Clarke Schmidt pitches seven hitless innings, Yankees lose no-hit bid vs. Orioles in the eighth
Clarke Schmidt pitches seven hitless innings, Yankees lose no-hit bid vs. Orioles in the eighth
NEW YORK (AP) — Clarke Schmidt walked off the mound after getting through his seventh hitless inning and exchanged a glance with New York Yankees manager Aaron Boone in the dugout.
That was it for Schmidt. Done for the day.
While the right-hander was disappointed, he certainly understood Boone’s decision to take him out of the game even with a no-hitter going. Schmidt was pulled after tying a career high with 103 pitches, and the Yankees lost a no-hit bid Saturday against the Baltimore Orioles when Gary Sánchez singled to start the eighth off JT Brubaker.
“It’s more him like looking at me like, this is it for you right here,” Schmidt said after the 9-0 win. “There’s a little bit of a back-and-forth where you’re having a conference, some dialogue, but you can tell with the look in his eyes it’s, ‘You’re at (103). We’re not driving you to 130 today.’”
“You’re going to power through pitch limits, or within reason,” Boone said. “Today was not that day for Clarke.”
Schmidt threw 27 pitches in the first inning, when he issued consecutive walks to Jordan Westburg and Gunnar Henderson. Schmidt stranded a runner in the fourth after hitting Ryan O’Hearn with a pitch.
He breezed through a nine-pitch fifth and needed eight pitches to get through the sixth.
“I knew he was struggling a little bit, even in the fifth, in the sixth and when he came through in that seventh and I was kind of down there waiting,” Boone said. “I knew he was done.”
Schmidt threw 21 pitches in the seventh as Brubaker warmed up. The starter ended his outing by retiring Colton Cowser on a flyball to center field.
“Unbelievable,” Brubaker said of Schmidt. “He absolutely dominated with every single pitch he had in the arsenal and went right after their hitters and that can go show you what attacking hitters can do and it can put you in a really good spot.”
It was the fifth time a Yankees pitcher threw at least seven hitless innings but did not finish a no-hitter. The previous instance was Oct. 3, 2022, at Texas when Luis Severino was pulled after seven innings and Josh Jung singled in the eighth off Miguel Castro.
Brubaker threw two strikes to Sánchez, but the former Yankees catcher hit a clean single to left field one pitch after first base umpire Jansen Visconti said he checked his swing. After the hit, some in the crowd of 46,142 lightly booed.
“Everybody in the stadium knows the situation,” Brubaker said. “I’m not ignoring it. Anytime I toe the rubber, I don’t want to give up a hit. At the end that’s always the goal. It happened to be that there was the no-hitter going.”
Brubaker finished New York’s second one-hitter this season by retiring Dylan Carlson. It was the Yankees’ 73rd one-hitter and sixth since the start of the 2022 season.
Schmidt threw first-pitch strikes to 16 of 24 hitters, struck out five and walked two. He ended the game with a streak of 25 1/3 scoreless innings, the third-longest by a Yankees pitcher since 1961. Only Gerrit Cole (25 2/3 innings in 2023) and Catfish Hunter (26 innings in 1975) had longer shutout streaks during that span.
New York has thrown 13 no-hitters. The most recent came on June 28, 2023, in Oakland when Domingo Germán threw the Yankees’ fourth perfect game — most of any major league team.
The Orioles have been no-hit 15 times. Baltimore was last held hitless on Aug. 12, 2015, in Seattle by Hisashi Iwakuma.
___
This story corrects the number of no-hitters the Yankees have thrown.
___
More AP baseball: https://apnews.com/MLB
By LARRY FLEISHER
Associated Press
