MUSGROVE’S GEM MAKES WEBSITE OWNER TAKE STEP BACK

Dirk Lammers and his wife were sitting down for dinner Friday night when he heard an alert on his ipad.

Lammers gets an alert whenever a major league team is in the midst of a nohitter in the middle innings of a game.

“I do it for every no-hitter, but the Mets and Padres let me know at the end of the fourth inning, a little early,” said Lammers, who was immediately intrigued by this particular notification. “I told my wife, ‘Ooh, Padres. Now I know what we’re doing tonight.’

“Whatever our plans were going to be, we never got to that point.”

Dessert would be served five innings later.

They quickly were in front of the television watching right-hander Joe Musgrove forever etch his name into Padres lore with the first no-hitter in franchise history with a 3-0 victory over the Rangers at Texas’ Globe Life Field.

The Padres were the last team in the majors without a no-hitter, a drought that spanned 8,205 regular-season games — plus 40 playoff games — over the franchise’s 52-plus seasons coming into Friday night’s game.

That’s why local baseball fans were on the edge of their seats as Musgrove mowed down the Rangers, and why they were still joyously celebrating the accomplishment a day later.

So what was a Mets fan who lives in South Dakota doing getting pinged for a Padres game?

Lammers, a former journalist, runs a website called nonohitters.com, a space he originated in 2008 to chronicle the Mets’ quest for their first no-hitter.

On June 1, 2012, the Mets’ Johan Santana held St. Louis hitless in an 8-0 home win over the Cardinals. The Mets counter was forever frozen at 8,019 games.

That left just one team in the majors without a no-no — the Padres — so Lammers pivoted accordingly.

His site includes nearly a dozen Padres-related pages — most notably the five no-hit bids spoiled in the ninth inning and the team’s 30 onehitters — on the franchise’s no-hitter futility.

Among the gee-whiz notes is this: The Padres and Montreal Expos both joined the National League in 1969 as expansion teams. Expos righthander Bill Stoneman threw a no-hitter in the franchise’s ninth game of existence.

A tracker on the nonohitters.com, which Lammers updated diligently, counted the number of Padres games without a no-hitter as they approached the mark made by the Mets.

Two years ago, Lammers and his wife visited San Diego for the specific purpose of attending game No. 8,020, which eclipsed the Mets’ no no-no streak.

For the record, Pittsburgh’s Adam Frazier hit a single in the third inning off Padres left-hander Eric Lauer at Petco Park.

Lammers wore a 1980s era Padres jersey that night. On the back where the player’s name usually appears, it read “NO-HITTERS.” Beneath that was “0”.

“Do I change the number to 1 now?” said Lammers, who owns two such Padres jerseys. “At least one of them I’ll keep intact. Maybe the other one I’ll have the number pulled off and put a 1.

“Then if they get a second no-hitter, I’m going to have to keep paying to get the jersey redone.”

Easy, now. “Statistically, it was more bound to happen than it wasn’t,” Lammers said, “but still, after seeing so many failed attempts, you kind of think it’s never going to happen.”

Somehow, things seemed different the way Musgrove was dealing against the Rangers. Lammers noted a “slider that started outside and just hit the mark. And he had people swinging at ones that were falling to the ground. And then the defense was stellar. It just looked like everything was coming together . ...

“Once he came out for the ninth and got that first out, you’re thinking, ‘This is it.’ ”

After watching Musgrove get mobbed near the mound, Lammers went to work updating his website to reflect the news.

Now what?

“For now, I’m still known as nonohitters, even though the ‘no’ is now obsolete,” said Lammers, noting that nohitters.com is already taken, so switching to that is not an option.

Through the years, the website evolved as a go-to resource on no-hitters and led to Lammers publishing the book “Baseball’s No-hit Wonders.”

The website lists all 306 major league no-hitters — 138 of them since the Padres came into existence — and separates them by team, ballpark and several other categories.

“Perhaps we won’t have no-hitter alerts interrupting dinner anymore,” he said. “That might be something my wife really appreciates.”