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No-hit wonder Nomo's back on baseball's radar screen ... for now
Sports Illustrated's Stephen Cannella checks in with his baseball thoughts every Thursday throughout the season on CNNSI.com. During spring training Angels reliever Shigetoshi Hasegawa, who jumped from Japan's Pacific League to the majors in 1997, reminisced about the enormous popularity his countryman Hideo Nomo once enjoyed. After his second season in Anaheim, Hasegawa was asked to ride a float in the Rose Parade. He agreed and, wearing his team jersey, spent the morning of the first day of 1999 waving to crowds along the streets of Pasadena. They cheered, waved back -- and gleefully chanted, NOMO! NOMO! "They saw a Japanese guy in a baseball uniform," Hasegawa said. "They didn't know me. Of course they thought it was Nomo." Times have changed. Until his no-hitter against the Orioles in Baltimore on Wednesday night -- the second hitless game of his career -- Nomo had been a forgotten man for the last two seasons. The Red Sox are his fifth team in four years, and since having elbow surgery in 1997 he is 27-32 with a 4.73 ERA. After striking out 10.1 batters per nine innings over his first three seasons, Nomo's K rate fell to 8.7 from 1998-2000. His fastball, which at the height of Nomomania hummed in the mid-90s, now tops out at 90 or 91, and hitters no longer flail at the diving forkball that once sent them into contortions. The hordes of Japanese media that once followed every step of his American experience now trails a new crop of expatriates, a group that includes closer Kazuhiro Sasaki and outfielder Ichiro Suzuki of the Mariners and Mets outfielder Tsuyoshi Shinjo. It's not a huge surprise that we saw a no-hitter in the season's first week. The 20 months since David Cone's perfect game in July 1999 marked the majors' longest no-hitter drought in more than a decade. With umpires dedicated to calling the new higher strike zone, many pitching coaches think it's only a matter of time until one of the elite power pitchers -- Pedro Martinez, Roger Clemens or Bartolo Colon, for example -- holds a team hitless with a steady diet of high heat. What was surprising about this week's no-no was that it came from Nomo, who had pitched terribly earlier this spring and seemed unlikely to last much more than five innings in his Red Sox debut. No-hitters are the baseball equivalent of slot machine payoffs: They're products more of luck and circumstance than of the lever-puller's skill level. Among them Clemens, Martinez, Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, Curt Schilling and Mike Mussina have zero complete game no-hitters. Nomo has two, in two of the best hitters' ballparks in the majors (his first was at Coors Field in 1996), and he's only the fourth pitcher in history to have thrown a no-hitter in both leagues. Does this mean Nomo is back, that the Red Sox have finally found a reliable act to follow Martinez in the rotation? "It was a cold night, Baltimore's a young team, and if his split is working they're going to hack at it," says one AL scout. "Plus, it looked like they were swinging at pitches off the plate, and if they didn't swing Nomo got the calls. Big deal, he threw a no hitter. It doesn't do anything for me." History says it may not do anything for Nomo, either. Before Wednesday, 14 pitchers had thrown April no-hitters since World War II. Just five went on to win more than 11 games that season. Still, for one night, Nomo was again Japan's most prized import. Sports Illustrated staff writer Stephen Cannella covers the baseball beat for
the magazine . Touching Base appears every Thursday on CNNSI.com.
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