Somehow, only the Padres have no history of no-hitters
In the ninth inning of a San Diego Padres win over the Colorado Rockies earlier this month, Matt Kemp crushed a knee-high Justin Miller slider off the top of Coors Field’s center-field wall and eased into third base 13 seconds later with a stand-up triple.
Ordinarily, such a play wouldn’t be worth mentioning for a player like Kemp, a former 40-40 threat who now has three triples this year and 36 for his career. But this one was different from his first 35, in part because it followed a first-inning home run, third-inning single and seventh-inning double, but more importantly because the first-year Padre did all of those things in a San Diego uniform.
Kemp’s first career cycle was also the first in the 47-year history of the Padres organization -- an astonishing drought for a franchise that has fallen victim to six opponent cycles over the years and counts Tony Gwynn and Dave Winfield among its legends -- but perhaps even more unusual than that bit of trivia is the fact there’s another rare feat San Diego is still waiting to celebrate.
Over the course of 7,454 regular-season games and 34 playoff tilts since the team first took the field in 1969, the Padres have never no-hit an opponent. Historically, the odds of throwing a no-hitter are a little worse than 1-in-1,500 -- by contrast, the Montreal Expos, who debuted the same year as the Padres, needed just nine games to record their first -- so even by the most conservative estimates, a team playing as long as the Padres should at least be able to claim a few.
So maybe that’s why those who know the Padres best think -- or at least hope -- the team is due for one soon. At this point, how could they not be?
“It’s a mystery how it took all these years to get a cycle, and to finally come up with it like that -- I’ve got a feeling the no-hitter is going to come out of nowhere, to be honest,” said former Padres left-hander Randy Jones, who spent eight years with the team in the 1970s. “We keep waiting for that night, and you just hope you’re at the ballgame watching it when it comes.”
Jones knows a thing or two about near-no-hitters. The 1976 NL Cy Young Award winner flirted with a handful during his career and twice threw complete-game one-hitters for San Diego.
“It would have been incredible to be the first one and, right now, the only no-hitter,” Jones said. “That would have been a real feather in my cap if I’d been able to do it. It epitomizes one start, one day in the big leagues where you were magical.”
In 1975, Padres starter Randy Jones had two one-hitters in six weeks.
The first was a 10-inning shutout of the Cardinals in May 1975, the no-hitter broken up in the top of the seventh when Luis Melendez (a .248 career hitter with a .571 lifetime average against Jones) led off the inning with a single up the middle. The other came just six weeks later against the Cincinnati Reds. That night, Jones took a perfect game into the eighth only to lose it on a Hector Torres throwing error. Two batters later, Reds backup catcher Bill Plummer spoiled the no-hitter with an RBI double.
“You remember those moments and the ifs,” said Jones, who now hosts the Padres postgame show on 1090 AM in San Diego. “I had great stuff, a lot of ground balls, and it’s nerve-wracking when you retire 21 in a row. With that Tony Perez ground ball to start the eighth inning, if Hector makes the play, you never know what might happen there. I hadn’t been in the stretch the whole day and then I had to pitch from the stretch for the first time. But it was great fun, I’ll tell you that. It was an adrenaline rush, the whole thing.”
Jones’ pair of near-misses are two of 28 one-hit games by Padres pitchers over the years, dating back to Dick Kelley’s one-hitter against the Astros in July 1969. Because Kelley allowed his only hit in the second inning, it may have lacked traditional no-hitter drama, but there have been several other nail biters, including more than a dozen no-hit bids that made it to the eighth, with some Padres fans claiming the curse dates back to one of them on July 21, 1970.
That particular night, San Diego right-hander Clay Kirby was sitting on a no-hitter after eight innings. The Padres were trailing the Mets 1-0, though, so when Kirby’s spot in the order came up with two outs in the bottom of the eighth, manager Preston Gomez sent pinch hitter Cito Gaston up to bat. Not only did Gaston strike out, but in the top of the ninth, reliever Jack Baldschun allowed three hits and two runs in the eventual 3-0 loss.
Nearly two years later to the day, Steve Arlin was one out from a no-hitter when he gave up a single to Denny Doyle -- a chopper that only got over the head of third baseman Dave Roberts because skipper Don Zimmer had Roberts playing in to protect against a possible bunt. It was the latest in a string of close calls for Arlin, whose previous seven starts coming into the game included a complete game one-hitter, two complete game two-hitters and 10 innings of one-hit ball in a 14-inning marathon.
After Arlin, the Padres didn’t take another no-hitter all the way to the ninth until 1997, when Andy Ashby’s try against the Braves was undone by a Kenny Lofton single. In 2006, Chris Young was two outs away against Pittsburgh when he served up a two-run homer to Joe Randa. Then in 2011, maybe the greatest indignity of them all, five Padres combined for 8-2/3 no-hit innings before the Dodgers’ Juan Uribe doubled to left off Luke Gregerson. Five pitches later, Dioner Navarro drove Uribe in with a walk-off single.
Because the score was 0-0 before Uribe and Navarro won the game for LA, San Diego would have needed to score a run itself and throw at least one more no-hit inning to officially get a no-hitter, but it all still hurts the same.
The Mets had always avoided no-hitters as well -- until Johan Santana got one in 2012.
“It’s become a thing where Padres fans know,” said Ted Leitner, now in his 36th season as the team’s radio play-by-play man. “They don’t need me to tell them, ‘Well there goes the no-hitter,’ so I try not to make it so it’s that same old, ‘OK fans, here we go again.’ It’s still a great pitching performance, but this elusive no-hitter thing is always there.
