Casting shadows upon the afterglow of Johan Santana’s no-hitter were concerns about the effect the effort may have on his surgically repaired left shoulder.
To become the first pitcher in Mets history to record a no-hitter, Santana had to throw 134 pitches Friday night — far more than his previous high this season, 108, and considerably more even than his previous career high, 125, which he produced in 2008, well before his arm began to bother him.
Santana’s workload was an inescapable concession to the significance of the moment. But on Saturday, Terry Collins, the Mets’ manager, was still dealing with his fear that the rewriting of history could come at some cost.
And so, on Saturday afternoon, even as an aura of celebration lingered inside the home clubhouse at Citi Field, Collins was holding his breath, waiting to see how Santana would recover, and formulating a schedule to provide him some extra rest.
“He’s still wound up with adrenaline,” Collins said of Santana. “We’ll wait till that’s out and see how he’s feeling. There is right now a real plan to back him up a day or two.”
Santana had an operation in September 2010 to repair a torn anterior capsule in his shoulder, and his return to action this season had until Friday been handled with extreme care.
He was ready to take on a monstrosity of a curse – an 8,019-game drought during which the Mets had failed to throw a no-hitter. Even the game’s giants were no match for this jinx, including Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan, Dwight Gooden and Pedro Martinez. Yet there was Santana, ready to finish off David Freese and, with him, history.
You knew it had to be a change-up. You knew it would be Santana’s signature pitch that would bestow upon the Mets a gift that’ll last forever. Just as he’d done thousands of times before, Santana unleashed what looked like a fastball to Freese, tricking him with perfect arm-speed, perfect follow-through, front-to-back shoulder rotation that cloaked the ball’s actual velocity.
This was no 89-mph four-seamer; it was Santana’s 82-mph change-up that Freese swung at. Last year’s World Series MVP coiled like a snake, hacking powerfully at the ball – which was no longer there.
The change-up had dropped just under the trajectory of Freese’s bat; he connected with nothing but the cool, dry air that’d made the night feel more like October than June. And for a moment, Santana froze, too, unable to process the fates that’d finally been generous.
“It was the most unbelievable feeling in the world,” Santana said, describing the riot of his teammates, the human cluster on the mound. The scene was lifted straight out of Animal House, only these were grown men using back-slaps and high-fives as substitutes for tears.
So much had to go right for Santana. So much was reliant upon sheer good luck. Carlos Beltran, for one, had slashed a line drive over third base in the sixth inning – called foul by umpire Adrian Johnson, but, as TV replays showed, was clearly fair.
The ball had kicked up the chalk on the foul line, although Johnson later told reporters, “I saw the ball hitting outside the line, just foul.”
When pressed, Johnson said, “Yes, I saw the replay,” but declined further comment. With a better, more experienced umpire, the no-hitter would’ve been over right then and there.
Beltran later said, “When things aren’t meant to happen, what can you do. I thought it was a fair ball ... the way I saw it, the ball was over the bag, and the replay showed it landed on the line.”
The Mets are professional enough to know the authenticity of Santana’s achievement is open to debate, but that’s not to say they dwelled on its blemish. After a half-century, this was Santana’s night – virtual asterisk be damned. In fact, if you didn’t believe in karma, the last remaining evidence was Mike Baxter’s full-sprint catch of Yadier Molina’s line drive to left.
Baxter caught the ball at the wall, crashed into it with such force his shoulder all but exploded; he was escorted off the field and would later be treated for a contusion.
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