Ken Akerman
October 23, 2004
I remember listening to this game on radio during a weekday afternoon after returning home from school. It was during the last week of the regular season on a Wednesday afternoon, before Wrigley Field had lights.
In this game, Tom Seaver pitched 8? hitless innings before giving up a base hit to rookie Joe Wallis with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning.
Seaver had retired the first 18 batters of the game before walking Don Kessinger to start the bottom of the seventh inning, breaking up a perfect game. He continued pitching no-hit ball into the ninth, and struck out the first two batters of the ninth inning before Wallis got the Cubs' first hit.
Wallis was a September call-up who, according to his profile on Retrosheet.org, had played his first major league earlier in the month on Sept. 2, 1975. Wallis thus joins a list of relatively indistguished players who broke up no-hitters by great pitchers, although Wallis, who played in 329 games over five seasons in the majors, did have a much longer and more productive career than Jim Qualls, who broke up Seaver's perfect game attempt against the Cubs in 1969.
Neither team had scored during the first nine innings of this game, so the game went into extra innings. Seaver pitched into the tenth and gave up two hits in the inning, but he got out of the jam when Manny Trillo, who had singled, was thrown out at home trying to score on George Mitterwald's double. John Milner pinch-hit for Seaver in the top of the eleventh inning, and the Cubs won in the bottom of that inning when reliever Skip Lockwood walked Bill Madlock with the bases loaded.
This was the last time that a Mets' pitcher had a no-hitter going into the ninth inning, according to ESPN. No Mets pitcher has ever pitched a no-hitter, although many former Mets pitchers, including Seaver himself, pitched no-hitters for other teams.
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