Does Halladay have no-how to match Vander Meers back-to-back no-hitters?
IT IS TRENDY to state that baseball’s most unbreakable record is Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. Nobody has come close to that 1941 necklace of base hits, adding up until a nation was glued to the radio. Perhaps nobody will . . . Which is what they said about Lou Gehrig’s “unbreakable” streak of 2,130 consecutive games played. Until Cal Ripken not only broke it, the Orioles shortstop destroyed it, running the record out to 2,632 games. Which brings us to the next record Roy Halladay now has in his crosshairs. That would be Johnny Vander Meer’s 1938 feat of pitching back-to-back no-hitters for the Cincinnati Reds. The first was against the Boston Bees on June 11. Four days later in the first night game ever played in Ebbets Field, the hard-throwing lefthander no-hit the Dodgers. There have been 155 no-hitters pitched since Vander Meer’s seminal feat. Ironically, the closest anybody has come to replicating the double no-nos, was Reds righthander Ewell Blackwell, the “Sidearm Assas
