Pete Millerman said...
Back when I was a kid, a no-hitter was big. The connotation was mythic and inspiring. A timeless halo of towering supernatural achievement accompanied the feat, more or less.

Case in point: when confronted with a contraption at my elementary school's spring fair that made buttons out of any old piece of paper or cardboard, I stepped right up and created an Ed Halicki button. I had bought a pack of cards that day... there were a couple of fringe-y Mets along the Mike Phillips trajectory...some lesser lights on the border of stardom - a Dennis Eckersley say, or a Steve Foucault... But in deference to the super-human Giants junkballer who had No-Hit the Mets the previous August, I sported an Ed Halicki button for an entire weekend.

This sense of childlike awe that came part and parcel with the hurlers who had thrown a no-hitter explains, perhaps, my enduring respect for the Forsch brothers, or my wondering why Steve Busby is not on the road to the Hall of Fame.

As time has moved forward with alarming velocity, the mere fact that no New York Met has ever, ever completed a no-hitter has weighed heavily upon my psyche. The no-hit fleece has grown only more golden and tantalizing through the years. Dates, jobs, dinners, family gatherings have all been callously interrupted and ruined by my sprinting off to the nearest saloon upon hearing word that, say, David Cone had not allowed a Padre to reach base after six innings...

Dick Bosman's star rose from that ash heap of the lower rungs of AL East-dom when, at my baseball-crazed summer day-camp, news filtered down that Bosman had somehow No-Hit the World Champion Oakland Athletics(!) one afternoon on the sweltering shores of Lake Erie - thus affording him, in my eyes at least, a legitimacy that bordered on the immortal.

Anyhow, there are but two postscripts to this allegory, offering, of course, a ubiquitous and expected near-Sophoclean twist of irony to gild the proceedings.

The first being that Dick Bosman was dealt the next season to an Oakland team that, as has been noted, was already in the early stages of an unseemly decline of epic proportions. Traded, in fact, for the consumate "A's 'A'," long-standing franchise staple Blue Moon Odom, who had, himself, valiantly pitched 3.2 innings of scoreless relief for Oakland the day that Bosman No-Hit them.

Odom would revisit his old digs by the bay the very next year following the trade, combining with the late Fransisco Barrios to No-Hit Bosman's Oakland team, (then in the process of missing the playoffs for the first time in half-a-decade), and earning the final victory of his lengthy career, going out in a Blue-Mooned haze of glory.

The other item of note is the small piece of business that Bosman's no-hitter could have very well been only the second AL regular season Perfect Game in the preceding 52 years, had he not personally botched the throw to first base on a weakly hit Sal Bando dribbler in the fourth inning.

At that juncture of my youthful, impressionable stage of fandom, the idea of a pitcher throwing a Perfect Game was something out of legend. Akin maybe to dragons roaming the earth, or the Hoover Administration. It was something I had never experienced happening in baseball. It would have been bigger than big.

Whether Bosman spent his his remaining summers wandering the earth in tortured lament following his spring training release from a cellar-bound Oakland team that finished 38-and-a-half games out of first place (and featured a pair of 19-game losers alongside such luminaries as Jim Umbarger and Pablo Torrealba in the starting rotation) is probably information best left between himself and Zeus.

All I know for sure is that back in the mid-70's, back in my childhood, there was certainly a throne and footstool for Dick Bosman, albeit briefly, somewhere in a Cardboard Olympian realm...

5:35 PM

Michael said...
This is so f^&king good I can hardly stand it.

Please tell me you're going to publish.

9:56 AM