Baseball history in Toronto

Houston Astros at the Toronto Blue Jays, Toronto SkyDome, 1 September 2019

I have been watching cricket for more than fifty years, but how often have I seen a new page written in the history book? The first World Cup final perhaps, the third certainly (dull game that it was). McCullum’s 300 (I watched the greater part though wasn’t there when he completed the achievement). BJ Watling breaking the test record for the sixth wicket, twice. Michael Slater responsible for more of his team’s runs in a test innings than anyone since Bannerman at the MCG in 1877. Those were all rewards for wet days spent at county grounds, decades of doggedness witnessed first-hand.

At the baseball, it happened first time, the day at the Toronto SkyDome that Justin Verlander pitched his third no-hitter.

In the manner of Charters and Caldicott, my Khandallah correspondent and myself were making our way back to Kent in time for the end of the County Championship season. By the start of September we had reached Toronto, where I achieved one of my outstanding ambitions in spectating: to watch a Major League Baseball game. What a day to choose.

Readers with long memories and dull lives may recall that I attended a Minor League game on my last trip to the Northern Hemisphere, in a lovely little stadium in Vancouver. That thoroughly agreeable experience could be compared to a pleasant day at the cricket in a way that this Toronto game could not (though that won’t stop the mad professors behind The Hundred trying). For a start, it was indoors, at the SkyDome (now called the Rogers Centre, but I’ll stick with Wisden’s practice of avoiding sponsors’ names as they are liable to change). It has a fully retractable roof, which remained shut here.

It is a most impressive venue, right in the heart of Toronto, nestled up against the CN Tower. It is everything that a contemporary stadium should be, so I was surprised to discover that it is thirty years old. Our own dear Cake Tin in Wellington is ten years younger, but it is as if someone from the council had been to Toronto and insisted that a copy be made based entirely on their description of what they could remember, without recourse to plans or photographs. So the concourse of the SkyDome is open to the field, not shut off from it by a concrete wall; the blocks of seats are sensibly smaller, so it is not necessary to trigger a Mexican wave by making a dozen people stand in turn if you want to leave your seat.

It helps that baseball stages the main action on the edge of the field, so at least half the spectators are closer to the players than they could ever be at the cricket. Our seats were, so to speak, at fly slip, halfway to the boundary, binoculars superfluous.

The Blue Jays were fourth of five teams in the East Division of the American League, any hope of qualifying for the post-season long gone, the Leicestershire of the New World. The Astros led the West Division and had the second-best record in the major leagues this year, so were anticipating the post-season and the possibility of a World Series. The contrasting records of the two teams may explain why half of the stadium’s 50,000 seats were unoccupied. Similar ratios at county cricket grounds lead to photos of empty seats in the paper, illustrating articles on a dying game. Of course, the Blue Jays come a distant second in the city’s sporting loyalties to Toronto’s NHL team, the Maple Leafs (sic), who have a membership waiting list of which MCC would be proud.

Baseball benefits from being a sport designed for commercial television before John Logie Baird had even been born, with its 17 breaks between innings over three hours or so. At the stadium, these intervals are filled with all manner of distractions, but in contrast to what happens at the Cake Tin and what I picked up from television coverage of the World Cup and the T20 in the UK, the announcer did not labour from the misapprehension that the sport was there to fill the gaps between the main attraction. There was plenty that was informative. Baseball, even more than cricket, generates numbers as a frog does spawn in spring and the arrival of each batter at the plate saw a soup of statistics displayed on the big screen, so that those of us to whom the names meant nothing knew as much as we wanted about their form and potential. We got there an hour or so before the start, so learned that the pitcher’s mound is prepared as tenderly as any 22-yard grass strip.

There is no toss; the visitors always bat first, so it was Wilmer Font who went to the mound to pitch for the Blue Jays. In cricket, the batsmen are generally regarded as the aristocracy, the bowlers the proletariat. In baseball, the pitchers are the elite. While the rest of the team follows a gruelling 162-game programme over six months, the lead pitchers play only once every four of five games, or have specialist roles for a couple of innings a game. Matches are presented as pitcher against pitcher, so today it was Verlander v Font.

Font lasted only two innings, though it was difficult to understand why. In the first Bregman got to first base, on a “walk”, (when four pitches are ruled not to be in the strike zone and the batter hasn’t tried to hit them); in the second, Diaz doubled (got to second base), but no runs resulted. Unless things start to go badly wrong, the starting pitcher customarily lasts for six or seven innings before being replaced, so it was a surprise that Font was replaced for the third inning. Either he was injured or the coach had been studying T20 captaincy, a tenet of which appears to be that the better an opening bowler performs, the more likely they are to be taken off.

For the Astros, it was Justin Verlander, the Jimmy Anderson of baseball, a pitcher with a sustained record of excellence over a 15-year career. A former winner of the Cy Young Award for the pitcher of the year, a couple of weeks after I saw him he became just the eighteenth player to pass the 3,000 strike-out mark. He walked to the mound as one of only 36 pitchers to have pitched two no-hitters. He left it nine innings later as one of six to have pitched three or more.

