Burnes fans 11 in dueling bids for no-hitter

MILWAUKEE -- Here’s the answer to the trivia question kicking around your head if you watched Saturday’s Twins-Brewers game: Fred Toney and Hippo Vaughn.

What’s the deepest into a game that opposing pitchers have carried dueling no-hitters? It was May 2, 1917, when the Reds’ Toney and the Cubs’ Vaughn put zero after zero on the scoreboard at Weeghman Park in Chicago, neither allowing a hit for nine full innings. The Reds finally broke through against Vaughn in the 10th and Toney completed his no-hitter.

No two pitchers have done anything like that before or since -- though it appeared the Brewers’ Corbin Burnes and the Twins’ Jose Berríos were intent on taking a run at it on Saturday night at American Family Field.

Box score

In a 2-0 Brewers loss in front of 11,383 fans rooting for history, Burnes and Berríos combined to retire the game’s first 26 batters with eight strikeouts apiece. Each hit a batter in the fifth inning, but neither allowed a hit through the end of the sixth. They took their dueling no-hitters into the seventh before Burnes finally blinked, throwing one too many cutters to Twins center fielder Byron Buxton and seeing it fly for the home run that decided the game.

“It’s always awesome to have a duel like that,” Burnes said. “Berríos has been in the league for quite a while and has been a good young pitcher. If you want to beat the best, that’s what you [have] to do.”

Pitchers’ duels don’t get much better than this one. It marked the first time since the Giants’ Jake Peavy and the Mets’ Jacob deGrom dueled in New York on Aug. 2, 2014, that neither team had a hit after six innings of a game, and according to STATS Inc., the first time in the modern era that opposing starters collected 10-plus strikeouts while allowing one or no hits in the same game.

Stat of the day

“It’s a fantastic baseball game for anyone who loves the game, for anyone that doesn’t mind showing up and watching two elite starters go at it at the top of their games,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. “I don’t know if I’ve seen too many games at the Major League level, as a participant of any kind or just a spectator on television, I haven’t seen too many games pitched like that through six innings. That was really fun to watch, and I’m just glad we were able to come through with a couple of runs and get the job done.

“That’s an old-time pitcher’s duel right there.”

It lasted two batters into the seventh, and then Burnes’ bid for history was over. Buxton hit a cutter down and away to the right-center-field concourse for a solo home run that marked an abrupt end to Burnes’ night at the 87-pitch mark. Burnes’ final pitching line: 6 1/3 innings, one hit, one run, no walks, 11 strikeouts, one hit batsman.

It was a good pitch, Burnes said. But probably the wrong pitch.

“It was basically the same exact pitch we threw before and he fouled off,” Burnes said. “I was trying to expand a little bit with two strikes and basically threw the same pitch. You throw the same pitch back to back to big league hitters, they’re going to get you.”

With the Brewers’ no-hit bid over, the Twins kept theirs going. Berríos didn’t allow a hit in six terrific innings, striking out 12 and throwing 84 pitches before left-handed reliever Taylor Rogers took over for a hitless seventh. The Brewers finally found their way into the hit column when catcher Omar Narváez followed Lorenzo Cain’s walk with a single down the right-field line with one out in the eighth off Tyler Duffey. But the Brewers couldn’t score.

That spared Brewers hitters another no-no. They were held hitless by the Cubs’ Alec Mills here in Milwaukee last Sept. 13.

"Good thing I got to [Duffey] today because [Berríos] was spotting everything,” Narváez said. “That’s the nastiest I’ve ever seen of him so I have to give him a lot of credit today."

Narváez was also quick to credit Burnes, who has made huge strides since going “offline” at the end of a miserable 2019 season. He rebuilt his arsenal at the Brewers’ high-tech pitching lab, ditching the four-seam fastball in favor of a two-seam sinker, adding a wicked cutter and refining a curveball and changeup. The results have been rather stunning. After Burnes’ 8.82 ERA in 2019 was worst in the National League for a pitcher who worked at least 40 innings, his 2.11 ERA in 2020 was fifth-best.

Saturday marked a promising start in his bid to repeat that success over a full season.

“Corbin pitched beautifully,” Brewers manager Craig Counsell said. “He's going to have a really good season if he has games like that and he's throwing the ball like that.”