The Main Event

  • August 23, 1992 – The Class-A Clearwater Phillies beat the Winter Haven Red Sox 1-0 without either team recording a hit; the game’s only run scored on two walks and a suicide-squeeze sacrifice bunt.

The game was at old Jack Russell Stadium in Clearwater, Florida and it remains one of the strangest and rarest results in professional baseball history: a Class-A Florida State League game in which both starting pitchers threw complete-game no-hitters, and the winning team scored its only run without the benefit of a base hit. About 1,500 fans were on hand that night, most with no idea they were about to witness something that had not happened in organized baseball in 40 years.

The game was played under a strange, tense backdrop. Hurricane Andrew, the catastrophic Category 5 storm, was churning toward South Florida the same week, and the threat of bad weather hung over the ballpark all night. A rain delay held up play for roughly 35 minutes in the fifth inning, forcing both managers to decide on the spot whether to trust their starters with wet grounds and a break in their rhythm.

Clearwater skipper Bill Dancy huddled with his pitching coach and decided left-hander Andy Carter still “had bullets left in his gun.” On the other side, Winter Haven’s Scott Bakkum, working in what was his first professional start, said he had no intention of coming out early: he’d just returned from a rehab assignment and didn’t want the outing cut short by rain.

Two pitchers matching zeroes

Carter, a Philadelphia-area left-hander who had grown up watching the Phillies train at the very ballpark he was now pitching in, and Bakkum, a Wisconsin right-hander making his professional debut, spent the night trading shutout innings without either offense solving them. By Carter’s own recollection decades later, there was no parade of diving catches or robbed extra-base hits behind him — the Red Sox hitters were simply overmatched, chasing pitches early in the count. “I was throwing strikes and they were swinging at first pitches left and right and popping up and grounding out,” Carter said. “I don’t think I was overpowering at all. I just don’t know if they weren’t seeing the ball good.”

Carter himself admitted he didn’t have his best stuff early on and only settled in after the rain delay. The defense behind both pitchers turned every ball in play into an out, but by all contemporary accounts it was routine contact — soft grounders and pop-ups — rather than spectacular defensive gems saving the two pitchers.

A run without a hit

The game’s only run came in the bottom of the seventh. Bakkum walked Clearwater left fielder Phil Geisler, then walked designated hitter Troy Rusk. Right fielder Gene Schall bunted the runners over to second and third. Then third baseman Ken Sirak, in what Dancy remembered as a suicide-squeeze call — though he could no longer recall decades later whether he or Sirak initiated it — dropped a bunt up the first-base line. Geisler crossed the plate standing up, with no play at home. Clearwater had its 1-0 lead, and it would hold up as the only scoring of the night on either side.

Realizing what was happening

For much of the game, almost nobody grasped the magnitude of what was unfolding. Clearwater general manager John Timberlake was in his office and only wandered out to the stands in the fifth inning, where a pair of season-ticket holders pointed him to the scoreboard and told him to look twice — not only was Carter working on a no-hitter, but Winter Haven hadn’t managed a hit either.

By the seventh-inning stretch, a buzz was rippling through the small crowd. Players on both benches, by their own admission, kept quiet about it in the dugout — baseball superstition dictates you never mention a no-hitter in progress — but by the final out, the realization set in all at once. A local cable broadcast carried the game, and footage made it onto ESPN’s SportsCenter that night. Timberlake’s office phones “started ringing and ringing,” he recalled, as wire services and reporters tried to figure out when — or if — this had ever happened before.

A vanishingly rare feat

It had happened before, but barely. Research by baseball historians turned up nine prior double no-hitters scattered across the low minors dating back to 1886, most of them obscure Class D or independent league affairs from the early 1900s.

The most recent had come in 1952, when Bradford’s Frank Etchberger and Batavia’s Jim Mitchell dueled to a hitless 1-0 game in the New York-Penn League. No double no-hitter has ever occurred in a Major League game, though two Hall of Fame-caliber arms came close on May 2, 1917, when Cincinnati’s Fred Toney and Chicago’s Hippo Vaughn both carried no-hitters through nine full innings before the Reds broke through in the tenth. Bakkum, for his part, would call his own effort in Clearwater bittersweet: he may be the only pitcher in professional history to throw a no-hitter in his very first start and lose.

Where the careers went from there

Neither Carter nor Bakkum became a big-league fixture, but both reached affiliated baseball’s upper levels.

Carter made it to the majors in 1994 and delivered one of the era’s stranger Phillies debuts: called into a game against San Diego, he hit the first two batters he faced, catcher Brad Ausmus and infielder Luis Lopez, and was ejected by an umpire still on edge from a bench-clearing brawl the previous night — all without a warning being issued.

