Trevor Bauer and the Rise and Fall of the No Hitter

Yesterday, Trevor Bauer made his first start of the year for the Cleveland Indians. A former top prospect, Bauer has already been given up on by one club and has fought hard for respectability with his second. He faced a hall of mirrors in the form of the Houston Astros—a team as young, flawed, and exciting as he is.

The game proceeded exactly as one would have predicted, only somehow, more so. The Astros, patient worshippers of the three true outcomes, settled for two. They struck out eleven times against Bauer and walked five, yet found themselves hitless through six innings. Despite the outline of glory visible far on the horizon, Bauer was in no shape to complete the no-hitter. Heaving 111 pitches was enough for anyone, especially in the first week of the season.

So reliever Kyle Crockett took over in the seventh, Scott Atchison the eighth. When lefty Nick Hagadone gave up a home run to Jed Lowrie in the ninth, there followed a chorus of sighs: some wistful, some relieved. No one, including manager Terry Francona, was sure what to make of it. After the game, he admitted asking his bench coach: "If we get through this with a no-hitter are we supposed to be excited? I wasn't really sure." It was the latest signal that the no-hitter, once the prized accomplishment of pitchers, has lost some of its allure.

Baseball lives in cycles. In the late sixties, pitchers laid waste to offenses, forcing the powers that be to redraw both the shape of the field by lowering the mound and its lineup cards by introducing the designated hitter (at least in the American League). In the eighties, Vince Coleman and his Cardinals ran into (and just as quickly out of) our hearts. The nineties and early aughts were ruled by dingers. And now, pitchers have finally regained their influence, throwing harder and striking out more batters than ever before.

Statisticians adjust for these shifts in era; they balance out their measurements by comparing the player to his offensive environment, his ballpark, and even now his opponents. But the no-hitter escapes these rough compensations. It is binary: it either is, or it isn't. And right now, it is, quite a bit.

As batting averages continue to tumble, the probability of dismissing 27 straight batters naturally trends upwards. Using a rough measurement of nine league-average hitters, the chances of any particular game being a no-hitter in 1994 were about 0.02%, or 1 in every 4,900 games. (As it turned out, there were three.) In 2014, thanks to a 20-point drop in batting average, those odds, and the actual results, nearly doubled. In this era of the expanded strikezone and hitters opting for power over contact, no-hitters are growing commonplace.

At the same time, the no-hitter as we know it is also dying, and its fate can be traced to a similar statistic: the shutout.

The modern pitching era is best categorized by two phenomenons: high strikeout rates, and the specialization of relievers. What might be surprising is that for all the post-Moneyball emphasis hitters are now placing on going deep in the count and earning walks, the number of pitches per game hasn't significantly changed in the past fifteen years. It's just that the pitches are divided up between more pitchers, the work is being spread thin: the number of complete games and shutouts have fallen to the point of endangerment.

Broadcasters and former stars have chalked up this trend to a weakness in the blood, a generational defect in stamina. The real cause is less romantic: it is Tony La Russa. His bullpen management and its effectiveness taught the league that a fresh inferior arm is often the better option than a tired, skilled one. Starters who were once left in to prove they had a small something left in the tank are no longer given that opportunity.

Even without the specialization of the modern era, the no-hitter would have probably lost much of its appeal by now. The entire concept is an anachronism, a throwback to a time when the ability to hit, rather than the ability to reach base, was the standard for success. The first crack in this philosophy came with Bill James's game score metric, a rough method of measuring the quality of a pitcher's performance. With it people began to ask whether one hit was really worse than four walks or, in the infamous case of A.J. Burnett in 2001, nine. Kerry Wood's 20-strikeout game, despite the single hit allowed, proved a far better display of dominance.

The no-hitter has also suffered from a swing in the popular perspective of the baseball itself. Despite the cliché of taking it one game at a time, managers and fans alike are increasingly inclined to do the opposite. Francona proved this yesterday with his choice of relievers: if the no-hitter were truly more important than any other game, Indians closer Cody Allen, not anonymous Nick Hagadone, would be preserving the gem. And despite the distaste of having to use relievers at all, the alternative, leaving a 24 year-old to throw 120-130 pitches and risk injury for the sake of adding his name to an already-long Wikipedia list, is hardly better.

It's not utilitarian calculus that has led us to distrustful single-game accomplishments so much as our developing consciousness of small sample size. Forty years ago, a Trevor Bauer no-hitter, in his first start of the year and at such a tender age, would be the heralding of ensuing greatness. But we've seen too many Bud Smiths and Philip Humbers to believe that now. We better understand that as fun as it is to watch greatness, that greatness is often a statistical aberration. Baseball has always been more about endurance than flash anyway.

And that concept of endurance, perhaps, leads us to the no-hitter's ultimate downfall. Both it and the shutout are symbols of individual endurance and perseverance. The pitcher stands on the mound in the late summer heat, his arm aching, the sweat bleeding under the brim of his cap. He's forced to summon his will, to overcome his own weakness and outthink his rested enemy. It's the climax of a samurai movie in a world with no more samurai.

The no-hitter as we knew it, this rugged individual accomplishment, is dying. In its place will be the new version: the work of Trevor Bauer and company, a parade of faceless names and slow jogs from the bullpen. The temptation will be to think less of this adulterated accomplishment, a mark of cowardice or weakness. In truth, it's just a natural evolution of how baseball is being played.