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.

1979: Forty years on—first wins for Essex and Somerset

                             

I was pleased that Somerset won the last Lord’s one-day final. It seemed fitting that a county outside the metropolitan elite (in whose number Hampshire, by their own choice, are counted these days) should enjoy county cricket’s last day on the biggest stage of all. There was a certain personal symmetry about it too. I was at Lord’s for Somerset’s first final in 1967, and for their first win, in 1979, the year that we have reached in this series of posts on Lord’s finals about which I can say “I was there”.

Britain had recently emerged from the Winter of Discontent, and Mrs Thatcher was in Downing Street, but the state of the nation is never representative of all its people; my own levels of content, at the end of my first year at Bristol University, were at a record high.

I can’t quite remember why I decided that I would go to both the Lord’s domestic finals that year, whoever was in them. It may have been an afterthought when applying for tickets for the World Cup final. Clearly, the price of tickets was within a student’s budget; Mrs T had not yet taken our grants away.

Essex played Surrey in the 55-over competition in July, while Somerset opposed Northamptonshire in the 60-over final in September. It was a good year to be a disinterested observer in St John’s Wood and a privilege to be present when both Essex and Somerset won their first trophies in more than a century of existence.  Tears in the eyes of grown men…“if only Dad had lived to see this, how happy it would have made him…” etc. And there were centuries by two great batsmen, though the greatness of only one of them was apparent by 1979.

What John Woodcock thought of all this I don’t know; The Times was in its year-long shutdown and missed the 1979 season completely, so there are no extracts from its archive in this piece.

I had watched two games in the 55-over competition before the final. My season began as it did for many of the next 19, in the bracing April breezes of the County Ground in Bristol. Gloucestershire despatched Minor Counties (South) with ease, Procter 11-5-18-2 and 82 not out. Two weekends later I returned to Kent for the visit of Middlesex. John Shepherd took three wickets for one run early on, and the Londoners reached 178 only because Mike Gatting and Phil Edmonds put on 75 for the sixth wicket. Knocking it off would be, we thought, a matter of routine, and I felt superior in already having my final ticket when everybody else would be scrabbling for theirs later. Kent were all out for 73, their lowest List A score (but, as we will see, not for long).

So to the final. I got to Lord’s, as I did for most of these finals, soon after the gates opened at nine. My basic ground admission ticket gave access to the lower tier of around much of the ground.  For all the finals in which Kent were not involved I watched from the stands at the Nursery End at long on for the right-handed batsman. No seats were allocated, so it was first-come-first served, but that worked well as like-minded spectators grouped together. In my area the ratio of people to Playfair annuals to pork pies was as near to 1:1:1 as makes no difference. Those there to drink and chant went to the Tavern Stand (this group was bigger for the July finals, outside the football season). Short people could choose not to sit behind tall people. The insistence on sending us all to particular seats was one of the reasons I stopped going so regularly, particularly after I found, in 1985, that my seat was directly behind the sightscreen.

I still like to get to grounds early, especially on big occasions. I’d go into the museum, walk around the ground, watch the players in the nets, and be back in my seat for the toss, won that day by Surrey’s Roger Knight, who did what most one-day captains did then and put them in, perhaps unwisely given that Sylvester Clarke was missing through injury and Robin Jackman playing despite struggling for fitness.

Opening the batting were Mike Denness and Graham Gooch. It was good to see Denness back at Lord’s, the only Essex player to have played in a previous county final, though Gooch had been there just a month before at the World Cup final (as had I). There he made 32 batting at No 4, but had been left in a hopeless position by Brearley and Boycott’s adoption of appeasement as an approach to chasing 286 (on the day of writing this, New Zealand adopted the same method in the World Cup to chase Australia’s 243, with equally disastrous results). Gooch had also—along with Boycott and Larkins—been a third of a fifth bowler against Richards, Lloyd, Greenidge and the rest, but a month later did not bowl a ball against Butcher, Roope and Lynch.

