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[This is part of a series exploring the Baseball Tarot. If you would like to prompt for a part of the game or a card from the deck, all the rest of the month is available for your curiosity, about either baseball or Tarot. Leave a comment with a prompt if you want in. All other comments are still welcome, of course.]
Welcome to the second round of December Days on the Baseball Tarot. This was a great series for me to write last year, and I hope this year will have the same quality and possibly a few more comments.
This session starts with something that is statistically kept in relation to the pitcher, but is accomplished by the entire team. The no-hitter is an accomplishment for the defense where an entire game is completed without an official hit recorded for the offense. It's not as stringent a requirement as the perfect game, where all the batters have to be sent down in order without walks, hits, or errors in the defense, but it's still a fiendishly difficult task to accomplish, and any defense that accomplishes a no-no should receive proper accolades for their skills, even as they acknowledge their luck in getting things to fall in the right places. No-hitters can be shared between pitchers statistically, but generally speaking, the no-hitter is a complete game by one pitcher in which no batter records a hit. Through the end of the 2015 season, there have been slightly less than 300 no-hitters recorded in the entirety of Major League Baseball, so you couldn't even fill two full seasons with them.
Part of what makes a no-hitter so difficult to accomplish is that even though there are nine defensive players, the offense has at least three whacks at the pitcher each, and as the pitch counts go up, fatigue is much more likely to work against the defense then for them. Fatigue slows the velocity of pitches and increases the possibility the pitch called for isn't the one that gets thrown. Opportunistic hitters pounce on those mistakes to hit pitches very far. So, a near requisite to a no-hitter is pitching efficiency - using only a few pitches to retire a batter leaves many more pitches available to retire the rest. A pitcher that doesn't have their velocity or control working exactly right for them is going to have a hard time throwing a no hitter.
Also working against the defense is that despite there being nine defenders, there's a lot of ground to cover to grab batted balls, especially in the outfield. No-hitters have almost zero well-hit balls that travel in lines, instead of long arcs or ground balls. The best, fastest defenders in the game can't chase down a ball hit just slightly over the shortstop's head...
...except when they totally do. Almost every no-hitter has something in the game where the defense comes up with something better suited to a stage magician's show, running down a ball that would have been a home run but for a few feet, spearing a line drive headed for the foul line, or a masterful barehanded grab and throw that beats a surprise bunt by juuuuust enough. Baseball really is a game of inches in all its aspects, and sometimes the inches all go the defense's way.
Working in favor of the defense on a level more than sheer luck, the definition of what constitutes a hit has more than a few places where what seems obvious isn't. Walks aren't hits, because they're defensive penalties that don't result in an official at-bat. Fielder's Choices aren't official at-bats, either, so they can't result in hits. Throwing or fielding errors can result in no hit being awarded, if the official scorer's judgment says the batter only reached base safely because the defense didn't cleanly record an out they should have gotten. In any if those situations, if the next batter hits a ground ball, the defense can clean up the runners and the no-hitter is preserved. Incidentally, this means it is possible to pitch a no hitter and lose the baseball game. This has happened twice in the MLB's recorded history, both in the 1960s.
No-hitters are also one of the places where the superstitions of baseball come out in a hurry. As a nod to the statistical improbability of such a feat, if the pitcher is carrying a potential no-no into later innings, the other members of the team will give the pitcher a wide berth, not interacting with them, talking to them, or doing anything to break the supposed concentration, rhythm, or luck of the pitcher, even though it's the entire team that's contributing to what's going on. If there are gods of baseball, they must be perpetually amused and interested in the superstitions and offerings that players and fans make to them.
If this card appears in your reading, as always, it's a question is whether you're throwing or hitting. If you're the defense, a no-hitter means really good things for your team! Individual efforts are meshing at their very best, and the unknowns are all working in your favor. Be careful of fatigue throwing things off, and while the temptation will be to put all the glory into the hands of one or a few people, remember that the "routine" outs are just as important to the completion of the work as the spectacular, highlight-reel defense that will get all the play on the sport shows that night. If your no-hitter is still in progress, be careful of staying in your head for too long. There's nothing that needs to radically change, necessarily, to keep things going - the baseball hasn't actually changed, it's just going exceptionally well at this particular point. If the no-hitter breaks, remember you still have to finish out the game, even if you won't get that particular decoration in your career this time. Keep your head in the game and concentrate, or that one hit will start unraveling all the good work you've been doing up to this point.
If you're on the receiving end of a no-hitter, well, keep trying. It may be that you have been doing everything you can, that your fundamentals are sound, and the defense is just everywhere, including some improbable events, so nothing appears to be working. It only takes one hit to break things up, and it might be the spark for your own rally. Don't be discouraged - there will be days where nothing you do works, and the best that you can do is get through that game and on to the next one.
