- and that's the reason for any concern and consternation among players.
In his first major league start, Ross Stripling went 7⅓ no-hit innings for the Dodgers -- and got pulled by manager Dave Roberts when his pitch count reached 100. It was an outrage: the Dodgers stealing a chance at history from this kid who had earned the right to secure it, all in service of what they believed would be a productive big league career.
Five years later, the aura of that first start is palpable -- and Stripling is healthy and pitching. A starter with Toronto now, he sees all the no-hitters around baseball and is like his friend Kershaw. He also doesn't want them to be watered down. He wouldn't mind if all the other pitchers from around baseball took a break, gave the game a little breathing room, rekindled some of the glow and sheen.
"But," Stripling says, "I also hope someone from our rotation no-hits the Indians this week."