{"id":129,"date":"2011-05-09T19:02:15","date_gmt":"2011-05-10T02:02:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/?p=129"},"modified":"2011-05-09T19:02:15","modified_gmt":"2011-05-10T02:02:15","slug":"liriano-verlander-toss-no-hitters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/?p=129","title":{"rendered":"Liriano & Verlander Toss No-Hitters"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Choppers pitcher Francisco Liriano<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There have been a ton of close calls this season, but Francisco Liriano and Justin Verlander managed to break through to complete the first two no-hitters of the season in a span of five days.\u00a0 First, the Choppers’ Liriano picked up a no-no on Tuesday evening.\u00a0 Then, the Kings’ Verlander did the same on Saturday afternoon.<\/p>\n

Of the two, Liriano’s no-hitter has to be the more improbable one.\u00a0 He entered the game against the White Sox with an ERA over 9.00.\u00a0 He had never pitched a complete game in his career.\u00a0 And for a while, it looked like he would have trouble completing this one as well.\u00a0 A bunch of early walks sent his pitch count soaring.\u00a0 On the game, he walked six and only struck out two.\u00a0 So there were probably at least a half dozen more impressive starts than his just last week, but a no-hitter deserves special mention.\u00a0 Despite the ugly walk\/strike out numbers, it was very much a dominating performance.\u00a0 The White Sox hitters only hit a couple balls hard all evening.<\/p>\n

Liriano is still having a tough season.\u00a0 His ERA stands at 6.61 and the win was only his second this season.\u00a0 He has walked more hitters than he has struck out too.\u00a0 Prior to this start, he was on the verge of a possible bullpen demotion by the Twins.\u00a0 You have to think the Choppers were losing patience with him as well.\u00a0 He has been the sour point on an otherwise surprisingly solid Choppers pitching staff.\u00a0 If he continues to pitch like he did last Tuesday, things could get very interesting as the Choppers already find themselves in third place and are the surprise team near the top of the standings right now.<\/p>\n

Verlander’s no-hitter was less surprising and much more dominating.\u00a0 He took a perfect game into the 8th inning against the Blue Jays, but a walk to J.P. Arencibia on an extended at bat ruined that.\u00a0 Arencibia was quickly erased on a double play though, allowing Verlander to finish the game facing the minimum 27 batters.\u00a0 This was Verlander’s second career no-hitter, joining Mark Buehrle as the only active DTBL pitchers with multiple no-hitters.\u00a0 (Technically, Roy Halladay has two as well, but his playoff no-hitter didn’t count towards his DTBL stats, so I’m not including him.)<\/p>\n

The Kings pitchers have had a mediocre start to the season, but Verlander has been solid as usual.\u00a0 He has a 3.16 ERA with 3 wins, a sub 1.00 WHIP and 55 strike outs.\u00a0 Verlander, his Tigers teammate Max Scherzer, and Tommy Hanson have been outstanding for the Kings, but the bottom of their rotation has been a disappointment.<\/p>\n

As mentioned, there have been plenty of close calls on other potential no-hitters this season including Anibal Sanchez twice.\u00a0 Also, two Cougars pitchers took no-hitters into at least the 7th inning on the same night last Friday:\u00a0 Jaime Garcia and Derek Lowe.\u00a0 The way pitching has dominated so far this season, you have to figure we’ll see a few more guys complete the task.<\/p>\n

Here’s another indication on just how good the pitching has been.\u00a0 Only one DTBL team has an ERA over 4.00 (Demigods).\u00a0 They were inching towards the 4.00 mark a couple days ago, so there is still a good chance we could see all ten teams under that mark at some point soon.<\/p>\n

Once again, Mariano Rivera’s save record is getting bumped to a later post.\u00a0 I promise to write about him soon!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There have been a ton of close calls this season, but Francisco Liriano and Justin Verlander managed to break through to complete the first two no-hitters of the season in a span of five days.\u00a0 First, the Choppers’ Liriano picked up a no-no on Tuesday evening.\u00a0 Then, the Kings’ Verlander did the same on Saturday […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-choppers","category-kings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":132,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions\/132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}