“It’s become such a big part of this franchise that, as broadcasters, we’re expecting it all the time,” Leitner added. “My thing has become, in the first inning, if the guy from the opposing team gets a base hit, I go, ‘Well, there goes that no-hitter.’ It’s kind of obnoxious and stupid, but it’s taken on a life of its own.”
If there’s a bright side to the last five decades of close shaves, it’s that at least the Padres weren’t alone in their rotten luck for most of it. The New York Mets went 8,019 regular-season games (in addition to 74 postseason games) before Johan Santana threw the team's first no-hitter in 2012 -- a game Mets manager Terry Collins says he still regrets leaving Santana in to finish.
“Misery loves company, and there was some comfort in those years that the Mets didn’t have one either, considering they had Nolan Ryan and (Tom) Seaver and (Jon) Matlack and (Jerry) Koosman and all those guys,” Leitner said.
“It was remarkable, quite frankly, because I thought that, through the years, the Mets had better pitching than we had and it was a statistical anomaly off the charts that it was both the Mets and the Padres. But now, after Santana, it’s just us, and while we haven’t had that great a group, we’ve had plenty of good ones.”
Perhaps the most accomplished of the Padres’ current pitchers is Andrew Cashner. At 5-12 with a 4.03 ERA, Cashner’s fourth campaign in San Diego hasn’t been his best since coming over in a trade from the Cubs in 2012, but in each of the past two seasons, Cashner has thrown a complete-game one-hitter.
The Padres have been no-hit plenty of times -- including twice in a calendar year by the Giants' Tim Lincecum.
In April 2014, Cashner took a no-no into the sixth against Detroit before Rajai Davis broke it up with a single, and in September 2013, Cashner was perfect through six against Pittsburgh, only to have Jose Tabata single to start the seventh. Add to that a game last September when Domonic Brown broke up a Cashner no-hitter with a bunt single in the fifth -- penance from the baseball gods, possibly, for San Diego’s Ben Davis doing the same to Curt Schilling in 2001 -- and it’s evident Cashner has the goods to do it.
“I think I exchanged some words with (Brown) after that one, but it’s a fair play if that’s the play he wants to make,” Cashner said in a phone interview last week. “I didn’t like it at the time, but it is what it is. If it’s in a guy’s game to bunt, I don’t think there’s any problem with breaking it up, but if it’s a power guy that’s hit over 25 homers, why’s he bunting? Is he scared?”
Cashner will take the mound Thursday night opposite Joe Ross and the Washington Nationals. In his previous start, last Friday, the 28-year-old Texan went six innings and allowed one run on four hits in a win against St. Louis, and the prevailing thought among those who follow the team is that if anyone removes the hex this season, it will be Cashner.
“If there’s one guy on this staff that should be able to slam the door and get this done, it should be him,” Jones said. “With his stuff, it’s electric when it’s really on. I was really hoping this year would be the year, but he hasn’t shown the consistency to get it done, to be honest. But you never know.”
Added Leitner: “With Tyson Ross and that slider on a given day, and Cashner with his overall game, I think legitimately, we’ve got at least those two guys who could do it.”
That said, if Ross, Cashner or someone else does someday flirt with history, you won’t hear Leitner talking around it on the air -- just like he readily invokes the “no-hitter” phrase when the Padres are being no-hit themselves (something that’s happened nine times, including twice by Tim Lincecum in a calendar year and once by Dock Ellis when Ellis was allegedly high on LSD).
“I am from the Vin Scully school -- and Vin has always set the tone for all of us -- that your job is to let the listeners know what’s going on,” Leitner said. “You’re not in the dugout, under the protocol of not saying anything and being quiet. It’s got nothing to do with you, and I’ve gone through that on many of those occasions that were broken up in the seventh and eighth and ninth, like Andy Benes (in 1994), where I was inundated with, ‘You jinxed us! Why didn’t you shut up?’
“I don’t care,” he continued. “The idea of being a news reporter and ignoring the hurricane that’s two miles away -- it just isn’t going to happen. So I always have said it, I always will say it and I think everybody has to, because this business of, ‘You can’t say it in the booth,’ is unacceptable.”
Cashner says he’s not superstitious when he takes the mound, either, mostly because he’s not especially concerned with the pressure of ending the jinx.
“I don’t look at it as a curse, and I don’t feel any pressure at all,” Cashner said. “I want to be the guy that does it, and if you don’t take the mound every time thinking you’re going to throw a no-hitter, then why pitch?”
In fact, Cashner says the staff doesn’t feel a particular weight to do much of anything but go out and pitch well on a given night. So far this season, San Diego’s starters have only turned in one complete game -- Ross’ four-hit win over Arizona in June; he lost the no-hitter in the third -- so the thought of simultaneously going the distance and being unhittable is rarely on anyone’s mind.
“I think whenever you have no hits going, it’s something you pay attention to, but there’s so much luck involved,” Cashner said. “Yeah, there’s a lot of skill, but you still have to have everything go right. Every play has to be made, and there’s always some crazy play that just happens and it gets made or it doesn’t get made. But it’s not something I try to pay attention to. It’s going to happen eventually, and it’s just a matter of time.”
And after 47 years, it’s more than overdue.
“We had a saying around here back in the ‘90s of ‘Keep the Faith,’ and I’m keeping the faith,” Leitner said, invoking the team’s 1998 run to the World Series. “There’s going to be one. The question is just who and when.”
You can follow Sam Gardner on Twitter or email him at samgardnerfox@gmail.com.
