That's a no-no

Well, here it is, May 23 – less than two months into the major league baseball season – and we've already seen six – count 'em, folks, six – no-hitters.

In fact, two of those no-hitters were hurled within 24 hours of each other when Detroit's Spencer Turnbull blanked Seattle on Tuesday and then New York Yankees Corey Kluber no-hit Cleveland on Wednesday.

The four other no-no's saw San Diego's Joe Musgrove defeat Texas on April 9; Chicago White Sox' Carlos Rodon blanked Cleveland on April 14; Baltimore's John Means did the same to Seattle on May 5, and Cincinnati's Wade Miley whitewashed Cleveland on May 8.

Look closer: Seattle, Cleveland and Texas have each been no-hit twice this season. That's weird. That's awful. Those three teams by themselves are going a long way to contributing to the MLB composite batting average of .236, the lowest in decades.

And don't forget the curious case of Arizona's Madison Bumgarner, who blanked Atlanta on April 25 in a no-hitter that didn't count because it only went seven innings instead of nine. This happened because Major League Baseball decided it could speed up the game by making both ends of doubleheaders seven innings instead of nine this season, and therefore it follows the guidelines it set in 1991 to eliminate rain-shortened no-hitters. So there. It's a rule. Write your Congressman (You know, the guy who won't vote to investigate sedition and insurrection in attacks on the Capitol. But that's a different blog).

At any rate, Bumgarner included or not, MLB is on a pace to see 20 no-hitters this year. That's nuts, and I don't think it will happen. Not unless Seattle, Texas and Cleveland somehow get worse. (Oh, yeah. Seattle just put four relievers on the Covid-19 list after positive tests on Friday. Yikes. The Mariners really are getting worse.)

The record for no-hitters in a season is seven, and believe it or not, it's happened four times: 1990, 1991, 2012 and 2015.

What's going on? All I can do is guess based on what I've read.

The most obvious answer is that the pitching has improved dramatically over the years. Not only are pitchers regularly serving up 100-mile-an-hour-plus fastballs, but 80-mph sliders, 95-mph sinkers, 85-mph changeups and 78-mph curves. I've always believed hitting a pitched ball is the hardest thing to do in sports. Now imagine even professional hitters going up against a pitcher's repertoire like this every night, especially when the pitcher is painting the corners of the plate with unbelievable control.

Coupled with this superior pitching is baseball's current offensive fad of trying to knock the ball out of the park with each swing. Home runs are where the big money contracts are. Ask Bryce Harper. Batters are lunging at pitches out of the strike zone. Nobody, it seems, is hitting for base hits. No sacrifice bunts. No hit-and-runs. The strategy is to knock the cover off the ball, ala Roy Hobbs (and he was fictional).

In 2019, MLB saw a record 6,776 home runs, which seemingly counters the superior pitching argument. Until you consider batting averages are dropping like anchors. As of today, there are only 22 players in all of major league baseball – both leagues combined – hitting .300 or above. Pathetic.

Now, the ball was altered slightly coming into the season with the aim of decreasing the number of homers being hit. The Rawlings company, which hand-stitches its baseballs in Costa Rica, has loosened the first three wool windings inside each ball, taking out some of its "bounciness." This, of course, has nothing to do with pitching, unless you figure the baseballs now weigh 2.8 grams less than they used to and is that really a factor?

We might be in a new manufactured dead ball era, but not a dead pitcher era.

I remember back in the late 1960s when pitchers like Bob Gibson and Luis Tiant were dominating the game. Seven starters had an earned run average of under 2.00 in 1968. That's nuts. Baseball decided to lower the mound that year from 15 inches to 10 inches high and the strike zone shrank from shoulders to knees to the current armpits to the top of the knees. Or thereabouts.

It worked. Pitchers lost their dominance.

But now, 53 years later, you have to wonder, what have we gained?