Baseball can be a beautiful, cruel sport. J.T. Ginn found out the hard way Monday night.
The Athletics right-hander took a no-hitter and a 1-0 lead into the bottom of the ninth inning against the Angels. He had thrown 105 pitches, struck out 10, and walked one. He needed three outs to make history.
He got zero of them.
Adam Frazier led off the ninth with a clean single. Two batters later, Zach Neto crushed a two-run walk-off home run over the center-field wall. In the span of six pitches, Ginn went from no-hitter and a win to a 2-1 loss. The Athletics walked off the field. The Angels’ dugout exploded.
Ginn is now the sixth pitcher since 1974 to allow zero hits and zero runs through eight innings and still take the loss. That’s not a list you want to join. That’s the list of guys who got close enough to taste it and walked away with nothing.
Mark Kotsay explained after the game why he didn’t pull Ginn. The argument for taking him out was real. The bullpen was rested. Mason Miller was warming. Ginn had thrown a career-high in pitches. But Kotsay said his guy had earned the chance to finish it, and you can’t take that opportunity away from a pitcher on a night like that. He’s right, even if the result was brutal.
The Angels did exactly what they had to do. Adam Frazier worked a single to break the no-hit bid. That gets the rookie off the hook for one piece of history, but Neto is the one who put the dagger in. He sat on a fastball, got it, and didn’t miss it. The ball was gone the moment it left the bat.
Here’s the part that makes this worse for Ginn. He didn’t throw a bad pitch. He went 8.0 innings without giving up a hit. He was in complete command of his stuff. The 10 strikeouts were earned. The one walk and one hit batsman were the only blemishes for nine innings. He did everything a pitcher is supposed to do.
And he still lost the game.
That’s baseball. You can do everything right and lose. You can throw the best game of your career and walk off the mound with a loss. Ginn is going to remember this night for the rest of his career, and not because of the no-hitter he almost had. He’s going to remember it because of the four pitches that erased eight innings of brilliance.
The A’s are not a good team. They were not supposed to be in a position to win this game. Ginn carried them there on his back and then watched the bullpen, the offense, and the baseball gods all fail him in real time.
The Angels needed every bit of this. They’ve been searching for offense all season. Neto’s homer was a nice reminder that their lineup can wake up and beat anyone. The walk-off energy is going to carry into the rest of the homestand.
For Ginn, the box score will say one earned run on one hit in 8 innings. That’s a Hall of Fame line. The result column will say loss. That’s baseball.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
