Remembering Dave Stieb’s no-hitter, 30 years later
Thirty years ago today, on a Sunday afternoon in Cleveland, Dave Stieb threw the first (and only) no-hitter in Blue Jays franchise history
Snake-bit. The baseball gods working against him. Just plain bad luck.
Whatever you want to call it, Dave Stieb had come tantalizingly close to throwing the first no-hitter in Toronto Blue Jays franchise history so many times before. His first brush with history came on Aug. 24, 1985, against the White Sox, when Rudy Law homered to lead off the ninth inning. In back-to-back starts at the end of the 1988 season, Stieb lost his no-hit bid in the most heart-wrenching ways possible. On Sept. 24, Cleveland’s Julio Franco hit a routine grounder to second base with two outs that hit a tiny pebble and bounced over the head of Manny Lee. Six days later, Stieb was again one out away when Orioles pinch-hitter Jim Traber flared a soft hit that barely landed in fair territory down the right-field line.
Then, on Aug. 4, 1989, before 49,000 fans at the newly-opened Skydome, Stieb came one out away from a perfect game against the New York Yankees before Robert Kelly lined a double to left on a 2–0 pitch.
Those memories stung Stieb, who admitted he had stopped caring about no-hitters after coming so close so many times. But they were all in the past when the 33-year-old Stieb, in his 12th season in the big leagues, prepared to make his 376th career start on Sept. 2, 1990, at Cleveland Stadium against the Indians.
Stieb was enjoying a solid season up to that point, with a record of 16–5 and a 3.07 ERA. The Blue Jays, however, were struggling. After tying the Boston Red Sox for first place in the AL East with a three-game sweep of the Minnesota Twins in mid-August, Toronto had lost eight of their next 10 games heading into a Labor Day weekend series against Cleveland and was 6.5 games behind Boston.
Toronto took the first two games against the Indians, including a seven-hit shutout on Saturday night. The Indians were assembling a roster that would win the division five straight years later in the decade and make it to two World Series, but in 1990 they were still perennial losers. They hadn’t made the playoffs in 36 years or finished above fourth place in 22 years. The club was well on their way to a fourth straight losing season. Only one player in their lineup had more than 75 RBI. Rookie outfielder Alex Cole was the only one to hit .300.
The speedy Cole led-off for Cleveland against Stieb, wearing the Blue Jays’ road gray uniform, shortly after 1:30 p.m. local time on Sunday afternoon. He quickly worked a five-pitch walk before being caught stealing second. Stieb also walked Carlos Baerga in the second inning but he, too, was thrown out at second by catcher Pat Borders.
Stieb was having problems with his control in the early part of the game and admitted he didn’t have his best stuff. “I didn’t have great control,” he said. “I couldn’t find my release point in the early innings. I hung pitches but got away with them. They helped me out a few times by swinging at bad pitches. They hit balls right at people.”
Stieb kept missing his pitches, but the Cleveland lineup wasn’t one that was going to stand there and take them. The Indians drew the third-fewest walks in the American League in 1990, and Stieb settled down after those two early free passes. He struck out the side in both the third and sixth innings. Not one Indians batter between the start of the third and end of the seventh hit a ball out of the infield. By the time he got to the eighth inning, Stieb had retired 16 in a row and was, once again, flirting with a no-hitter.
The Blue Jays, meanwhile, gave him some run support. Fred McGriff hit a solo home run in the fourth off Cleveland starter Bud Black to put Toronto ahead 1–0. An inning later, Lee (playing second base again but with no sign of that fateful pebble) drove in Ken Williams with the Blue Jays’ second run. Stieb now had a 2–0 lead to work with facing the last six Indians batters.
Leading off the bottom of the eighth was designated hitter Ken Phelps. Phelps, purchased from the Oakland Athletics in June, was winding down an 11-year MLB career; he would, in fact, play in just one more game. A four-time 20-home run hitter earlier in his career, he was batting just .158 entering the game. Earlier that season, on April 20, in a game between Oakland and Seattle, he had broken up Brian Holman’s bid for a perfect game by hitting a home run with two outs in the ninth, the only one he hit all season. And he nearly spoiled Stieb’s run at history on this afternoon.
On a 1–1 pitch, Stieb threw a low slider that Phelps reached for and lined hard down the right-field line. But Stieb’s luck had finally changed. Unlike Traber’s hit two years earlier, this ball fell in foul territory by a few feet. Three pitches later Phelps drew a walk, the first baserunner Stieb had allowed since the second inning. Stieb, though, had an advantage over the Indians’ hitters. The afternoon start meant that, for the final few innings, shadows started to creep across the field at Cleveland Stadium. Stieb was standing in the pitching mound bathed in sunlight, while the batters were cloaked in shadow. Anything he threw to the plate was difficult for the batters to see.
