Volquez Makes History: Ranking The Miami Marlins No-Hitters

No-No No. 5: Leiter First For Fish 5/11/96

I’ll come clean here- part of my reasoning for putting this one in fifth place in Miami Marlins no-hitter history is that I honestly have no memory of it. And that’s pretty bad considering I was 12, even if my house wasn’t all the way there yet baseball fandom wise.

But Al Leiter‘s domination of the Colorado Rockies way back in 1996 was certainly significant, serving up a defiant piece of evidence that Marlins baseball had arrived in a big way. There have been six no-hitters in franchise history, and if that seems like a lot in just twenty-five seasons, it would be because no other team has recorded that many since 1993. Yet Leiter was the first to the hitless mountaintop, and that deserves plenty of praise.

Six strikeouts, only two walks, one hit batsman, and no errors. Pretty good stuff all around, and Cy Young worthy numbers compared to the Burnett performance discussed on the previous slide. What keeps Leiter’s night in fifth though is actually the offensive onslaught that accompanied it.

The Marlins had 11 hits in this game…one for each run.  An 11-0 victory, fueled by a six run first, robbed this game of a lot of the drama that accompanied other hitless performances. Never in doubt as to who would win, and with the first walk issued in the second inning, it was never in any real danger of being a perfect game either. One fun fact though- one of the opposing Rockies hitters was Walt Weiss, an original Marlin, and future Rockies manager.

To that point though, it was as close as the young Florida franchise had come to doing so.