Monday, March 12, 2012

Trucks was minor league no-hit master

Uncommon commons. Based on contemporary accounts from The Sporting News; tidbits that as a collector of baseball and football cards I found interesting because they help bring to life the faces on the cards I collected. I figure that if I found these items of interest, so would other vintage card collectors.I consider myself more than a casual baseball historian, especially of the era of my greatest baseball card interest, the 1950s.


Last time I relayed the story of Johnny Vander Meer's third no-hitter.


This time I'll tell you about another major league pitcher who had two no-hitters in one season . . . and four in the minor leagues.


In 1952, Detroit Tigers pitcher Virgil Trucks no-hit the Washington Senators on May 15, for a 1-0 win. On Aug. 25, he notched another no-hitter, a 1-0 victory over the N.Y. Yankees, to become only the third major league pitcher to throw two no-hitters in a season (Vander Meer in 1938, Allie Reynolds in 1951; they have since been joined b y Nolan Ryan in 1973 and Roy Halliday in 2010).


It is less well-known that Trucks almost became the only pitcher to have three no-hit games in a season. In between his gems, on July 22 he was again pitching against the Senators. Mickey Vernon led off the game with a single . . . the only hit he allowed in a 1-0 shutout he walked three).


In 1938, his first year of professional ball, while pitching for the Andalusia Bulldogs under questionable contract status in the Class D Alabama-Florida League Trucks also had two no-hitters. He was 25-6 that season, with a 1.25 ERA. He set a modern professional record with 418 strikeouts; that record stood for eight years.


With Beaumont in the Texas League in 1940, Trucks threw his third no-hitter.


Trucks' fourth minor league no-hitter came in 1941, with Buffalo of the International League. But he lost that game. Trucks had his gem going into the 10th inning when Montreal scored to win 1-0. Under the rules of that time, it still counted as a no-hit game. 


In 1991, MLB's Committee for Statistical Accuracy ruled that a "An official no-hit game occurs when a pitcher (or pitchers) allows no hits during the entire course of a game, which consists of at least nine innings." Technically, this would negate Trucks' fourth no-hit game.



No comments:

Post a Comment

Your comments, criticism, additional information, questions, etc., are welcome . . . as long as they are germane to the original topic. All comments are moderated before they are allowed to appear and spam comments are deleted before they ever appear. No "Anonymous User" comments are allowed.