Hamels, Phillies make baseball history as lefty is dealt to Texas
Cole Hamels was traded to the Texas Rangers by the Philadelphia Phillies on Wednesday. As such, the left-handed ace finds himself as a page of baseball history.
No, not for getting traded. However, the timing of the trade is what is unique.
Hamels' last start happened to be the first no-hitter of his career (Saturday against the Chicago Cubs.
Throughout baseball history, there have been 290 no-hitters tossed, with 11 of them coming in combined efforts (including one last year that saw Hamels throw the first six innings). But never had a pitcher been traded in the immediate aftermath of a no-hitter and gone on to make his next start for a different team.
In fact, it's exceedingly rare to see a pitcher throw a no-hitter then get traded later that season, much less later that week. Since 1900, two pitchers have thrown a no-hitter, only to be traded before the end of that season.
The first, Pittsburgh Pirates southpaw Cliff Chambers, no-hit the Boston Braves in the second game of a doubleheader on May 6, 1951. In that 3-0 win, Chambers walked eight batters, so it wasn't so much a dominant display as much as a remarkable ability to overcome his own wildness. (In the sixth, a walk, wild pitch and sacrifice bunt put a Braves runner on third with one out, but Chambers escaped the jam, the only instance of a Boston player reaching third base.)
The win improved Chambers' record to 3-2 with a 3.03 ERA at the time, but Chambers' honeymoon didn't last long. Over his next five starts, Chambers went 0-4 with a 9.38 ERA and he was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals in a seven-player deal on June 15.
After the trade, Chambers improved but never again flirted with a no-hitter. He threw two more complete-game shutouts -- one coming in a five-hit effort against his former team less than two months after being traded -- but went 18-16 with a 4.19 ERA overall with St. Louis before retiring in 1953.
The other player to go from no-hitter hero to a new clubhouse in the same season was Edwin Jackson, who tossed his no-no for the Arizona Diamondbacks, shutting out the Tampa Bay Rays on June 25, 2010.
Like Chambers before him, Jackson's no-hitter wasn't as dazzling as it was lucky. Jackson walked eight hitters and also hit a batter in the 1-0 win, joining Chambers and only five others as pitchers to walk eight men in a no-hit effort. Jackson also allowed runners to reach scoring position in four separate innings, even working out of a bases loaded, no-out jam in the third.
But a no-hitter is a no-hitter, and so Jackson joined a storied club when he got Jason Bartlett to ground out to end the game, after 149 agonizing pitches. By his next start, however, Jackson had returned to form and took a cue from Chambers during his next five outings, going 1-4 with a 7.24 ERA before being traded to the Chicago White Sox on July 30 for David Holmberg and Daniel Hudson.
Over the next several seasons, Jackson continued to bounce around the league. In July 2011, Jackson was part of two trade-deadline deals in one day, making his way from Chicago to Toronto to St. Louis in a matter of hours. The following year, Jackson signed a one-year deal with the Washington Nationals, which earned him a four-year contract with the Cubs, who released the right-hander on Monday after moving him to the bullpen at the start of the season following two disastrous campaigns as a starter.
With Chambers' and Jackson's post-no-hitter experiences in mind, it's understandable why one might be concerned about what could lie ahead for Hamels if he's traded, though there's no indication that Hamels would embark on a downward spiral with a new club. The logical bet is that Hamels might actually improve with a backing cast that doesn't make for the worst team in the league, and if that's the case, at least this time Philadelphia will have gotten a no-hitter out of their man before they sent him elsewhere.
After all, that wasn't the case with Don Cardwell, a right-hander who started his career with Philadelphia in the late 1950s and compiled a 17-26 mark with a 4.46 ERA before the Phillies sent him to the Cubs on May 13, 1960. Two days later at Wrigley, in his first start for Chicago, Cardwell no-hit the Cardinals, with a walk to the second batter he faced his only blemish on the day.
It's tough to say at this point whether Hamels' career will follow the path of Chambers and Jackson or that of Cardwell, who won 102 career games and went 13-7 with a 3.88 ERA in 40 career games against the Phillies after the trade. But the end of the Hamels era in Philadelphia, leaves the Phillies and their fans with a dazzling last start to remember him by.
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