As usual, if you are not at work on this Labor Day, thank a union…
We are less than a month until the end of the baseball season, and there have been zero no-hitters this season. This would be just the second time since the 1901 “modern era” that there had been zero of them in a season, the other year was 2005.
The closest we have gotten to a no-hitter this season (as of this writing Monday afternoon) was Cleveland’s Gavin Williams going into the 9th inning against the New York Mets on August 6th, when he gave up a home run with one out and was taken out one batter later, having thrown 126 pitches, the most in the majors this season…
Which makes what the San Francisco Giants Justin Verlander did on Sunday even more absurd. He threw the second-most pitches in the majors this season, 121, and did it in only five innings…
You might say he was… really laboring… *drum riff* (thank you, be sure and tip the waitstaff and don’t try the veal, that’s just inhumane…)
A pitcher only does something like that when they are reaching for something, and that was exactly what Verlander was doing Sunday against the Baltimore Orioles. You see, a starting pitcher can only earn a win if they pitch five complete innings, and Verlander has not had the best season, to put it mildly.
He did not get his first win as a Giant until July 23rd and did not get his first win at Oracle Park until the previous start last Tuesday against the Chicago Cubs. And I don’t just mean this season. That was his first win at Oracle Park ever, and he made his debut in 2005… you know, 20 years ago, or the last season without a no-hitter…
And those have been his only wins this season. So, he had a chance to get another. And since the Giants were crushing the Orioles, manager Bob Melvin and the coaching staff let Verlander go to cross that five-inning barrier…
One final example of just how strenuous those five innings were: Verlander has thrown three complete-game no-hitters in his career, and he threw more pitches on Sunday than he did in any of them. (112 in 2007, 108 in 2011, and his last one, six years ago today on September 1, 2019, he threw 120.)
So, he made it somehow, and even though the Giants ended up winning the game 13-2, a pitcher still earned a save. And he earned it for my favorite sub-clause of the save rule.
I’ve already mentioned this several times this season when there have been ridiculously lopsided games with pitchers earning saves. The rule is that if you are the last pitcher in the game and you throw at least three innings, you are eligible for a save (and they’ll usually give it to you). My favorite part of the rule is what used to be there, which was the word “effectively.” They changed that part of the rule from a grading system to pass/fail. If you throw three innings and finish the game, you get the save…
Which is what Spencer Bivens did in relief of Verlander on Sunday. He threw three innings, and they were… fine. He threw 48 pitches, which while not a 121-through-5 pace, is a lot for three innings, and gave up two runs in the ninth. But he still got the save, which, not surprisingly, is his first career…
Remember when Jen Pawol became the first female umpire in the majors early in August and it was huge news? Well, she umpired in her second series a couple of weeks ago, for the Pittsburgh Pirates and Colorado Rockies, and it barely made a ripple. I’d call that progress. She got all the eyeballs the first time, the second time it was accepted as a normal thing…
The bases were loaded, and the count was 2-1 on the hitter. The pitcher was in trouble. “He’s got to waste one here,” I said, sitting in the stands on the third base side. “He definitely needs to waste one,” was the immediate agreement from others in the crowd.
Reader, the pitcher may have tried to waste one, but he failed miserably.
The batter did not miss. As soon as he made contact, everybody in the park knew it was gone. My eyes immediately went to center field, but instead of following the fielder as I usually do, I looked much higher up, above the 30-foot-or-so-batters eye wall. I had a brief flash of “huh, did I lose track of the ball?” only to then see the ball go over that 30-foot wall.
At that point I knew I had seen something stupid in a game that had already been stupid from the time I entered the gates. You see, I was in West Sacramento, watching a major league team play a home game in a minor league stadium, as the former-Oakland A’s are allegedly going to do for three years…
Yes, there were lots of reasons to not go see the A’s in person and contribute to this absolute mockery of a sham of a mockery of sham. My reason to go was because it was dumb…
And that grand slam I saw go over the wall was from the Detroit Tigers Riley Greene, who had just hit the second-longest grand slam of the StatCast era: 471 feet, two feet shorter than a Kyle Schwarber blast (of course) and tied with Giancarlo Stanton.
The dumbest part about the whole thing, for me: anything that happens in that minor-league West Sacramento ballpark while the A’s are there counts as equally as if it happened at Wrigley Field or Yankee Stadium or Dodger Stadium. And after having been there, it feels like anything that happens in West Sac should count for like, 75% of “real” MLB baseball.
If you have been to a spring training game or even Triple-A game, the atmosphere in West Sacramento felt exactly like one of those. From the berm in the outfield right down to wandering through the concourse in the seventh inning and thinking that everyone else had imbibed a little too much…
It only confirmed to me that a major league team playing in a minor league stadium is a joke. It even felt like the Tigers treated the series as a spring training outing. They let their pitchers go longer than they probably should have- not 121 pitches long, but longer than ordinary…
Were they laboring as well? Maybe a little…
The A’s happened to announce their schedule for 2026 that day. They’ll play six games in their allegedly new home of Las Vegas next season. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they move another series there. And then another… and then another… and then another… well, you see the end result as clearly as I do. This was their only full season in West Sacramento…
Labor Day was once a huge baseball day. It was just like the 4th of July, with doubleheaders everywhere you looked. The most famous early Labor Day game occurred in 1916, when former Giants legend Christy Mathewson, then manager of the Reds, came out of retirement for one game against Cubs legend Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown (you can figure out where he got that nickname- a farm accident as a kid)…
They had matched up when the Giants and Cubs were battling for pennants in the “early aughts,” and both were at the tail-end of their playing careers. So, in order to goose attendance at Weeghman Park, they agreed to match up one last time, and it was promoted as big as any game.
As I explained in my Labor Day post two years ago, both pitchers went the distance and Matty got the win- and that ended up being huge decades later. Another old Matty rival, Grover Cleveland Alexander of the Phillies and Cardinals, was determined to beat Matty for the all-time NL wins total. So “Ol’ Alex” stuck around to get 373 wins, which was one more than Matty’s then-presumed total of 372…
But when historians combed through the records years later, they found Matty had somehow been miscredited somewhere along the line, and he had one more win than they had thought. So, they gave it to him, and now Matty and Alex are tied with 373 victories…
September 1916 is also the month the then-New York Giants went on their still-MLB record 26 game win streak, which you can read all about in my book. You might as well read about it in the month it happened, and you could even read each chapter on the day it actually happened if you wanted too…
Hey, I labored to write it, you can labor to read it…
So long as you snuck into that A's game without paying it's fine. Otherwise...
That Marichal-Spahn marathon? There a whole book written about that game. Yes, the game has changed. Sandy Koufax retired in his prime after a career that often saw him icing a left arm that was literally black and blue following a game.
Tuesday, July 2, 1963, 15,921 at Candlestick Park, shutout inning after shutout inning. When all is said and Mays done, Juan Marichal throws 227 pitches, Warren Spahn tosses 201, the last deposited over the fence by the Giants ' centerfielder in the 16th inning to end the marathon (""Don’t worry. I'm going to win this game for you.")
"Do you see that man pitching on the other side? He's 42 and I'm 25, and you can't take me out until that man is not pitching."
Marichal and Spahn made their next starts on July 7.
Oh, the game has changed...