 

Gooch’s promise was universally acknowledged, but at that point unfulfilled. It was four years after his disastrous double-duck debut at Edgbaston, the last test in England where an uncovered pitch changed the course of the game. He had returned to the England team in 1978, filling a vacancy caused by the absence of the Packer players. In the winter’s series against a second-string Australia he had played in all six tests but reached fifty only in the last of them. Thirteen tests so far, but no centuries. There were those who thought that he was another English batsman—Hampshire and Hayes two recent examples—whose promise was no more than a mirage.

Nobody who saw Gooch bat under the July sun that day took that view. For the first time on a big stage we saw the foreboding backlift, the stop-motion movement, the most reassuring front foot in cricket plonking down to send extra cover into retreat. His 120 was one of the four finest hundreds I saw in Lord’s finals: Clive Lloyd in the first World Cup final, Richards a few weeks before and Aravinda de Silva’s losing effort against Lancashire in 1995 complete the list.

When the names of overseas players who graced county cricket in the seventies and eighties are reeled off, that of Ken McEwan is rarely included, which is an omission. He played for Essex for 12 years, in every one of which he topped a thousand first-class runs, and was as consistent in the one-day game, good enough to bat at any tempo. Here, he outscored Gooch in a third-wicket partnership of 124, his 72 including ten fours.

McEwan always seemed to make runs when I was in the crowd. The day of Princess Diana’s wedding was memorable for me solely for his century at Canterbury. Perhaps the community of cricket bloggers could collect famous days in history that they recall more for cricketing reasons.

Essex reached 290, the second-best domestic final score at that time, beaten only by the 317 that Yorkshire made in 1965, on the day that hard-hitting aliens took over the body of Geoffrey Boycott.

The Essex supporters around me couldn’t have been more nervous had all their mortgages been put on the win. Openers Alan Butcher and Monte Lynch went before fifty was on the board, then Geoff Howarth and Roger Knight put on 91 for the third wicket. But it was just a beat too slow, and the pressure that put on the later batsmen meant that wickets fell regularly, the winning margin of 35 runs making it look easier than it felt, to everybody on the northern banks of the Thames Estuary, at least.

Essex followed up by winning the Championship later in the year, the first of seven titles secured with four games in hand. No county has represented the soul of county cricket better than Essex in the four decades since that first happy day at Lord’s.

A few days before Essex’s victory, Lancashire visited Canterbury for the second round of the 60-over knockout. Kent had beaten Glamorgan at Swansea in the first round, Underwood 12-5-11-1.

Chris Tavaré has been attracting some attention on social media this week having been photographed at the launch of Vic Marks’ book (which is on the list of purchases on our September visit to the UK—we always arrive with light suitcases and leave with heavy ones, all books). It was good that his appearance prompted universally positive comments, admiring of the stoutest defence since Leningrad in the forties. Even more pleasing were the one or two who remembered him as a Sunday dasher, Clark of Kent, the mild-mannered blocker transformed into flayer of one-day attacks. It was this persona that turned up at St Lawrence that day, top scoring with 87 when Kent batted first, and putting on 101 with Asif Iqbal for the third wicket. Some late hitting from Ealham, Shepherd and Cowdrey took Kent to 278, a score that would win many more 60-over games than it lost in that era.

Lancashire’s reply was interrupted by the weather at 35 for one. A surprise here for younger readers: we all went back the next day to finish the game. Cricket was not controlled by the accountants and marketing people to the extent that it is now, so a loss-making second, or third, day to finish the game properly was considered worth the expense.

Day two did not start well for Lancashire, with opener Barry Wood retiring hurt a shoulder injury on 24. Wood was good enough a batsman to play 12 tests, mainly as an opener. He had a fine reputation as a player of pace, but suffered, as so many in that era did, from never being given a real run. The same applied to ODIs, of which he was selected for 13 over a decade. If had started just a few years later he might have played ten times that number as specialist one-day selections became more of a norm, his quality batting supplemented by scheming medium pace.

Here, he returned to the crease with Lancashire in trouble at 124 for five and reached his hundred in under an hour, supported by keeper John Lyon in a stand of 76 for the sixth wicket. They never quite caught up with the required rate though and fell well short of the 22 needed from the last over.

