How Unlikely Was the Astros’ Combined No-Hitter?

On Monday night, the Astros celebrated Memorial Day with a no-hitter against the Rangers. Throwing in catcher Christian Vázquez, pitchers Tatsuya Imai, Steven Okert, and Alimber Santa tied for the 18th no-hitter in franchise history dating back to 1962. According to senior Sarah Langs, not only are most of the players no hitters at that time, but the Dodgers are in second place after five ithmai full of no-3. Santa was starting his first league game. There must be something in the water in Houston.

I didn’t catch any game live. I saw a supercut showing all 27 outs the Astros got. There they are. You don’t have to watch it to enjoy this article, and it’s seven minutes long, but I at least wanted to give you a chance to experience the game the way I did.

Several things jumped out at me at the beginning of the video. It starts with the shooting of Imai. He steps on the rubber before he even lets out his first pitch, and his stats are overlaid on the screen. They are happy. He is 1-2 with an 8.31 ERA, 1.79 WHIP, 3:2 walk-to-strikeout ratio, and a 4.64 xFIP. With the Seibu Lions in the NPB, Imai ran an ERA under 2.50 over the past four seasons. He was untouchable. But his first five starts weren’t great. He hit the IL with arm fatigue after three outings, lit up in his first Triple-A rehab start, then lit up again in his first return to the big leagues. In the beginning after that, on May 18, Imai scored 41 points. He previously threw a curveball, a splitter, and a regular changeup, but he seems to have completely abandoned them. “Forbid,” he wrote Athletic‘s Chandler Rome, “existed between spots and non-existence.” All of this is to say that, so far in his short MLB career, Imai doesn’t look like a guy with no-hit stuff.

Then the video goes and we are in for another shock. The first pitch we see Imai throw comes with runners on first and second! He had walked the first two batters in the game, at which point hitting coach Josh Miller came out to visit the mound and told Imai to consider shutting down his four-seamer. How often does that happen without a hit? Missed the strike zone in 10 of your first 12 pitches, and you’re asking your pitching coach to tell you to just stop throwing your primary fastball? Imai obeyed, starting Brandon Nimmo with two sinkers, but he missed worse with those, so he went back to the four-seam machine. The first pitch we see is a flat slider in the perfect center of the strike zone. It’s a meatball, and Nimmo rips it open. Unfortunately for the Rangers, he crushed it on the second baseman, starting a double play in a 4-6-3.

Another video has a similar feel. Imai hits only two Rangers in six innings. He draws a few bunts, but it seems like every other ground ball is ground in, requiring a gifted play from Jeremy Peña, Nick Allen, or Brice Matthews, or smoked on a line to the outfield, requiring center fielder Jake Meyers to ride the gap with a big catch. Okert, who pitched the seventh, and Santa, who closed things out, did not allow any hard balls, but only hit the batter, and Okert allowed a single walk.

My point in presenting the game this way is to show that to the naked eye, this looked like a no-hitter, and not just because Houston’s pitching staff has been the worst in baseball so far this year by ERA, FIP-, xFIP, and a bunch of other metrics. Everyone who doesn’t hit is almost impossible, of course. Conventional wisdom says that every no-hitter requires one defensive play. But many things can make a no-hitter very easy. Strikers tend to put in more strikes, because that reduces the amount of chaos that BABIP gods can cause. They tend to put up a low number of walks, because throwing with runners on base is difficult and leads to giving up more hits (and because hitters who walk a ton of batters often don’t have their best stuff). And I would imagine that they tend to include a few hard hit balls because hard hit balls tend to fall between hits. The Astros didn’t get anything out of this during their no-hitter, so I decided to go through the Statcast data to see how small this one is.

I have to start with something more weird than anything else. Imai, Okert, and Santa are all smooth boys. (Santa throws both a regular slider and a slider.) Aside from Imai’s four sinkers, every pitch the Rangers saw was either a four-seamer or a slider. The Astros didn’t throw a single curveball, cutter, or offspeed pitch all night. Going back to the start of the track season in 2008, that happened just 34 times, or just under twice a season. It doesn’t happen much because mixing things up, throwing different pitches with different speeds and movement profiles, keeps hitters guessing and wasting their time. It helps. Not doing so is very unusual.

Okay, on to the numbers. Since 2015, we’ve seen 43 no-hitters. I pulled all the stats I could think of, then looked at where the Astros’ performance ranked among that group. Here’s the table, and to respect Statcast, we’ll use percentiles instead of the old standard.

Well, I’m going to go ahead and take this as the most improbable thing that doesn’t hit! The highest percentage in this table is the barrel rate, which is 38! With no hits, the Astros were lit up. They are ranked at the bottom of everything. They were hit harder, collected fewer bases, and had about the highest batting average expected on the team. No-hitter teams almost always hit more or less hitters; and they always do at least one of the two. The only other no-hitter with a negative K-BB in our sample came on June 24, 2021, when four Cubs combined to walk eight Dodgers and hit just one. According to Stathead, out of 194 no-hitters in the stretch, this is the 16th worst walk-to-strikeout average and the fifth in this century.

This seems like a good place for a good old tell-them-that-you-just-told-them ending so we can repeat all the ways this game could have failed. The Astros have the worst pitching staff in baseball, at least so far. Imai entered the game with a disastrous 8.31 ERA in his five MLB starts, and spent a month during that stretch in the IL with arm fatigue. He had just left a bunch of pitches, and started the game completely unable to find a place. He allowed a 50% strikeout rate and walked twice as many batters as he struck out. Santa was making his big league debut. Three-potters throw a four-seamer or a slider almost across the field. They only do a good job of avoiding hard contact, and a bad job without hitting rates. They did not blow anyone. They walked more batters than hitters. They were soaked in Gatorade anyway. This game is stupid and I love it.