Surviving 27 Outs: No-Hitter Edition

 Recently I wrote an out-by-out survival analysis of throwing a perfect game. Now, let’s discuss baseball’s next biggest achievement: the no-hitter. Like the perfect game, a no-hitter has a simple definition that adds to the prestige of it: pitch a complete game and win without giving up a hit. Because perfect games require no baserunners at all, both in and out of a pitcher’s control, they are much rarer than a no-hitter. Still, there haven’t been many.

I used the same perfect game dataset from 1920-2025 of 379,815 starts. We are looking at the survival analysis of pitchers who started the game, so combined no-hitters are excluded. By MLB’s definition, a no-hitter has to be at least 27 outs and result in a win. That leaves us with 216 no-hitters since 1920.




Like last time, my attention immediately points towards the fact that 0.057% of starts are no-hitters (216/379,815), but 0.058% are hitless through 27 outs. That’s because despite there being 216 no-hitters, there have been 222 starts hitless through 9 innings. We already know about Harvey Haddix and Pedro Martinez’s special starts that were perfect through 9 innings. What were the other four?

  •           Bobo Newsom on September 18, 1934 lost his no-hitter in the 10th inning, when a single after two walks gave up the winning run to make Newsom the losing pitcher.
  •           Jim Maloney on June 14, 1965 was hitless through 10 innings before giving up a home run to lead off the 11th inning. He completed the 11th inning but ultimately lost the game. I think what’s most impressive about Maloney is in another start in 1965, on August 19, he pitched a 10-inning no-hitter—the only 10-inning no-hitter in my dataset.
  •           On July 26, 1991, Mark Gardner was hitless through 9 before giving up a lead-off hit in the 10th inning.
  •           Rich Hill on August 23, 2017 was not just hitless, but perfect through 8 innings before an error broke it to lead off the 9th inning. After completing the 9th inning, Hill gave up a walk-off home run to lead off the 10th inning to lose the game.

There have been 55 games where pitchers were hitless through 26 but unable to complete the no-hitter. Recent examples include Yoshinobu Yamamoto in 2025, Framber Valdez in 2024, and Alex Cobb in 2023.

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Analyzing Strike Zone Data From the Statcast Database

Image
 With my Statcast database in Oracle nice and handy, let’s have some more fun and look at strike zone data. Strike zone data in Statcast is measured by two variables, plate_x and plate_z, which are like respective x and y coordinates of an axis. The strike zone is the width of home plate, which is 17 inches, although the rule book says specifically part of the baseball has to hit the strike zone for it to be a strike, so truthfully the strike zone is slightly wider than 17 inches. A baseball is three inches in diameter, so really the strike zone width is a number slightly smaller than 23 inches. Statcast measures plate_x and plate_z in feet, not inches. The middle of the strike zone width is a plate_x of 0 (like an axis origin of (0,0)), with pitches to the left being a negative value of plate_x and pitches to the right being a positive value of plate_x. For example, the strike zone is 17 inches wide (1.417 feet), so the left edge has a value of -0.7083 and the right edge has a ...
Read more

Surviving 27 Outs: A Data‑Driven Look at Perfect Games

Image
 I don’t think there’s a more celebrated feat in baseball than a perfect game. There are rarer feats, such as four home runs in one game (21 times) or 20 strikeouts in a 9-inning game (only five times), but I think what separates a perfect game is it’s less about matching a numeric record and more about accomplishing literal perfection. In a sport loaded with failure and random variation, a perfect game is not only pretty awesome by definition but also incredibly rare. There have only been 24 perfect games in history (including one in the playoffs by Don Larsen in 1956). Think about the 150+ years of baseball and hundreds of thousands of starts it took to accomplish those 24. To gain some appreciation, I wanted to calculate just how rare it is to accomplish a perfect game, out-by-out. How rare is it to even get half-way through a perfect game? How many outs do you have to be perfect through to have accomplished better than 99% of starts? Furthermore, of those starts that were per...
Read more

Introducing the Full Statcast Database (2019-2021)

Image
Back in July, me and my school partners created a similar data warehouse for every pitch thrown in the 2021 season up until June 23. The project was a lot of fun and you can read a PDF version of it here under the Data Warehousing section. I wanted to continue that project for all of 2021 and beyond, and have finally completed it. Baseball Savant contains data from every season since 2008, and Statcast metrics were measured starting in 2015. In a perfect world, I wanted my database to include everything since 2008, and at the very least 2015 to have a "Statcast Era" database, but unfortunately my student account in Oracle has a limited table space, so I was limited to 2019, 2020, and 2021. Across those three seasons, there were a total of 1,743,857 pitches thrown.  My database is set up in a similar dimension model "warehouse" style. The "fact table" contains all the pitches that I just described, with all their details such as velocity, spin rate, pitch ...
Read more