The No-Hit Bid — And Home Run — That Wasn’t

Chandler Simpson may be the fastest player in baseball. At the very least, the 24-year-old center fielder is one of the few major leaguers with 80-grade speed, befitting a player who stole 104 bases in 110 games at two minor league stops last year. A day after making his major league debut with the Rays, Simpson’s speed figured into a controversial play in Sunday’s game against the Yankees at George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, as he broke up Max Fried’s no-hitter… retroactively. That might not even have been the game’s most contentious call, as Aaron Judge lost an apparent home run on a towering fly ball that was ruled foul, even after a replay review.

Fried had held the Rays hitless through 5 1/3 innings when he faced Simpson for the second time in the bottom of the sixth inning. With a 2-2 count, Simpson hit a 78.6-mph grounder between first and second base. Yankees first baseman Paul Goldschmidt, a four-time Gold Glove winner, ranged over to his right to field the ball, but as he did, it deflected off the heel of his glove and towards second base. Simpson reached safely.

The play was initially ruled an error on Goldschmidt, and Fried carried on, retiring five of the next six hitters — the exception being when he grazed Curtis Mead’s right foot with a sweeper — and keeping the no-hitter intact through seven innings while the Yankees stretched their lead to 3-0. By the time the 31-year-old lefty took the mound for the eighth, the official scorer had reversed his previous decision, wiping out Goldschmidt’s error, crediting Simpson with a hit, and ending Fried’s no-hit bid.

In the press box, scorer Bill Mathews explained over the intercom, “It was very apparent the runner would have beaten any throw.” That’s an entirely fair assertion given Simpson’s blazing speed and the distance Goldschmidt was from first when he fielded the ball. When he cleanly fielded a Simpson grounder in the third inning and underhanded the ball to Fried, the pitcher did win the footrace. While that groundball was slower (52.6 mph), Goldschmidt had more time to position his body to make the throw upon fielding the ball.

When asked for further explanation about his reversal, Matthews added, “I made a decision,” but refused to clarify beyond that.

Matthews has actually been at the center of controversy regarding a potential no-hitter before. On June 13, 2012 at Tropicana Field, in the first inning of a game between the Rays and Mets, B.J. Upton hit a slow roller down the third base line that David Wright unsuccessfully tried to barehand. Matthews scored it a hit. Starter R.A. Dickey went on to retire the next 22 batters and struck out 12 in a complete-game shutout without yielding another hit. After the game, the Mets appealed the ruling on the Upton play to Major League Baseball, but MLB executive vice president Joe Torre upheld the call. Dickey was ambivalent about the possibility of the call being overturned, a likelihood that Mets manager Terry Collins estimated at less than five percent. “It would be weird. I don’t know if it would be quite as satisfying,” said the pitcher. “I think the asterisk beside the no-hitter would get more attention than the no-hitter, you know? Plus, you’re not pitching the eighth, ninth inning with the pressure of a no-hitter going. It would be a little bit cheap.”

On Sunday’s YES Network broadcast, Yankees play-by-play announcer Michael Kay described himself as “absolutely flabbergasted” at the timing of the reversal on the Simpson play, and analyst Todd Frazier expressed bewilderment that the scoring change was allowed at that juncture, even if the call was ultimately correct.

“Just unfathomable. Either you call it when it happens, you don’t wait three innings to go by. It’s just unbelievable,” said Kay.

“It’s one of those situations, you gotta stick with what you put up,” said Frazier.

While I can understand why Kay and Frazier were upset, I disagree with their position. Ideally you’d like any team’s first hit of the game to be a clean one to remove any doubt about a potential no-hitter, but retroactive scoring changes aren’t so uncommon that this one was beyond the pale — it wasn’t even made after the game, the way the Upton call might have been. Besides, the broad consensus is that Matthews’ ruling it a hit was the right one.

The point became moot just moments after the change, as Fried allowed a clean single to Jake Mangum to lead off the eighth. He departed after retiring two more hitters, the second of whom was Simpson, who hit into a 4-6 force out to erase Mangum, then swiped second against reliever Fernando Cruz for his first major league steal. He ended up stranded there, and the Yankees went on to win, 4-0.

Asked afterwards about the scoring change, Fried said he wasn’t aware of it until he came out of the game. “I had no idea,” he told reporters. “I looked up and saw two hits. It is what it is. I’m just happy we got the win.”

“I don’t think Max cares about that kind of stuff,” said Judge when queried about the change. “He’s worried about going out there, helping the team, helping us win. He pitched a heckuva game, so I think he’s happy coming away with the win.”

Fried has never completed a no-hitter as a professional, but he’s had a few close encounters. He threw the first 5 2/3 innings of a combined no-hitter for A-level Fort Wayne in 2013, when he was a Padres farmhand. While with the Braves, he was pulled after five hitless innings and 66 pitches on September 4, 2022 against the Marlins, and then twice over a three-start span last year, first on April 29 against the Mariners (six innings, 100 pitches) and then on May 11 against the Mets (seven innings, 109 pitches). Relievers subsequently surrendered hits in all three of those games.

