No-hitter: individual or team accomplishment?

How Big A Deal Is A No-Hitter?  Saturday, March 16, 2013

Pitchers only retire batters they strike out.  The other players retire the batters who put the ball in play except for those rare occasions when a pitcher actually makes a fielding play...

a massive number of strike outs seems to me to be much more of an accomplishment for the pitcher who actually retired those batters without any help.
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With a No-Hitter on the Line, Balancing Between Health and History
By ANDREW KEH and JAY SCHREIBER
Published: July 14, 2013 The New York Times

Managers probably cringed a bit when Tim Lincecum threw 148 pitches during the first no-hitter of his career Saturday night..

Mets Manager Terry ... Collins .. confronted a similar quandary last year, when Johan Santana threw 134 pitches — a total that, like Lincecum’s, was the most in his career — to record the first no-hitter in Mets history, and the first of his career

The last pitcher to throw more pitches than Lincecum did Saturday was Edwin Jackson, who, as a member of the Arizona Diamondbacks, threw 149 in June 2010 in his eight-walk no hitter against the Tampa Bay Rays...

But according to Baseball-Reference.com, Lincecum barely creeps into the bottom of the list of the 300 pitchers who have thrown the most pitches in a game since 1916...

Sandy Koufax ... threw 205 pitches (third highest on the list) against the Chicago Cubs in a 13-inning, 3-2 victory against them in September 1961 ...

Warren Spahn, another Hall of Fame left-hander, had games in which he threw 184, 183, 174 and 169 pitches, all between 1948 and 1953.
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First an aside.  There'a a list!?  Say what?  Does everyone know about this list but me?  Where the heck is it and how the heck could it have been created?

Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Marichal v. Spahn July 2, 1963: pitch counts.

Tom Tango developed a pitch count estimator...

I played with it ...

For this legendary 16 inning game:

Pitches per batter faced:
Marichal 3.61
Spahn 3.07

xPCE:
Marichal 217
Spahn 172
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Do actual pitch counts exist for this game?

I just ran an ad hoc query at baseball-reference.com and found 215 games that matched this criteria: From 1916 to 2013, (requiring H=0), sorted by most recent date.

Games as short as five innings are included.

No pitchers are mentioned, just team stats including: Pit, which when I put the cursor over it reveals:

"Number of pitches in the PA.
Click to see the pitch-by-pitch sequence."

There are pitch counts for every no-hitter going back to Reds over Dodgers 9/16/1988.  Then none until no-hitter 133 (going backwards in time): Dodgers over Cubs 9/9/1965; I'm guessing Koufax.  Remember, no pitchers are listed.

Then more sporadic data with the final no-hitter with a pitch count: game 169 of the 215, Brooklyn Dodgers over New York Giants 9/9/1948, 116 pitches.  I looked up that one because it was my birth year: Rex Barney no-hit the Giants in the Polo Grounds.  No pitch counts for no-hitters 170-215.

Of the 81 no-hitters for which we have pitch counts, at least this number of pitches in this many games:
130: 14
120: 30
110: 51
100: 66

Of the 15 games below 100, two were 5 innings, one was 6 innings.
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OK, back to the subject of this post.  Why all the anguish?  If a possible no-hitter were treated like any other game, the starting pitcher would leave pretty much when he usually would and relief pitchers would try to complete the no-hitter.  Would the suspense and excitement be that much less?  OK, aside from draining the life out of the game during the pitcher change ritual?

Wednesday, June 11, 2003, 7:05PM, Yankee Stadium II
Attendance: 29,905, Time of Game: 2:52

This one is not shown on the YES network.  The Houston Astros no-hit the Yankees 8-0.  Winning pitcher: Brad Lidge, the fourth of six Astro pitchers.  The other five pitchers?  Who cares?  The ASTROS no-hit the Yankees, not an individual pitcher.  They threw 151 pitches, most for any no-hitter.

So what if Giants manager Bruce Bochy had removed Tim Lincecum after 114 pitches, the most Lincecum had thrown previously in 2013, and turned it over to the bullpen?  Would Bochy be excoriated?  Would he be praised?  Would he set a modern precedent that relieves all the copy-cat managers and allows them to do the same thing?

I can understand leaving a staring pitcher in the game because you don't trust the relief pitchers and you want to win the game.  In the late 1960s I became convinced that a tired Mel Stottlemyre was better than a fresh Dooley Womack.

In his World Series perfect game Don Larsen threw 97 pitches.  Yankee manager Casey Stengel needed to win that game as the series was tied 2-2.  Stengel was not concerned with the pitch count or whether Larsen got credit for a perfect game, a term with which Larsen was not even familiar after the game.  Larsen benefited from a great catch by Mickey Mantle in left center against Gil Hodges and a ricochet off third baseman Andy Carey to shortstop Gil McDougald who threw out Jackie Robinson. Also, Duke Snider hit a long foul home run.  So was this an individual or team accomplishment?