| 30 August 2010
In what cliched and uninventive sportswriters will surely cite as another example of 2010 being the "year of the pitcher", the Dodgers' Hiroki Kuroda took a no-hitter into the eighth inning again last night before it was broken up by Shane Victorino on a solid line drive to rightfield. I haven't had a chance to count the actual- and near-no-hitters again like I did in May, but I think it's safe to say were on pace for a pretty good year in that regard.
Which got me thinking a bit on this whole "don't talk about a no-hitter while it's in progress" taboo that we keep running into this year. It seems to be happening more and more this summer. With the advent of Twitter and every other form of instant analysis/conversation, it's impossible to avoid crossing that taboo on a regular basis, which always seems to bring out the crazies who seem to think that, by mentioning the no-hitter while it's happening, the outcome is affected. It's 2010, people. That means we're ten years into the 21st century. There is no witchcraft or sorcery, and jinxes don't exist. I'm sorry.
But that doesn't stop people from talking about it. I've seen a number of blog posts written this year discussing the phenomenon (the author is usually defending himself for breaking the taboo). There's even this post from over the weekend over at The Baseball Codes, a blog by Jason Turbow, the author of the book with the same name. In it, Turbow tells a story of how Red Barber mentioned a potential no-hitter on air during the 1947 World Series before it was broken up. He was inundated with complaints.
Since I'm not breaking any ground in discussing this silly superstition, I thought I'd share a couple of stories I found in the Google News archive that deal with the decades old taboo. The first comes from May 1976:
The red telephone rang once.Ken Leiker of the Topeka Capital-Journal picked it up and said, "No-hitter through seven." The voice of a New York sportswriter about 25 feet to his right followed with: "Shut up."
(Click "Read More" to continue reading.)
In baseball, it is considered a taboo to mention a no-hitter while it is in progress. Sunday, New York Yankee hurler Rudy May held the Kansas City Royals hitless through eight inning before yielding a leadoff double to Amos Otis in the ninth.After the fifth inning, scribes in the Royals pressbox talked about nothing but no-hitters, while carefully avoiding the mentionthat May had one going.
The typewriters, which are usually clacking away by the seventh inning, were strangely silent Sunday afternoon. Leonard Koppett of the New York Times answered the telephone in the eighth inning by saying, "Story, hell! I don't even have my lead yet." Koppett, the rotund veteran of many campaigns kept tension at a minimum through the late innings by relating tales of plane crashes that didn't occur. Most of the stories revolved around "Sputnik" airlines.
I guess that isn't too surprising. Someone has to perpetuate these superstitions to the public, so a bunch of old and "rotund" sportswriters from the 1970s being adamantly against talking about a no-hitter in progress makes a lot of sense. But then what about this article from June 1960?
NEW YORK, June 5 (AP) "Hey, Oisk, ya' know yer woikin' on a no-hitter."Every inning from the fifth on, Pitcher Carl Erskine received that information from a horsehide-lunged Dodger fan in Ebbets Field on May 12, 1956."Did I know I had a no-hitter," the former Dodger righthander recalled recently. "Heck, everybody in Brooklyn knew it."And does Carl Erskine, now a baseball broadcaster, feel that "everybody", specifically the listening or viewing audience, is entitled to know it when a pitcher is working on a no-hitter? Or is he in sympathy with the longtime superstition that says to mention a no-hitter is to jinx it?"A no-hitter," Carl says, "is part of the game. If you don't tell the people about it, you're not giving them all the information you should give them."Actually, the pitcher certainly knows it all the time. It's always obvious that the other team is trying to break it up. So why not tell the fans about the no-hitter?"Early this season Jack Buck and I were broadcasting a game at San Francisco in which Sam Jones got close to a no-hitter. We didn't hesitate to say that he hadn't allowed any hits, and we discussed frankly the excitement in the ballpark."
...
"After I pitched the no-hitter against the Giants," Erskine explains, "Buddy Blattner came down to the dressing room and told me he had talked freely about the game on the air. And remember, Buddy was a major league player before he became a broadcaster."
In tonight's game, none other than Vin Scully had no problem openly talking about the potential no-hitter while it was in progress. If Jack Buck and Vin Scully feel that they can talk about a no-hitter in progress, then I'm not sure what leg any of the superstitious fans have to stand on. There have never been two smarter, more respected ambassadors of the game than Scully and the elder Buck, and if they didn't see anything wrong with it, everyone else should probably just shut up about it.
It's wishful thinking, I know, but at least you and I now know just how silly the superstitious really are. It's one thing to have Murray Chass in your corner. It's something completely different to have Vin Scully and Jack Buck. I'll take the latter every time.