Manager Aaron Boone was not aware of the scoring change until after Mangum’s hit, but he had a reasonable excuse, as he was ejected in the top of the eighth. Judge had been called out on strikes on a borderline pitch, but what had Boone’s dander up was that the slugger appeared to have been robbed of a home run on a titanic fly ball down the left field line, more on which below. Boone sounded less upset about the reversal on the Simpson play. Via the New York Daily News‘ Gary Phillips:

“Look, we’re not gonna beat [Simpson] to the bag,” Aaron Boone said, noting he didn’t have a problem with the change taking so long. “So I get it, but it makes it a little bit dicey… with a no-hitter going on. But the reality is, it was a hit.”

Boone said that even if he had known about the reversal, he would have sent Fried, who had thrown 92 pitches through seven innings, back out for the eighth, particularly given that his bullpen was a bit short-handed. “I probably wouldn’t have let him go to 120 today,” he said when asked about Fried’s pitch count had the no-hitter still been intact. “I don’t what it exact[ly] is, there’s a conversation to be had there if he gets through the eighth, where he’s at. I think he was a little bit gassed.”

Though Fried allowed just two walks to go with his two hits, he only struck out two batters, and got just three whiffs (on 47 swings) and 17 called strikes for a 20% CSW rate. The Rays peppered him with 10 hard-hit balls, though only Mangum’s 102.8-mph liner turned into a hit. The Rays right fielder also hit a 96.2-mph fly ball that center fielder Trent Grisham ran down in the right-center gap before tumbling to the ground and then firing to second, where he doubled off Danny Jansen, who had tagged up from first base.

“I thought it was a grind for him, actually,” said Boone of Fried. “I thought it took him awhile to find his secondary stuff today. He only punched out two, but he pitches so well with the fastball. Sinker, four-seam, add, subtract, move it around.”

For a team that lost Gerrit Cole for the season due to Tommy John surgery and that just learned that Luis Gil’s throwing progression had been pushed back as he recovers from a lat strain, Fried has been a godsend. Through five starts totaling 31.2 innings, his 1.42 ERA is fourth in the American League, his 2.91 FIP 10th. While he’s only struck out 22.7% of hitters, he’s walked just 5.3% and allowed just 0.57 homers per nine; the last two marks rank in the AL’s top 10 among qualifiers as well.

Curiously enough, Fried has not been generating as many grounders as usual. Last year, he had the majors’ second-highest groundball rate (58.8%), but this year, he’s at 50% despite throwing his sinker more often (19.8%, up from 16.2%); that pitch has produced a 66.7% groundball rate for Fried this year and 65.5% historically. Meanwhile, batters have produced an 87.6 mph average exit velocity and a 37% hard-hit rate against Fried, his highest marks since 2019. Warts and all, he’s still been the Yankees’ most effective starter by far. Carlos Rodón, Carlos Carrasco, Will Warren, Marcus Stroman and Clarke Schmidt — the last of whom made his season debut on Wednesday after missing the start of the season due to a bout of rotator cuff tendinitis — all have ERAs of 4.34 or higher and, with the exception of Schmidt, FIPs of 4.37 or higher as well.

As for the Judge play, the foul poles at George M. Steinbrenner Field — the Yankees’ spring training facility and A-level ballpark, pressed into service due to the hurricane damage to Tropicana Field — are shorter than those at major league ballparks, so it may have been more difficult for the umpires to see in real time whether Judge’s ball was fair or foul. Here’s the blast as called by the Rays’ booth:

Here are my frame grabs of the clip in the 50- to 52-second range, with the ball highlighted:

Not only did the umpires miss the call, but even with the crew chief calling for a replay review, it wasn’t overturned. “It’s a home run,” said Boone, who reviewed the drive in the replay room before his postgame media availability session. “It didn’t go our way, though… I get it’s high and towering, but then it goes to replay. I guess they couldn’t find enough [that was] conclusive. So we’ve got to live with the call.”

Even Judge, a graduate of the Derek Jeter School of Diplomacy, shook his head at the call in the heat of the moment. “It was a fair ball,” he said afterwards. “But that’s why we’ve got replay. It’s not on the umpires; it’s tough when you’re in a situation like this in a minor league park where the foul poles aren’t as high, so that’s why you have replay. They have every angle.

“I think everybody is kind of scratching their head, but [there’s] nothing I can do about it. They missed it, and I’ve just got to move on.”

The home run would have been Judge’s eighth, tying him with Mike Trout for third in the AL behind Cal Raleigh and Tyler Soderstrom. It wouldn’t have made a difference in the outcome of the game, but it might wind up meaning something to a player who set an AL record with 62 homers in 2022 and hit 58 last year — and set a single-season AL/NL record for wRC+ by a right-handed hitter (218) — despite an early slump. He’s on pace for 51 homers right now, and hitting a ridiculous .390/.495/.707 (243 wRC+), but he would have been on pace for 59 homers, with an even more extreme slash line, had the play been ruled a homer.

In the end, neither the official scorer’s ruling on the Simpson play nor the umpires’ miss on the Judge home run figured in the Yankees’ win, which lifted them to 14-8 and preserved their two-game lead atop the AL East. Hopefully, we won’t wind up looking back at the non-homer later this season while wondering what might have been.