For the purposes of this piece it is important to understand what a no-hitter is. It is when no batsman from one team reaches first base having hit the ball. Walks— see above—do not count against the pitcher’s record in this respect as the batter has not hit the ball in order to proceed to first base. There was just the one walk, Cavan Biggio, second up in the first, but he proceeded no further, and was the only Blue Jay to reach first base.

To understand the magnitude of this achievement you have to know that before this game there had been only 302 no-hitters pitched in the major leagues, which have a history back as far as 1876. What’s more 14 of these were achieved by a combination of pitchers across the nine innings. This was just the fourth instance this year, and that was one more than last year; 2016 and 2017 saw one each.

What would be an equivalent achievement in cricket? A hattrick? As I have recorded here before, I have witnessed seven of these across all forms of first-class, list A and the equivalent. Though it seems that I have beaten the averages to reach that number, it suggests that hattricks are far more common. One experienced baseball journalist reported that it was the third no-hitter that he had seen in more than twenty years, during which he has probably watched more than a hundred games a season. All ten would be too rare, so perhaps nine wickets in an innings by a bowler would be a comparable cricketing achievement. This has been achieved 19 times in tests (including Laker and Kumble’s all-tens). I have never seen it done, but Kyle Abbott managed it for Hampshire a week or so later; I suspect that the chances of seeing a nine-for are about the same as being there for a no-hitter. There must be any number of people who have spent as many days at the baseball as I have at the cricket, yet have never seen a no-hitter.

People who want to decry T20 often say that it is no more better than baseball, which shows that they have no idea about baseball, a game of which is a three-hour slice of test match. The constant action and movement of the scoreboard that short-form cricket demands is not guaranteed or even desired in baseball. I heard a presenter on a Toronto sports radio station bemoan the increased number of home runs being hit this year. Of one high-scoring game where they were responsible for all but one run he asked “where’s the baseball in that?”. There is a man who would appreciate a day at the Scarborough Festival.

As in first-class cricket, spectators are tolerant of apparent inactivity in the expectation of something interesting occurring soon. This game was an extreme example of this. After eight innings the score was 0–0, which is very different from saying that nothing had happened. The Astros made it as far as third base in the second and seventh innings. Whenever a runner is on base a sharpened sensory perception develops around the stadium. If no or one batter is out the main job of the man at the plate becomes not to biff a home run, but to move on the player ahead of him, even if he has to sacrifice himself to do so. This is how Diaz and Alvarez respectively got to third. But with two out it becomes much more difficult to get home, as the batter at the plate has to get to first for any run to count. So it was here, as a fly ball to left field and groundout to shortstop ended the innings (and let us wallow for a moment in baseball’s exotic lexicon).

At the bottom of each inning Verlander was a Victorian bodice into which the Blue Jays batters were tied, struggling for breath. Here was a 36-year-old, the most dangerous pitcher on the team as it headed for the post-season. The instinct of the manager must have been to pull him out after the usual six or seven innings rather than risk injury or exhaustion, but baseball’s reverence for its history was more compelling. A pitcher with a shot at a no-hitter would be given his chance.

But Verlander needed help. With no score on the board at the end of the eighth inning, he faced the prospect of having to pitch for more than the standard nine innings to register a no-hitter, as the match would continue until there was a winner. America’s intolerance of the draw is much mocked (though a game which decides a World Cup on boundaries hit lives in a glass house in which the throwing of stones is unwise), but in baseball the inevitability of resolution means that in a stalemate the tension increases rather than dissipates.

First up for the Astros in the ninth inning was Alex Bregman, who got to second on a pop up (a hit that goes higher than it does laterally) that eluded first baseman Smoak. Alvarez was struck out for one down, then Diaz was out, caught in centre field, but allowing Bregman to move to third.

Abraham Toro came to the plate, the last chance for Verlander to wrap up the no hitter in the ninth. Home fans had a dilemma: a win or history?  Toro hit a fly towards left field, but it did not have the immediate stamp of a game-winner. Surely it would be what they call playable, able to be caught. But as it descended it became clear that it was wide of the fielder and a little stronger. The ball sighed over the fence for a home run, taking Bregman with it for a 2–0 lead.

Verlander now had certainty that removal of the next three batters would give him the prize. First up was Drury whose swing was collected by shortstop Bregman who calmly threw to first base for the play. A slider struck out McGuire with the first pitch he faced, Verlander’s 14th strike out of the game, the second-best of his career.

The Blue Jays were now back at the top of their order with Bo Bichette, whose three previous at-bats had not given the impression that he would ever die wondering. Sure enough, he swung at the fifth pitch he received. It went straight to third baseman Altuve, who may never again make a throw across the diamond to first under such pressure. He executed it perfectly, Bichette dismissed as the ball lodged in the glove of first baseman Diaz.

Verlander’s teammates rushed from the dugout to laud him and the crowd gave him a generous and prolonged ovation. It was the second time for some of them; one of Verlander’s two previous no-hitters had also been at the SkyDome, for the Detroit Tigers. He became the first ever to pitch two no-hitters at the same away venue.

Perhaps when Bob Willis rolled over Australia in 1981, or Ben Stokes did the same a couple of months ago, somewhere in the Headingley crowd there was somebody spending a day at the cricket for the first time, defying the odds as I was fortunate to do at the Toronto SkyDome.