Welcome to the second round of December Days on the Baseball Tarot. This was a great series for me to write last year, and I hope this year will have the same quality and possibly a few more comments.
This session starts with something that is statistically kept in relation to the pitcher, but is accomplished by the entire team. The no-hitter is an accomplishment for the defense where an entire game is completed without an official hit recorded for the offense. It's not as stringent a requirement as the perfect game, where all the batters have to be sent down in order without walks, hits, or errors in the defense, but it's still a fiendishly difficult task to accomplish, and any defense that accomplishes a no-no should receive proper accolades for their skills, even as they acknowledge their luck in getting things to fall in the right places. No-hitters can be shared between pitchers statistically, but generally speaking, the no-hitter is a complete game by one pitcher in which no batter records a hit. Through the end of the 2015 season, there have been slightly less than 300 no-hitters recorded in the entirety of Major League Baseball, so you couldn't even fill two full seasons with them.
Part of what makes a no-hitter so difficult to accomplish is that even though there are nine defensive players, the offense has at least three whacks at the pitcher each, and as the pitch counts go up, fatigue is much more likely to work against the defense then for them. Fatigue slows the velocity of pitches and increases the possibility the pitch called for isn't the one that gets thrown. Opportunistic hitters pounce on those mistakes to hit pitches very far. So, a near requisite to a no-hitter is pitching efficiency - using only a few pitches to retire a batter leaves many more pitches available to retire the rest. A pitcher that doesn't have their velocity or control working exactly right for them is going to have a hard time throwing a no hitter.
Also working against the defense is that despite there being nine defenders, there's a lot of ground to cover to grab batted balls, especially in the outfield. No-hitters have almost zero well-hit balls that travel in lines, instead of long arcs or ground balls. The best, fastest defenders in the game can't chase down a ball hit just slightly over the shortstop's head...
...except when they totally do. Almost every no-hitter has something in the game where the defense comes up with something better suited to a stage magician's show, running down a ball that would have been a home run but for a few feet, spearing a line drive headed for the foul line, or a masterful barehanded grab and throw that beats a surprise bunt by juuuuust enough. Baseball really is a game of inches in all its aspects, and sometimes the inches all go the defense's way.
Working in favor of the defense on a level more than sheer luck, the definition of what constitutes a hit has more than a few places where what seems obvious isn't. Walks aren't hits, because they're defensive penalties that don't result in an official at-bat. Fielder's Choices aren't official at-bats, either, so they can't result in hits. Throwing or fielding errors can result in no hit being awarded, if the official scorer's judgment says the batter only reached base safely because the defense didn't cleanly record an out they should have gotten. In any if those situations, if the next batter hits a ground ball, the defense can clean up the runners and the no-hitter is preserved. Incidentally, this means it is possible to pitch a no hitter and lose the baseball game. This has happened twice in the MLB's recorded history, both in the 1960s.
No-hitters are also one of the places where the superstitions of baseball come out in a hurry. As a nod to the statistical improbability of such a feat, if the pitcher is carrying a potential no-no into later innings, the other members of the team will give the pitcher a wide berth, not interacting with them, talking to them, or doing anything to break the supposed concentration, rhythm, or luck of the pitcher, even though it's the entire team that's contributing to what's going on. If there are gods of baseball, they must be perpetually amused and interested in the superstitions and offerings that players and fans make to them.
If this card appears in your reading, as always, it's a question is whether you're throwing or hitting. If you're the defense, a no-hitter means really good things for your team! Individual efforts are meshing at their very best, and the unknowns are all working in your favor. Be careful of fatigue throwing things off, and while the temptation will be to put all the glory into the hands of one or a few people, remember that the "routine" outs are just as important to the completion of the work as the spectacular, highlight-reel defense that will get all the play on the sport shows that night. If your no-hitter is still in progress, be careful of staying in your head for too long. There's nothing that needs to radically change, necessarily, to keep things going - the baseball hasn't actually changed, it's just going exceptionally well at this particular point. If the no-hitter breaks, remember you still have to finish out the game, even if you won't get that particular decoration in your career this time. Keep your head in the game and concentrate, or that one hit will start unraveling all the good work you've been doing up to this point.
If you're on the receiving end of a no-hitter, well, keep trying. It may be that you have been doing everything you can, that your fundamentals are sound, and the defense is just everywhere, including some improbable events, so nothing appears to be working. It only takes one hit to break things up, and it might be the spark for your own rally. Don't be discouraged - there will be days where nothing you do works, and the best that you can do is get through that game and on to the next one.
