The divine beauty of Rich Hill’s no-hitter that wasn’t

I’ve written a variation of this theme before, and I’ll write it again: No-hitters are baseball. They’re one part luck and several parts skill. The great catch that saves the no-hitter in the eighth is the random bench player who hits a home run in the ALCS. The nasty curveball that hitters can’t touch throughout nine hitless innings is the same thing as a team’s best player driving in runs in Game 7. The Cubs won the World Series because, yes, they were an incredible collection of talent, but also because they had one of the cleanest injury sheets of any World Series team in history. When a pitcher throws a no-hitter, it’s as much about the baseballs that were caught as it is the baseballs that batters couldn’t hit.

When a pitcher loses a no-hitter in the 10th inning, that’s not baseball. That’s something that transcends the sport, and the analogy breaks down. Hear me out: It becomes something that’s even better.

Not for Rich Hill! No, he’d rather have the no-hitter and the win, and I can’t blame him. For the pitcher, it’s obviously preferable to be at the bottom of a dogpile, to get neon sugar water dumped on your head while you’re being interviewed, to go where Roger Clemens and Greg Maddux never could. I can appreciate that, and I feel bad for Hill. The fact that we’re talking about him at all will never stop being amazing.

For us, though? This becomes a much more fascinating story. This becomes a painting that we hang on our wall instead of a page in one of the books on our bookshelf. Here’s a list of pitchers who have thrown a no-hitter in the last 20 years, except I’ve added someone who didn’t throw a no-hitter:

Maybe you’re a superfan who can spot the imposter immediately. For most of us, though, there will be a lot of garbled wait-a-secs and fuzzy reminders. Some of those are no-hitters you watched or remember vividly for some reason. Others are like a song that you just can’t place.

Here’s a list of pitchers who lost a no-hitter in the 10th inning on a danged walk-off home run:

And you’ll remember that for years. Decades. There won’t be a moment where you’re searching for his name. Who’s the dude who threw two no-hitters in a row? Johnny Vander Meer. Who’s the guy who lost a no-hitter in the 10th inning on a home run? Rich Hill. Who’s the pitcher who threw a no-hitter against the Angels in 1986? Well, uh, hold on, let me get my phone out ...

A no-hitter for Hill would have meant a lot of things. It would have meant that his covey of curveballs were all working, all under his complete control. It would have meant that he mixed speeds expertly. But it also would have meant that all of these baseballs in the middle of the plate were missed, for whatever reason:

All the light-red squares were called strikes. All the dark-blue squares were outs. You can see a bunch of them in the middle of the plate. And you really don’t see a lot of yellow squares outside of the strike zone. While this confirms that the Pirates weren’t swinging the bat well against Hill, which is sort of what a pitcher is supposed to do, it also confirms that they had their chances. But only if they were throwing paper when he was throwing rock*, and that just ... never happened.

* Technically, considering how many different looks Hill can give you with his curveball, it was more like this than the traditional rock-paper-scissors game, but you get the point.

Now think about what it took for Hill to lose a no-hitter in the 10th inning on a home run. It had to take all of the above and it had to include a sputtering offensive performance from a team that hadn’t been shut out in months. One of the best lineups in baseball couldn’t do much against three different Pirates pitchers. Trevor Williams is the pitcher you would design in a lab if you wanted to create someone who wasn’t likely to shut the Dodgers down. He’s right-handed, a hard thrower, but not that hard, inexperienced, prone to bouts of wildness ... exactly the kind of pitcher that the Dodgers have feasted on this year.

Other pitchers the Dodgers have feasted on this year: all of them. That part doesn’t really matter. It’s just important that this was the game in which they were shut down. If a no-hitter is really an amalgam of different statistical probabilities and permutations colliding, the Dodgers’ not scoring a run was a huge, unlikely set of conditions to add to the pile, which makes everything that much more unlikely, that much more of a special twinkly diamond.

We can use analogies to prove the point, too. What’s more impressive: Carlos Delgado hitting four home runs in a game, or Carlos Delgado hitting two inside-the-park home runs in a game? It’s close, but give me the second one.

What’s more impressive: John Jaso hitting for the cycle, or John Jaso tripping while rounding second base and getting tagged out before he got the triple that would have completed the cycle? I don’t remember Jaso hitting a cycle, but I would probably have a t-shirt made of him tripping.

What’s more impressive: the two cycles hit in Blue Jays history, or the complete lack of cycles the Padres hit from 1969 to 2015? The former is a boring fact. The latter was an artistic statement and a middle finger to statistical likelihood.

I’d even argue that Dodgers fans should appreciate the oddity of Hill allowing no hits in nine innings and losing. It came in a season that’s one of the best in a long, storied franchise history. Of the 110 or 120 games the Dodgers will win this year, they couldn’t win the game in which their starting pitcher didn’t allow a hit or a walk for nine innings. That’s an eclipse that you shouldn’t look away from. Embrace the weirdness as a rare spice in the stew of baseball.

Hill and his teammates are right to be upset or annoyed, just as they’re right to forget it ever happened. The rest of us, though? Oh, we should appreciate this tiny baseball gift. The next no-hitter will be celebrated, as it should be. But this will stand for decades to come as one of the great exploding jack-in-the-boxes in baseball history, and I’m much more into that. Bless you, Rich Hill. Bless you, Josh Harrison. And bless you, every single Dodger who just couldn’t get that runner home. You’ve made baseball even more interesting than it already was.