He pitched parts of two seasons in Philadelphia before an arm injury, sustained in a separate on-field brawl in the minors, derailed his career; he later played independent ball and a stint in Taiwan before retiring.

Bakkum was eventually traded to the Phillies organization in 1996, briefly becoming a teammate of Schall’s, but a torn ulnar nerve in his elbow ended his career in spring training the following year. Gene Schall, the right fielder whose bunt set up the winning run, later reached the majors himself as an infielder for the Phillies in 1995 and 1996 before moving into scouting. Dancy went on to a decades-long career in the game, eventually serving as the Phillies’ third base coach in the mid-2000s.

The Baseball Hall of Fame took notice too: its curator requested artifacts from the game, and Timberlake shipped Cooperstown the ball from the final out along with both pitchers’ autographed caps — a small, permanent record of the night two Class-A pitchers combined to make baseball history without either offense ever putting the ball safely in play.

Philadelphia Baseball Events for August 23

  • August 23, 1910 – Pittsburgh left fielder Fred Clarke made a record-tying four outfield assists in a game against the Phillies, throwing out two runners at home and one each at third and second.
  • August 23, 1918 – Irish Meusel hit an inside-the-park grand slam in Cincinnati, but the Phillies still fell 8-7 to the Reds.
  • August 23, 1931 – Chasing a record-breaking 17th straight win, Athletics ace Lefty Grove lost 1-0 to the St. Louis Browns after rookie fill-in outfielder Johnny Moore (subbing for an injured Al Simmons) misjudged a fly ball that let in the game’s only run. Grove reportedly tore apart the clubhouse afterward in fury. (For more on Grove’s 16-game win streak and his post-game reaction, click here.
  • August 23, 1947 – Cardinals slugger Joe Medwick, after yelling at the Phillies dugout that he’d hit the next pitch out, did just that — a three-run homer into the upper deck at Shibe Park, his 205th and final career home run, powering a 5-3 Cardinals win.
  • August 23, 1999 – Scott Rolen struck out five times, tying a team and major-league record, in a 7-6 Phillies loss to San Diego at the Vet.
  • August 23, 2009 – With runners on first and second and nobody out in the bottom of the ninth, Mets batter Jeff Francoeur lined out to Eric Bruntlett, who stepped on second and tagged the runner for a game-ending unassisted triple play — only the second in MLB history to end a game that way.

ICYMI

Philadelphia Baseball Birthdays for August 23

  • Lew Richie (born 1883) – A right-handed pitcher who broke in with his hometown Phillies in 1906 and stayed through 1909, posting a career-best 1.77 ERA in 1907 before later pitching for the Boston Doves and Chicago Cubs.
  • Roy Leslie (born 1894) – A first baseman who was the Phillies’ regular starter at the position in 1922, his only full big-league season, batting .266 with 6 home runs over a brief three-team career.
  • Ed Murphy (born 1918) – A first baseman whose entire major-league career consisted of 13 games with the 1942 Phillies, hitting .250 (7-for-28) before spending the rest of his playing days in the minors.
  • John Morris (born 1941) – A left-handed reliever originally drafted by the Phillies who made his big-league debut with them in 1966, though most of his eight-season career unfolded later with the Orioles, Pilots/Brewers, and Giants.
  • Julio Franco (born 1958) – A future three-time All-Star who began his 23-year career playing 16 games with the 1982 Phillies before being traded to Cleveland that December in the deal that brought Von Hayes to Philadelphia.
  • Tony Ghelfi (born 1961) – A first-round 1980 draft pick who made his only MLB starts for the Phillies in September 1983, winning his debut against the Giants before finishing his brief career at 1-1.
  • Jeff Manto (born 1964) – A corner infielder who played eight games for the 1993 NL champion Phillies, part of a nine-team playing career; he later became a respected major-league hitting coach for the Pirates, White Sox, and Red Sox.
  • Bobby Estalella (born 1974) – A catcher who broke in with the Phillies in 1996 and, in just his 10th career game the following September, hit three home runs against Montreal — the fastest anyone had ever reached a three-homer game.
  • Chris Roberson (born 1979) – A Phillies ninth-round draft pick and 2005 Eastern League Rookie of the Year who played parts of the 2006 and 2007 seasons in Philadelphia as a reserve outfielder.
  • Alexander De Los Santos (born 2006) – Posted a 15.19 ERA in three starts and four relief appearances with the FCL Phillies this season prior to being placed on the 60-day IL.
  • Will Vierling (born 2003) – Currently with the Clearwater Threshers, Vierling is hitting .240/.324/.378 with seven home runs and 34 RBI.

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