When he threw ball four to the Detroit Tigers’ Mickey Stanley in the top of the ninth, issuing his third walk of the inning and 10th of the game, Steve Barber knew it was his final pitch of the day.
Even though he only needed one more out to complete the second no-hitter in Orioles history, he was on the verge of blowing the game on April 30th, 1967.
“I was so wild. The whole game was a struggle,” Barber recalled years later when I interviewed him about his unforgettable outing for From 33rd Street to Camden Yards, my 2001 book on Orioles history.
Sure enough, Orioles manager Hank Bauer emerged from the dugout and walked to the mound, signaling for Stu Miller, the Orioles’ 39-year-old closer, to replace Barber. Even though Barber was agonizingly close to making history, he handed Bauer the ball without incident and walked to the dugout with his head down.
It was one of the few times in recent weeks that the veteran manager and 29-year-old pitcher hadn’t bickered.
A nice crowd of 26,884 was at Memorial Stadium for a doubleheader between the Orioles and Tigers on a sunny Sunday afternoon. As defending World Series champions, the Orioles had opened the 1967 season with eight wins in their first 14 games, hinting that they’d at least contend for another American League pennant.
As it turned out, they didn’t contend, winning 21 fewer games than the year before and finishing far behind the first-place Boston Red Sox. In hindsight, the first game of the doubleheader on April 30th hinted at what lay ahead — a season of frustration, not more triumph.
Barber started the first game of the doubleheader. A Maryland native, he was a fixture in the Orioles’ rotation, a two-time All-Star who’d won 93 games since 1960. He had the kind of talent you couldn’t teach, his pitching repertoire built around a heavy fastball that felt like a bowling ball when you hit it, or so opposing batters said. In 1966, before a sore arm ended his season prematurely, the league had batted just .218 against him and he’d started the All-Star Game for the American League.
At the outset of the 1967 season, though, Barber’s place in the rotation suddenly seemed tenuous. The Orioles had won the World Series without him the previous fall; Jim Palmer, Wally Bunker and Dave McNally had tossed shutouts while he nursed his sore arm. Now, he and Bauer weren’t getting along. “He had a habit of picking on one guy, and I was it,” Barber told me. Bauer, a gruff former Marine with a crewcut, valued an orderly chain of command, but Barber had a wry sense of humor and chafed at authority, a habit dating to when he’d signed with the Orioles a decade earlier for a free bus ticket to spring training and $50 out of the farm department’s petty cash drawer, in his mind forever casting him as the opposite of a pampered bonus baby.
Adding to the problem in the spring of 1967, Barber, as the Orioles’ representative to the players’ union, had led an attempt to force the club to pay players for making media appearances. The front office had responded by sending him to minor league spring training for a week.
He was back in Baltimore for the start of the season, motivated to prove he still belonged in the rotation. In his first start, against the California Angels, he took a no-hitter into the ninth inning and settled for a 3-0 shutout. Then he beat the Kansas City A’s in his second start, allowing a couple of runs in six solid innings.
That gave him a 2-0 record going into the start against the Tigers on April 30th. But it was clear from the outset that he was struggling with his control. He walked a batter in the first inning, walked another in the second, hit a batter in the third, walked two in the fourth.
It was reminiscent of how Barber had pitched earlier in his career, when persistent wildness had almost forced him to retire and become an electrician before he reached the major leagues. He’d solved the problem then, enabling him to reach the majors, win 20 games in 1963 and start the All-Star Game in 1966. The last thing he needed in 1967 was for that wildness to resurface. But it did that day against the Tigers.
He escaped without allowing a run in the early innings as the Tigers struggled to make hard contact. “His pitches were really moving. He was hard to hit,” Detroit’s North Cash said later, according to a Society of American Baseball Research account of the game.
The lone exception was a searing ground ball that the Tigers’ Jim Northrup spanked up the middle in the second inning. The ball appeared destined for center field as a base hit until “it hit me right in the butt,” Barber recalled years later, laughing. He picked it up and threw to first to retire Northrup.
In the middle innings, the Orioles’ defense helped keep the no-hitter going. Shortstop Luis Aparicio made two hard plays look easy in the fifth. After Barber walked the leadoff hitter in the sixth, he induced a sharp ground ball to Aparicio that resulted in an easy double play.
