A.J. Burnett Goes Effectively Wild
The no-hitter is among baseball's greatest achievements, but sometimes, you don't even need to be good to get one.
When I was 15 years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, watching the Pirates as they built a playoff team for the first and only time since I was born, my favorite player wasn’t Andrew McCutchen. It wasn’t Gerrit Cole or Mark Melancon.
My favorite player was A.J. Burnett.
Don’t get me wrong, Burnett was absolutely one of the most popular players on the team, but it isn’t like he was some Pirates legend. After all, he only played in Pittsburgh for three years at the end of his career. Maybe it was the cool tattoos, or the fact he’d earned the nickname “Batman” during his time in baseball. Maybe it was because the arrival of Burnett signified that finally, after two decades of embarrassment, the Pirates were finally a contender.
Either way, Burnett made a mark. On May 12th, 2001, he made an entirely different kind of mark.
Let’s get a sense of what A.J. Burnett’s career looked like at this point in time. Before the 2001 season, he had just 20 career starts, pitching to a roughly league-average 4.35 ERA. Burnett had been a top prospect for Florida, not that anyone really knew.
Burnett came to the Marlins just before the 1998 season as a 21 year old minor leaguer. The trade that sent Burnett to Florida was part of the Marlins organization dismantling their 1997 roster just months after winning the World Series. This is basically unheard of. If a team today won the World Series and immediately shipped off all their best players, fans would be in mutiny, just like they were back then. Marlins fans stopped coming to the ballpark, and by 2001 the Marlins had the second-lowest attendance in the Major Leagues, ahead of only the Montreal Expos.
Luckily for A.J., what he’s about to do is about to be seen by a stadium full of people, as the Marlins are playing in San Diego on this particular day in front of a crowd of over 40,000. It’s only his second start of the season after missing the first month due to a stress factor in his right foot.
Remember how I told you about Burnett’s 20 career starts and his 4.35 ERA? Yeah, I forgot to mention any aspect of his pitching style. Burnett threw absolute trash, and because it was trash that moved all over the place, batters would often swing and miss at it. In his first two years, over 124 innings, he struck out 90 batters and walked 69. To say he was a loose cannon is something of an understatement, but he still managed to be effective.
Usually when a pitcher like this pitches a great game, it’s because the pitches that usually end up just outside of the strike zone nip the corners, or because the other team is off their game and swinging at their garbage.
Well, A.J. Burnett is about to go against all of that.
Burnett cruises through the first inning. He strikes out Rickey Henderson to start the game, then gets groundouts on either side of a base-on-balls to Ryan Klesko. The second inning gets a little rockier as Burnett walks the first two batters, but recovers to force a flyout from Damian Jackson, then gets Donaldo Mendez to ground into an inning-ending double play.
His third inning was even rockier than the second. Burnett starts by striking out the opposing pitcher, then walking Rickey Henderson. Henderson, the greatest base stealer of all-time, steals second of course while Burnett is in the process of walking Mark Kotsay, already his 5th of the game. He then throws a wild pitch to Klesko, but again snakes out of his own trouble with a strikeout and flyout for the 2nd and 3rd outs.
Burnett adds another walk to Bubba Trammell in the 4th, and just to switch things up hits Damian Jackson with a pitch but again gets out of the inning with a pair of strikeouts to San Diego’s 8th and 9th hitters.
Finally, Burnett gets his act together, retiring the next six batters in a row, but by the end of the 6th inning, he’s at 91 pitches. Nowadays, this would be the end of Burnett’s start, despite the fact that he’s throwing a no-hitter. Not only is he very close to the 100-pitch limit that most modern managers stick to, but he’s walked six batters and hit another. There really is no reason for him to be this effective.
Manager Tony Boles, who is 16 days away from being fired by the Marlins, doesn’t seem to care. He leaves Burnett out there, and Burnett continues to pitch well. He forces a groundout from Alex Arias, then hands a four-pitch walk to Donaldo Mendez, Burnett’s 7th of the game before forcing a flyout from pinch-hitter Mike Colangelo, and a strikeout from leadoff hitter Rickey Henderson. At this point, Burnett is at 102 pitches. His arm has to be tired. Go outside right now and throw a ball 102 times, as hard as you can, with the exact same motion each time. You will be very, very tired.
Despite this, Burnett comes out again in the 8th, and once again, it starts looking like the wheels are falling off for our buddy A.J.. Kotsay grounds out to lead off the inning, then Klesko and Dave Magadan each reach on walks. However, just like he’s done all night, he slithers out of the situation by forcing two straight foul ground popups from Ben Davis and Bubba Trammell.
At this point Burnett has thrown 120 pitches to the Padres. 58 of them have been either strikes or batted balls. 62 of them have been balls. More often than not, when a pitcher throws more balls than strikes, he gets beat up on by the opponent. Every once in a while though, you can do the wrong equation and get the right result. The Padres weren’t a terrible team either, sure they went 79-83 in 2001, but they had some great hitters like Ryan Klesko and Phil Nevin, although the latter wasn’t in the starting lineup on this day.
Burnett’s 9th inning ended up as his best of the game. He took just two pitches to get a flyout out of Alex Arias, then backed that up with his 7th strikeout of the game to Santiago Perez to make it two outs. With one out left before his rendezvous with history, Burnett has to face Padres’ star-player Phil Nevin, who would go on to hit 41 home runs in the ‘01 season with an OPS of .976.
But just like every other time Burnett got in trouble that night, he finds a way out of it.
Burnett’s no-hitter was the third in Marlins history, five years and one day after the franchise’s first, which was thrown by Al Leiter, the player Burnett was traded for. Burnett’s nine walks remain a Marlins franchise record for a single game. In fact, every single position player in San Diego’s starting lineup made it on base by either a walk or by being hit by a pitch. It’s actually pretty impressive that Burnett managed to walk nine batters while throwing only 129 pitches. 54 of those pitches were part of a base-on-balls, meaning that it took him just 75 pitches to make it through the other 28 batters. If you weren’t being walked by Burnett on this night, he was the scariest pitcher on the face of the Earth.
A.J. Burnett’s no-hitter is considered by many to be the worst no-hitter of all-time, but that’s like saying the Portofino is the worst Ferrari. You’re not wrong, but come on. The Portofino is still a Ferrari and this 9-walk turd of a game by Burnett is still a no-hitter, and it always will be.
It’s like they say. It ain’t the journey, it’s the destination.
Burnett had a miserable year with my favorite team, the Phillies, in 2014. He put up a *cool* 8-18 record.
Good post Josh! Burnett almost threw another no hitter with the Pirates. I believe the game was at Wrigley Field and he lost it in the 8th. Can't wait to see what you write about next!