Apr 29 2010 09:41 PM
Re: R.A. Dickey
Dickey gives Bisons a mound masterpiece
By Mike Harrington
NEWS SPORTS REPORTER
It was far from a perfect night for baseball Thursday at chilly, wind-whipped Coca-Cola Field.
Didn't matter to Buffalo Bisons knuckleballer R.A. Dickey. He was just about perfect.
"I felt like I could throw another nine [innings] right now and have the same result," Dickey said after tossing a spectacular one-hitter in the Bisons' 4-0 win over the Durham Bulls. "That's a good feeling."
Dickey, 35, allowed a leadoff single to short right field by Durham center fielder Fernando Perez — and then retired the next 27 Bulls to break the Buffalo franchise record of 25 straight set by Bartolo Colon during his 1997 no-hitter here against New Orleans. That remains the only no-no in the ballpark's 23 seasons.
Pitching against the International League's top offensive team, Dickey was oh-so-close to Buffalo's first perfect game since Dick Marlowe befuddled Baltimore in 1952.
"Oh, don't say that," Dickey said with a pained smile. "That was an 0-2 hit too. So maybe you can give me an error on it, like a mental error of some kind and we can call it a no-hitter. ... That knuckleball was probably the worst one I threw all day. I didn't throw many bad ones today."
The game took just 1 hour, 45 minutes. It was the Herd's first nine-inning, one-hit shutout since Kevin Blankenship blanked Oklahoma City in 1991.
Dickey threw 90 pitches, 68 for strikes. He went to a three-ball count just one time, got 12 groundball outs and struck out six. Most of the pitches never got above 75 mph. No inning lasted longer than 13 pitches.
The only even remotely tough outs were Ryan Shealy's topper to Mike Hessman at third in the eighth and Angel Chavez's chopper that a leaping Dickey speared in the ninth.
"After the first hitter, he threw a perfect game," manager Ken Oberkfell said. "What can you say? That was the most dominating performance I've ever seen. Not just from a knuckleballer. From almost any pitcher."
Dickey (3-1), signed as a free agent after spending most of last year as a reliever for Minnesota, picked up the knuckleball in 2007 as a career saver at Nashville and won 13 games to earn Pacific Coast League Pitcher of the Year honors.
"I'm still learning a lot. I really feel like I'm about 25 in knuckleball years," Dickey said. "I feel like I got maybe five or six more if I get up with the big-league team and stick there. I really feel like I'm passionate about it and still want to learn about it."
Dickey has been Buffalo's workhorse. He's pitched at least eight innings in four straight starts and leads the IL with 38⅔ innings pitched.
There have been only three complete games in the IL this season. One was Wednesday's no-hitter by Norfolk's Chris Tillman at Gwinnett. Dickey has the other two.
There's a reason for it, too. Dickey has no ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow. That's the one typically replaced in Tommy John surgery; it either was missing at birth or has disintegrated.
A 1996 U.S. Olympian, Dickey was a No. 1 pick of the Texas Rangers and was about to get an $810,000 bonus. But a team physician saw a picture of Dickey on the cover of Baseball America and thought his arm looked funny. After another exam revealed the oddity, the Rangers gave him only $75,000. But because of it, his arm has tremendous resiliency. No need to ice it after starts. No need to worry about elbow strain.
"Life is not without that sense of irony," Dickey said. "To not have that ligament as a conventional pitcher really allowed me to be resilient. It's that much more as a knuckleballer because I'm operating out there at 75 percent. If I'm at 100 percent, I'm going to be throwing the ball all over the place.
"I pick my times to really try to hump it up and throw a really filthy, hard nasty one," Dickey said. "The rest of the time, I just want to feel like I'm playing catch with it, taking spin off the baseball and manipulate the baseball like I want to do."
Only about 300 bundled-up fans saw the gem (there were 4,599 tickets sold). The Bisons got a run in the fourth on Hessman's groundout, two in the seventh (one on Chris Carter's single), and an insurance run in the eighth on 20-year-old shortstop Ruben Tejada's first Triple-A home run.
