Doubling up on the no-nos

Fifty-six years later, Virgil Trucks remains the answer to one of baseball’s intriguing trivia questions: What pitcher tossed two no-hitters during a season in which his record was 5-19?

Trucks did so for the last-place Detroit Tigers in 1952, surely one of baseball’s oddest feats. Only three others have thrown two no-hitters in the same season: Johnny Vander Meer in consecutive games for the Cincinnati Reds in 1938, Allie Reynolds for the New York Yankees in 1951 and Nolan Ryan for the California Angels in 1973.

Trucks is 91 now, two years older than his listed “baseball” age, and living in Calera, Ala. He says people and interviewers still bring up the double no-hitters. The first was against the Washington Senators at Detroit’s old Briggs Stadium on May 15, the second against the pennant-winning New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium on Aug. 25.

When Trucks went to the mound against the Senators, “I felt pretty good, but I always felt good,” he recalled last week. He had been knocked out and lost his first four starts for a 50-104 team that would become the first Detroit club to finish last in the American League, but Trucks always shook off adversity in a marvelous 17-year career that yielded 177 victories.

Those Senators were better than most of their recent predecessors, finishing fifth with a 78-76 record. But that day the Senators had nothing resembling a hit against the aptly nicknamed “Fire” Trucks, who struck out seven while outpitching Washington ace Bob Porterfield for a 1-0 victory. Porterfield was pretty wonderful himself, allowing just four hits before a tiny Thursday afternoon gathering of 2,215.

Five Senators reached base — two on walks, two after being plunked achingly by Trucks’ heater and one on an error. The final out in the top of the ninth came when Trucks fanned former and future batting champion Mickey Vernon, later a fellow coach with the champion Pittsburgh Pirates in 1960.

Nonetheless, the game was scoreless until the bottom of the ninth, when Detroit slugger Vic Wertz homered into the upper deck in right field with two out and none on. And literally, Wertz’s sock hurt Trucks as much as it did Porterfield.

“When he hit the homer, I jumped up so excited that I hit my head on the dugout roof,” Trucks said in his 2004 autobiography. “Man, I saw stars, but I staggered out to greet him just like we’d just won the World Series.”

After his first gem, Trucks won just three more games before his second gem in New York more than three months later. In the third inning, Tigers shortstop Johnny Pesky bobbled a grounder, allowing Phil Rizzuto to reach base. Official scorer John Drebinger of the New York Times called it an error, then changed his ruling to a hit. But when the debate kept raging in the press box, Drebinger called Pesky, who said he should have made the play. So the “hit” was erased, and Trucks was in business again.

Baseball tradition dictates that nobody in the dugout mention a potential no-hitter. But when Trucks reached first base in the seventh, umpire Bill Grieve motioned to the scoreboard and said, “There’s your no-hitter back — now go get it.”

Trucks’ response was typical: “I don’t care about a no-hitter. I’m just trying to win a ballgame.”

So he did, again by 1-0, and baseball history was made — or at least equaled. In his five victories that season, Trucks allowed a total of five hits — surely one of the game’s more bizarre statistics. Virgil’s ERA for the season was 3.97, high for that era but respectable nowadays. Late in the season, he asked manager Fred Hutchinson to let him pitch out of the bullpen to avoid 20 losses.

In most other seasons, Trucks was a consistent winner and feared opponent. The Tigers showed their appreciation for his pair of no-hitters by trading him to the sad-sack St. Louis Browns, who shipped him to the Chicago White Sox later in 1953. By way of erasing the overall stigma of 1952, he won 20 games that season and 19 the next before retiring in 1958 with a career ERA of 3.39 and 33 shutouts.

Despite his long career as one of the AL’s most reliable right-handers, he seldom got the recognition he deserved — possibly because of his modest, quiet nature and because his only World Series was in 1945, when the quality of play was greatly reduced because of World War II.

“I sent an autographed ball from each [no-hitter] to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, and they made me pay the postage,” Trucks noted in his book.

And, oh yes, his biggest salary for a season was $38,500.

Too bad, in terms of money and acclaim, that Virgil “Fire” Trucks wasn’t born a half-century later. Yet what he did in 1952 shines through the baseball ages.