Oooh, that’s gotta hurt
From a perfect game, to a no-hitter, to a loss, Dodgers pitcher Hill makes painful history
A baseball lexicon swollen with terminologies both ancient and modern, both whimsical and analytical, both culturally appropriated and properly obscure, nonetheless lacks a suitable entry to define and describe what Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Rich Hill did Wednesday night at PNC Park. His feat can only be defined by what he did not do.
Hill did not pitch a perfect game Wednesday night, because, having set down the first 24 Pittsburgh Pirates in order, his chance at that rare feat was lost in the bottom of the ninth inning on an error by his third baseman, Logan Forsythe.
He also did not record a no-hitter, despite completing nine innings without allowing a hit, as the Dodgers’ game against the Pittsburgh Pirates was scoreless after those nine innings, and when Hill came back out for the 10th, it took just one batter — Pirates second baseman Josh Harrison — for him to lose the no-hitter, the shutout and the game. Harrison’s drive to left just eluded the glove of Dodgers left fielder Curtis Granderson and settled into the second row of the stands for a home run that handed Hill the hardest of hard-luck losses, 1-0.
And yet, the performance was a pinnacle in the meandering, well-travelled, mostly unremarkable 13-year major league career of Hill, the affable, 37-year-old lefty with the baby face, the 4.03 career ERA and the resume featuring 10 organizations (including the Washington Nationals), not counting the independent league team he was reduced to joining for a spell in 2015.
For eight dazzling innings, he was perfect. For nine, he was unhittable. For eternity, he will be known as the first pitcher in history to lose a perfect game in the ninth inning by a teammate’s error.
“It falls on me, this one. One bad pitch,” Hill said of the 88-mph fastball to Harrison, with a tone that suggested this loss was no more painful or meaningful than some early-season tilt destined to be forgotten by the next evening. When it was pointed out to Hill that it is difficult to pin a 1-0 loss on a pitcher who had just thrown nine no-hit innings, he interjected, “No, it was a bad pitch. Late in the game like that, you need to make better pitches.”
As the bottom of the ninth opened, the crowd of 19,859 was mostly quiet. Nothing moved, except the shivering ripples of the Allegheny River reflecting the lights of the downtown skyline beyond the outfield wall. But then, a burst of movement from the mound, and a single shot rang out — Jordy Mercer’s one-hop smash to third, which ate up Forsythe. The ball ricocheted off his chest and to his left, but there was nothing he could do. Mercer was safe without a throw.
“I just felt for him,” Hill said of Forsythe, who, judging by his grim, hangdog look after the error, could have said the same of Hill.
But Hill escaped the ninth with his no-hitter intact, and after the briefest of discussions in the Dodgers’ dugout — the primary factor at that point being Hill’s tidy pitch-count of 95 — the decision was made to send him back out for the 10th.
“He felt good, felt strong,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “It was more of where he was at with the pitch count.”
Merely returning to the mound for the 10th inning made Hill’s performance a historic one; he became the first pitcher since Pedro Martinez in 1995 to carry a no-hitter into extra innings. One might be tempted to call Hill’s undefinable feat Wednesday night a “Pedro” except for one critical difference — Martinez won his 1-0 gem.
This Dodgers team is the best in the majors this year and the best the sport has seen in at least a decade and a half — on pace, even after Wednesday’s loss, for 115 victories, one shy of the 2001 Seattle Mariners, this century’s standard-bearers. Of all the nights for baseball’s third-best offence, with a cumulative .792 OPS, to suffer its first shutout in 11 weeks, it had to be on the night Rich Hill completed nine no-hit innings.
Fifty-eight years ago, a Pirates pitcher named Harvey Haddix pitched 12 perfect innings against the Milwaukee Braves, only to lose the perfect game, the no-hitter, the shutout and the game in the 13th. Already on these shores, Pirates fans are calling Wednesday night’s epic “the revenge of Harvey Haddix.”