No-hitter? No big deal, but offence is a concern
Just five pitches into Tuesday night’s game in Houston, the Blue Jays could breathe a collective sigh of relief.
Bo Bichette, back after a twogame absence with neck spasms, sliced a Framber Valdez fastball into right field. It dropped safely in front of Kyle Tucker, ensuring the Jays would not be making history.
As frustrating as it can be — especially given the fact that it happened so early in the season, combined with the prevailing notion that the Jays didn’t do enough over the winter to fortify an offence that fell short so often last year — getting no-hit really doesn’t say anything about a team beyond that one game.
While the Jays were the only playoff team to suffer that ugly fate last season, unable to solve a trio of Tigers pitchers in Detroit in their penultimate game before the allstar break, the year before tells a different tale.
There were three regularseason no-hitters in 2022. One, a combined effort by three Houston pitchers, was against the New York Yankees. Another by the Angels’ Reid Detmers (in his 11th bigleague start) was against the Tampa Bay Rays. Both victims wound up in the playoffs.
The first no-hitter that year came at the end of April when five New York Mets hurlers got it done against the Philadelphia Phillies, who fell to 10-11 on the young season but wound up representing the National League in the World Series six months later.
In Game 4 of that World Series, those Phillies were no-hit once again.
Go back one more year and you’ll find the 106-win Los Angeles Dodgers were no-hit by the 71-win Chicago Cubs.
A little farther into the Wayback Machine gives us another look at the pesky Rays, always a thorn in the Jays’ side. Tampa Bay batsmen were on the wrong end of a nohitter three times in one calendar year. They got snuffed by future Jays Mark Buehrle (who was perfect) and Edwin Jackson, with another perfect game by Oakland’s Dallas Braden in there between July 23, 2009 and June 25, 2010. The Rays won the AL East one of those years and were coming off a World Series appearance in the other.
Having your team manage zero hits in a game is frustrating, embarrassing and (depending on how you manifest your fandom) angrifying. That’s always going to be true. No matter whether your team is good or bad, expectations high or low, the offence should always be able to scratch out at least one measly hit.
Often a no-hitter is saved by a spectacular defensive play, one that a viewer takes note of early in the game, thinking: That’s going to be the difference if this thing happens. But there was no such play Monday night.
The closest the Jays came to a hit off Ronel Blanco was an Alejandro
Kirk comebacker off the pitcher’s glove. Any other hitter running out of the box and the Jays would have been saved from ignominy, albeit on what would have been an incredibly cheap hit.
We're not even a week into the season — the Jays haven't even played at home yet — so no conclusions can really be drawn. But the fact that the offence has been so completely flat in two-thirds of the games (waiting until there were two out in the ninth to score on Tuesday night) has done nothing to ease the minds of everyone who watched the hitters fail so consistently last season.
Putting up a zero, a one and two in the first six games has carried more weight than the eight and nine they scored in the other two games because fans want consistency. The Jays had a clear need to add offence over the winter and didn’t do it. After missing out on signing Shohei Ohtani, they chose to run it back with basically the same group that had so many fans tearing their hair out. There would be internal improvements, we were promised.
Don Mattingly is in charge of the hitters now. Justin Turner and his consistently strong approach arrived. Those things will surely help, we were told.
And they very well might. There are still 156 games left. We’re not even five per cent of the way into the season. If this were a hockey game, it would be early in the third minute of the first period.
But there’s already been a no-hitter in those first two minutes.
Astoundingly, it was the fourth time the Jays had been no-hit in eight seasons (plus six games) since Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins took over. In the previous 38 seasons, they were also no-hit four times.