Sports Update Monday: Marlins’ Alvarez Throws Bizarre No-Hitter To End The 2013 Season
Detroit Tigers catcher Brayan Pena was the first to sense it when the pitch squirted past his glove. The crowd of 28,315 was the first to detect it when they saw the ball skip to the backstop. The fish inside the backstop aquarium at Marlins Park were the first to feel it when the ball struck their one-of-a-kind domain, jolting them from their aimless swim.
Henderson Alvarez of the Marlins had just thrown one of the oddest no-hitters in major-league history, a no-hitter that wasn’t decided until the bottom of the ninth inning — on the final pitch of the final day of the regular season, no less — when Detroit reliever Luke Putkonen uncorked a wild pitch, enabling Giancarlo Stanton to race home with the winning run in a 1-0 victory.
“I don’t know that, in your life, you can envision a no-hitter ending like that,” Marlins manager Mike Redmond said. Marlins outfielder Juan Pierre, who was playing in his 1,994th and, perhaps, final major-league game, called it the “strangest” game of any he has played in.
“I can’t even explain it,” Pierre said.
And Alvarez?
He was standing in the on-deck circle before Putkonen skipped a pitch past Pena, praying.
“I thought to myself, ‘God, give me this inning, a hit or whatever, to win and get the no-hitter,” Alvarez said.
Prayer answered.
Alvarez became the fifth Marlins pitcher to fire a no-hitter and first major-league pitcher to deliver a no-no on closing day since the Angels’ Mike Witt pulled off the feat in 1984. His performance was also the first complete-game no-hit gem decided in walk-off style since Washington’s Virgil Trucks did it in 1952.
Heck, Alvarez himself said he hadn’t thrown a no-hitter since he was 7 or 8 years old pitching in a Venezuelan Little League game.
But on the last pitch in the final inning of the season finale in an otherwise abysmal season for the Marlins, one in which they suffered 100 losses for only the second time in franchise history, Alvarez provided the highlight of the season.
“I couldn’t see it,” Stanton said. “I thought he [Pena] caught it. I basically went off the crowd’s reaction. The crowd wouldn’t have been screaming like that if [Pena caught the pitch].”
And that was how it ended. Just like that, in a speedy two hours and six minutes, making it the quickest game all season for the Marlins, and easily the most satisfying. Alvarez was mobbed by his teammates, who grabbed at his jersey until it began choking him around the neck and he ripped it off himself.
Rookie pitcher Jose Fernandez took possession of Alvarez’s No. 37 jersey and held it up for the crowd.
Right then — right at that very moment — you would have never known the final chapter had been written on one of the worst seasons in Marlins history, that the painfully long season had finally come to an end.
“I think ending on this kind of note is awesome,” Dobbs said.
Said Stanton: “I don’t think I’ve been that excited all year.”
Until Alvarez saved the best for last, no one on the Marlins had.