He needed just four pitches to retire the next three batters, getting Brook Jacoby (a future Blue Jays hitting coach), Baerga, and Cory Snyder to fly out and send the game into the ninth inning.
Stieb would face two pinch-hitters to start the ninth. Chris James, batting for Tom Brookens after the Cleveland third baseman struck out both times at the plate, flied out to left. Candy Maldonado, pinch-hitting for catcher Joel Skinner, struck out on a high fastball for the second out, Stieb’s ninth strikeout. For the fourth time in his career, Stieb was now one out away from a no-hitter. The batter was the dangerous Cole, who had plenty of speed but no power. He would hit just five home runs in nearly 1,800 at-bats in his career but stole 40 bases in 1990 and was hitting .333 coming into the game. Stieb had to be careful to Cleveland’s leadoff hitter and walked him on four straight pitches.
Jerry Browne (a career 4–18 against Stieb) was the next batter. Stieb threw him a slider inside for ball one, then came back with a fastball down the middle that Browne took for a strike. Finally, at 4:04 p.m, Stieb came back with a slider but left it hanging in the middle of the plate. Browne swung and made solid contact, sending a hard line drive to right-field. But there was Junior Felix, staring into the late-afternoon sun, who was able to make the catch for the third and final out.
Stieb put his right hand to his cap in disbelief when Felix came up with the ball before embracing Borders. He threw 123 pitches (75 strikes) and took two hours, 27 minutes to set down the Indians lineup. The 23,640 fans in attendance, many of them cheering for the Blue Jays after making the trip across the border on the holiday weekend, gave him a rousing ovation. The rest of the Blue Jays lineup came streaming in from around the field and dugout to congratulate the first Blue Jays pitcher to throw a no-hitter. It had taken 14 seasons, 2,182 games, and five bids broken up in the last inning (in addition to Stieb’s four attempts, Jim Clancy had a no-hitter broken up in the ninth in 1982), but the Blue Jays finally had their no-hitter.
Stieb, the man who said he no longer cared about throwing a no-hitter, that it was all just luck anyway, admitted he couldn’t stop thinking about it on this day. “I started thinking it in the second or third inning, and kind of told myself that’s a little too soon to be thinking of it. But I couldn’t help it,” he said afterward. “As the game progressed, the no-hitter was still intact. It really got nerve-racking about the seventh-eighth inning when I knew it was at hand.”
Riding the momentum from Stieb’s performance, the Blue Jays went on to win 12 of their next 16 games and overtook Boston for the AL East lead. But it was all for naught after closing the season on a 4–8 run, finishing at 86–76 and two games behind the Red Sox. Two years later, they would win the World Series.
But they would do it without Stieb. While he won a career-best 18 games in 1990 and finished fifth in AL Cy Young voting, Stieb began experiencing back and shoulder problems that limited him to just eight wins over the next two seasons combined. He went 4–6 in 14 starts in 1992, his ERA ballooning to 5.04, and didn’t appear in the postseason. He was not brought back to Toronto for 1993, playing one season with the White Sox before sitting out four years.
The Blue Jays resigned a now 40-year-old Stieb in 1998, where he played a small role in another part of franchise history. On Sept. 27, in just his second career start, Roy Halladay had a no-hitter going with two outs in the ninth against the Tigers. Stieb was standing in the bullpen as Bobby Higginson hit the first pitch the opposite way for a home run to break up the no-hit bid. It was the closest any Blue Jays pitcher had come to joining Stieb in the no-hitter club. Stieb, coincidentally, caught the ball in the bullpen.
Halladay would go on to the Hall of Fame and become the best pitcher in franchise history. But he never caught Stieb on the club’s career leaderboard. Stieb is still the Blue Jays all-time leader in wins, strikeouts, complete games, shutouts, and ERA (0.01 points ahead of Halladay). And, although he would later pitch two with the Phillies, Halladay never threw a no-hitter in a Blue Jays uniform.
Thirty years later, Stieb stands alone in the Blue Jays record book. Halladay fell one out short. So did Brandon Morrow in 2010 on an infield single. Dustin McGowan had a no-hitter broken up in the ninth against the Rockies in 2007. For 4,695 consecutive games and counting, no Blue Jays pitcher has matched what Stieb did on that September afternoon in Cleveland.