In the top of the seventh, he hit a batter to start the inning and bobbled an ensuing sacrifice bunt attempt when he tried to pick it up, leaving the Tigers with runners on first and second with no outs. After a successful sacrifice moved the runners into scoring position, Barber induced a popup and groundball to end the threat.
At that point, through seven innings, bizarrely, eight Tigers had reached base but their bottom line was no hits and no runs.
The Orioles had fared little better, managing just two hits and no runs through seven innings against Detroit starter Earl Wilson. They finally broke through in the bottom of the eighth when Wilson walked the bases loaded and Aparicio hit a sacrifice fly, giving Barber a 1-0 lead going into the top of the ninth.
Bauer brought in two defensive replacements — 23-year-old Mark Belanger at second base and 24-year-old Larry Haney at catcher. Both would be involved in the outcome.
Barber’s command was really fading now. He walked the first two Detroit batters in the top of the ninth. But when Wilson advanced the runners with a sacrifice bunt and Barber retired Willie Horton on a popup, he needed just one more out to secure the no-hitter and a 1-0 victory.
The fans were on their feet, imploring him to finish the job. But Barber just couldn’t do it. Facing Stanley, the Tigers’ leadoff hitter, he uncorked an errant sinker that bounced away from Haney, enabling a Detroit runner to score from third.
Now the game was tied.
Then Stanley’s at-bat ended with Barber throwing ball four and Stanley trotting to first.
Bauer had seen enough.
“I tried to get it for you,” the manager said on the mound before Barber left, according to the SABR article about the game.
Nothing if not a realist, Barber shrugged. “If you can’t get the ball over the plate, you don’t deserve to win,” he replied.
Miller, who replaced Barber on the mound, had thrived for years on escaping tense situations late in games. And it appeared he would do just that when he tossed a changeup that Detroit’s Don Wert smacked to Aparicio. The shortstop, a future Hall of Famer, grabbed the ball and tossed it to Belanger, standing on second, for a force and the second out of the inning. But Belanger, a future eight-time Gold Glove winner, lost his grip on the ball as he tried to pull it from his glove and throw it on to first for the final out. A second Detroit run scored on his error.
The next batter, Al Kaline, hit a sharp grounder off the glove of third baseman Brooks Robinson, but fortunately for the Orioles, the ball caromed straight to Aparicio, who threw it to Belanger, standing on second, for a forceout that ended the inning. But the Tigers now led, 2-1, even though they still hadn’t recorded a hit.
When the Orioles went down in order in the bottom of the ninth, baseball history had been made. Never before in the majors had two pitchers combined to throw a nine-inning no-hitter and lost.
“I had no idea where the ball was going. I haven’t been that wild since I was a rookie,’ Barber told reporters after the game.
Asked if he was upset to throw a no-hitter and lose, he said, “If I hadn’t been pitching a no-hitter, I would have been out of the game long before I was. I was out of gas in the fifth inning. I’m not upset about losing the no-hitter. I’m more concerned about losing the game. No-hitters aren’t worth anything in the books unless you win.”
The no-hitter was the second in Orioles history, coming nine years after Hoyt Wilhelm’s gem against the New York Yankees on a rainy Saturday afternoon at Memorial Stadium. And it came three years after the first instance in major league history of a single pitcher, i.e., just one, throwing a nine-inning no-hitter and losing. Ken Johnson, of the Houston Colt ‘45s, suffered that fate against the Cincinnati Reds on April 23rd, 1964. (Houston’s team became the Astros the next year.)
Barber’s season spiraled in the wrong direction from there. By early July, his record was 4-9. The Orioles traded him to the Yankees on July 4th, receiving cash and two players to be named later in exchange.
“I was struggling. I’d gotten very wild,” Barber told me years later. “Bauer had taken me out of the rotation. I told him, ‘I’ve got enough problems of my own; I don’t need your shit.’ That’s when I got traded.”
The deal ended Barber’s time with the Orioles, which was, by any measure, epic. Signed for next to nothing, he’d become the club’s first 20-game winner, made 211 starts, totaled 95 wins and tossed 53 complete games. Completing a no-hitter, and winning the game, would have provided the highlight. Instead, Barber made what can only be described as a curious piece of baseball history.
Typically wry when asked about it years later, he laughed and told me, “When everyone asked me afterward if I was upset to not give up a hit and still lose, I said, ‘Hell, I walked so many, I was lucky not to get beat, 10-1.’”
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