ST. LOUIS – The double-A New Hampshire Fisher Cats were an out away from a combined no-hitter against the Bowie Baysox on May 10, 2007, when reliever Tracy Thorpe and catcher John Schneider couldn’t agree on how to put Oscar Salazar away.
“I called slider away to a righty who chases sliders, he shook me, called it again, shook me, called it again, shook me,” recalled the Toronto Blue Jays manager. “I said, ‘OK,’ he threw a heater, double off the wall, no-hitter gone. Not that I remember it at all.”
The incident is one reason Schneider likes when catchers carry enough conviction in a gameplan to visit the mound and tell a pitcher to throw whatever sign he puts down. At the same time, a pitcher needs to trust in what he’s throwing, which is what makes the back-and-forth between batterymates so layered.
“When a pitcher is convicted in what he’s throwing, it’s usually a better version of that pitch, too,” said Schneider. “A convicted pitch that may be the wrong pitch sometimes is better than an unconvicted pitch that is the right pitch. It’s a fine line.”
The line is even finer when a pitcher has eight different offerings and is still building rapport with a new catcher, which in combination with the pitch clock is why Chris Bassitt opted to call his own game through PitchCom in his Toronto Blue Jays debut Sunday afternoon.
Between a dip in his velocity across the board and a pivotal misplay behind him, it didn’t go well, and the way the buttons were pushed wasn’t likely to have made much of a difference as the right-hander surrendered four home runs in a 9-4 drubbing from the St. Louis Cardinals.
Bassitt was ambushed right from the first pitch as Brendan Donovan turned on an 89.4 m.p.h. fastball and sent it over the wall in left, one pitch later, Alec Burleson launched a 91.1 m.p.h. four-seamer to left and after a two-out Willson Contreras single, Nolan Gorman yanked a first-pitch curveball to centre-field for a 4-0 lead.
After the Blue Jays rallied with a three-spot in the second on a Matt Chapman RBI double, Whit Merrifield sacrifice fly and Jansen run-scoring single, Bassitt took more damage in the third after a miscue in the outfield.
Burleson opened the inning with a pop-up that had a hit probability of one percent but was misread in a spotless blue sky by Daulton Varsho for a double. One batter later, Nolan Arenado singled him home and Gorman then hammered his second homer of the day, this one on an 88.7 m.p.h. cutter.
The Cardinals added three more runs in the fourth before Bassitt’s day was up and the Blue Jays bats, save for a Merrifield RBI single in the sixth, were held at bay from there before 45,525 at Busch Stadium.
Bassitt’s uniquely large pitch mix can make calling his games especially complicated and the 34-year-old’s deliberate and analytical approach to pitching only adds to the challenge. In an ideal world, he’d prefer to have the catcher do the heavy lifting but with only 15 seconds between pitches, or 20 with runners on, there isn’t enough time to cycle through signs.