It was Asif Iqbal who swept away the Lancashire top order with a spell of four for five in 17 balls, probably the most decisive spell of his Kent career. Because of a dodgy back he was never a regular member of the attack, and some years hardly bowled at all. The scorecard of this game suggests that he only came on because Chris Cowdrey was getting tonked, but in heavy conditions such as those that day he could get the red ball to swing.

It was off to Taunton for the quarter-final. It was another of several days in 1979 when Kent folk spent the first half of the game thinking that things were going much more swimmingly than they actually were. Dilley removed openers Rose and Slocombe early. Richards (44) and Botham (29) were two of four victims for Bob Woolmer’s deceptive medium pace. Somerset were 45 for four, then 128 for eight, but Graham Burgess led a rally of the tail that produced 62 for the last two wickets.

Burgess’s appearance and demeanour gave the impression of his having left his blacksmith’s forge to play, though in fact he was a ex-Millfield schoolboy. He was the only survivor of the team from the 1967 final, and had held his place as the journeymen were replaced by superstars.  In 1979, he knew that his time was running out and walked out to bat that day with determination borne from the thought that his last chance of a trophy could be gone if he failed.

Even so, a target of 190 did not seem daunting. If the last two pairs could bat with such ease, we reasoned, then the pitch must have detoxed, making a sub-200 target an administrative matter.

What occurred was a cricketing recreation of Wall Street in the late October of ‘29: panic, helplessness and collapsing numbers, the Kent batsmen reduced to penury by Joel Garner. It was the second of three occasions that summer when I watched Garner bowl an irresistible spell that finished off the opposition, the previous occasion being the World Cup final. Chris Tavaré went more square on when he found the pace uncomfortably quick; here his feet pointed straight down the pitch, but he still got one of five ducks in the Kent innings. Kent’s 60 all out remains their lowest List A score to this day.

Watching a World Cup game from Taunton the other day, I realised a sign of the passing years is that what is now referred to as the “old pavilion” wasn’t built when I first went there.

An easy victory over Middlesex in the semi-final took Somerset into the final, where they were favourites against Northamptonshire, just as they had been against Sussex the previous year, only to go down by a comfortable five wickets. Just four years before, Northamptonshire had beaten Lancashire against the odds, so the Somerset fans were every bit as inclined to read the runes as pessimistically as their Essex counterparts had been a few weeks before.

Viv Richards was there to reassure them, in the same way as Gooch had, with a century. It contained many of the same fine shots as his World Cup final hundred, but was of a different tone, as if he had been given custody of a fine but fragile piece of priceless china that he had to deliver safely. Watching Richards bat has been one of the greatest joys of my cricket watching, a combination of elegance, power and pride that was quite wonderful. Brian Rose’s 41 was the next highest score, but most of the rest chipped in for a total of 269.

Garner started as he had at Taunton, removing Larkins lbw in the first over, then trapped Richard Williams hit wicket as the batsman wisely tried to put as much distance between himself and the bowler as possible. It seemed that an early train was again an option, but Geoff Cook and Allan Lamb put on 113 for the second wicket. Wisden says that this took just 13 overs, but this has to be a mistake. Nine an over at any stage was unheard of in those days, and it would etched on the memory and often written about, surely. Lamb was three years off qualifying for England and this was the first time that he showed his class on a big occasion. Cook was to secure a winter in the sun on the back of a Lord’s final performance two years later, but here was run out for 41, the beginning of the end for Northamptonshire. Garner returned not so much to mop up the tail as expunge all traces of its DNA, finishing with six for 29, the best bowling I saw in a final.

Somerset’s first trophy in 104 years was followed by a second fewer than 24 hours later. The team, the whiff of cider in the air all the way up the M1, made their way to Nottingham for the last day of the Sunday League, which they went into placed second. Their modest (but in the circumstances commendable) 185 did not suggest that a double was in prospect, particularly as leaders Kent had three fewer to chase against Middlesex. At 40 without loss in ten overs, to us at Canterbury it looked pretty much in the bag. We were the Habsburgs of our time, thinking ourselves magnificent while bits of our empire were quietly seceding.

All ten wickets fell for 86 runs. News of this inspired Somerset to induce an even more precipitous collapse, with the last eight Nottinghamshire wickets falling for 46. A slightly surprised looking Brian Rose accepted the trophy as if he had been doing it all his life.