Have We Lost Our Appreciation for No-Hitters?

There are a handful of reasons why Edinson Volquez’s no-hitter didn’t get a ton of attention. It happened on a weekend day in one of baseball’s least engaged markets (Miami). The pitcher involved was a journeyman in the midst of another just okay season. And as for making history and grabbing headlines, this particular Saturday wasn’t ideal, as one the greatest players of all time, Albert Pujols, was busy hitting a grand slam to record his 600th homer. So, yes, there were a lot of factors working against extensive coverage of this particular no-hitter. But it’s also possible that the no-hitter itself has lost a little bit of its cachet.

Some have lamented that Pujols’s 600th homer didn’t net the attention it should have garnered, given the rarity of such an event. It has actually been a while since a modern player — whether Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, Sammy Sosa, or Jim Thome — hit their 600th home runs, and we might not see another player get there for quite some time. The home-run barrage of the 90s and early 2000s might have dampened the enthusiasm for career accomplishments like a 500th or 600th homer. As for a no-hitter, it’s more of a single-game oddity and, in terms of rarity, comes nowhere close to a big career home-run threshold. But Scooter Gennett’s four-homer game received a lot of attention, and that’s a single-game exploit, as well. (Although, in fairness, it’s probably closer to a perfect game in terms of frequency.) Whatever the case, it appears as though interest in the no-hitter has decreased and it’s quite possible that the volume of them over the last half-decade is the reason why.

From 2012 to -15, there were 20 no-hitters, an average of five per year and the greatest number over any four-year stretch in the last century. Here are the number of no-hitters by season over the past 50 years.

The past decade has produced four of the top 10 individual seasons for no hitters out of the last 50 years, and every single year of the past decade has seen at least three no-nos. In looking at things another way, let’s go back even further, and look at the period of time it took to get to the 20 no-hitters that we saw from 2012 to -15.

We get sort of close to the present rate in 1968 — a season literally known as the Year of the Pitcher — but otherwise the present is unrivaled by this standard. Perhaps that’s why most of us didn’t even notice we were going through the longest no-hitter drought in more than a decade when it was two seasons between Randy Johnson and Anibal Sanchez no-nos between 2004 and 2006. To find another drought longer, you have to go back to 1988 to 1990, when Randy Johnson ended a drought begun by Tom Browning.

As for the particulars of Volquez’s no-hitter, there are some rare qualities to it. Consider:

• Only 15 pitchers have thrown no-hitters with more strikeouts than Volquez’s 10 and fewer walks with Volquez’s two.
• Volquez erased both walks with double plays. There are only 10 other games with pitchers striking out at least 10 and facing the minimum in a no-hitter and nine of those are perfect games, with Sandy Koufax the only other pitcher to match Volquez.
• While we don’t have pitch counts going all the way back through history, only Jim Bunning, David Cone, Koufax, and Volquez himself have managed to strike out double-digit batters and throw a Maddux in a no-hitter, per the Baseball-Reference Play Index.

It’s certainly possible that analytics over the past few years has taken some bite out of no-hitters’ prestige. For example, a pitcher can record a no-hitter while still racking up a bunch of walks — which is to say, he can still be somewhat ineffective. We also know that batters have a lot of control over what happens when the ball hits the bat and that there’s a certain element of luck involved on balls in play. While that could play a role in the potentially diminished interest in a no-hitter, I certainly hope that’s not the case, as I still find them fascinating.

Certainly it takes a lot of luck to throw a no-hitter, and some of the pitchers who’ve accomplished the feat aren’t necessarily among the game’s best. Even after accounting for luck, though, it’s still usually pretty impressive. As for role of luck in Volquez’ case, we find that he recorded 10 outs via the strikeout, four more outs on a pair of double plays, and the other 13 via batted-ball outs. If we took just that information, we might say a simple way of determining the odds of a no-hitter can be made by multiplying the odds of an out in play (roughly 70%), times 13, times the odds of a double play (roughly 11%) twice. We do that and we come up with .00011 or one in about 8,500 games.

Let’s use the game feed from Statcast to go a little bit further. Based on launch angle and exit velocity, we can have a better idea of the batted-ball quality against Volquez and adjust our expectations.

In this particular cast, we lack estimates for four batted balls: three grounders where the ball was pounded into the ground and another that was an easy pop fly. I just made estimates for those plays, including an estimate on whether a double play would be turned. Here’s what we have:

Just two at-bats saw players with a decent shot at hits based on launch angle and exit velocity, and both were converted into outs. The rest of the plays were unlikely to become hits. Of course, putting all of those batted balls together makes no outs pretty unlikely. When we put all of those together, we come out to .01872. Based on knowing nothing about the batted-ball stats, we would think that Volquez had about one in 8,500 shot to throw a no-hitter. When we look at Statcast, we see that maybe his chances were closer to one in 50. Changing the odds on the double plays might move things a little bit, but the actual batted-ball info improves the odds greatly. How much credit Volquez should get is in the eye of beholder. There’s still a ton of luck involved, but a no-hitter, especially in these increased run environments, is no easy feat and deserves some celebration.