We’ve made it past the trade deadline of the 2025 season, and our favorite teams fall somewhere on the spectrum of buying with both hands, filling one or two specific needs, standing pat or close to it, or tossing in the towel. And I’m still recovering from last night’s gigantic WHEEEEEE the Rockies put on the Pirates, a flashback to late-inning (and some earlier-inning) Coors Field magic of seasons past.
Which brings us to this month’s meeting, a virtual Zoom affair featuring author Kevin Hurd. On August 24, 1975, Ed Halicki spun a no-hitter pitching for the Giants at home against the Mets. Halicki, with a lifetime record of 55-66, is proof that no-hitters do not always come from elite pitchers – and that got a young Hurd, who was in the stands at Candlestick that day, thinking about the accomplishment.
After retiring from a 20-year career in the USAF as a navigator on RC-135s and KC-135s, his interest in the lore rekindled in 2014 with no-hitter feats from Tim Lincecum and Clayton Kershaw. Finally, in March 2020, with a pandemic just starting and his security job at the Western Currency Facility in Fort Worth just ending, a friend suggested turning his passion for no-hitters into a book. The result is a two-volume effort titled “From Randy Johnson to Dallas Braden: No-Hitters Beyond the Box Score,” available on Amazon.
Hurd documents 23 no-hitters with a unique perspective, looking at what went on around each game with first-hand accounts from many people who made baseball history. A twist to Hurd’s work is that he interviews not only the pitchers who accomplished the feat, but also others, including the catcher behind the plate. (I’ll be curious to see if Hurd talked to our old friend Robby Hammock, who my daughter got to know a bit as manager of the Missoula Osprey in 2013.)
Chapter commissioner Gilbert Martinez will interview Kevin Hurd live, and the event promises to be a WHEEEEEE for the Hornsby Chapter and our SABR friends around the country. We hope you can join us online on Saturday, August 9, starting at 2 p.m. CDT. Register for the Zoom at the following link. See you there!