NEW YORK – A million bucks generally won't get you much on baseball's free-agent market these days, but pitcher Aaron Harang is proving to be a major exception for the Braves.
The well-traveled veteran pitched seven hitless innings in Friday night’s 6-0 win against the New York Mets at Citi Field, where the Braves’ bid for a combined no-hitter ended with David Wright’s two-out single against Luis Avilan in the eighth inning.
Jordan Walden pitched the ninth inning to finish off the one-hitter and the Braves’ fifth win in six games.
Harang (3-1) had six walks and five strikeouts and was replaced because his pitch count climbed to 121 when he struck out Andrew Brown to end the seventh inning with the Braves nursing a 1-0 lead. He’s taken no-hit bids through at least six innings twice already this season, and lowered his majors-leading ERA to 0.70.
“I’m pulling for him — I want to see him throw a no-hitter,” Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez said of the decision to bring in a reliever. “But I think it gets to a point where you’ve got to worry about 25 more starts. You’ve got to worry about his longevity, and all that kind of stuff. I think we made the right decision, and it doesn’t matter who comes in and tells me different.”
Harang asked Gonzalez to let him go back out to start the eighth, but afterward said he understood the decision.
“I fought to go back out there,” he said. “But looking at my best interests, it was a smarter play (not to). If I got a quick (seventh) inning, I’m going back out there. But it’s Fredi looking out for me, he wants me to pitch the rest of the year. He doesn’t want me to, all of a sudden maybe you have to skip me the next start because I’ve got 150 pitches, then I’m not the same.
“It’s definitely him trying to take care of his players. He knows I’m a competitor, he knows I’m going to go out there and keep pitching. As a manager, I know it’s probably the hardest decision that he’s ever going to have to make. Bud Black has told me the same thing.”
When Harang was with San Diego in 2011, Black replaced him after six no-hit innings in his first start after an injury-rehab stint.
Harang’s latest seemingly improbable performance came 16 days after he took a no-hitter to the seventh inning of his Braves debut at Milwaukee.
“He’s been incredible,” said third baseman Chris Johnson, whose three hits included a second-inning RBI double, the only run the Braves scored while Harang was in the game.
They tacked on four runs in the eighth, including Freddie Freeman’s two-run homer, and one in the ninth.
The Braves haven’t had a no-hitter in 20 years, since Kent Mercker threw one against the Dodgers in Los Angeles on April 8, 1994. Three years earlier, Mercker and relievers Mark Wohlers and Alejandro Pena combined on a no-hitter against the Padres on Sept. 11, 1991, the only combined no-hitter in franchise history.
Of all the great pitchers who’ve come through the Braves organization since then, Harang would be an unlikely pick to throw their next no-hitter. Or at least he would’ve been until a few weeks ago.
Signed by the Braves for $1 million in the final week of spring training as a stopgap starter, Harang has been something else entirely. The 35-year-old is pitching like a man who turned back the clock, determined to stick around for a good while.
He’s taken no hitters to the seventh inning or later twice this season, while the only other National League pitcher to do it even once was Milwaukee’s Matt Garza — in the same April 2 game as Harang’s debut. Both pitchers had no-hitters through six innings that day, and Harang’s no-hit bit was broken up by Logan Schafer’s leadoff single in the seventh.
Johnson ended Garza’s no-hit bid with a seventh-inning homer for the only offense in that 1-0 win at Milwaukee, and for much of the night Friday it looked like Johnson might again have the only RBI again in the game.
But soon after starter Jon Niese left, the Braves roughed up the Mets bullpen. After Freeman’s homer, Dan Uggla and Jordan Schafer added RBI doubles in the eighth, with Uggla coming all the way around to score when the catcher’s throw to third base sailed to the left-field corner.
Harang threw 98 pitches through six innings, then got the first two outs of the seventh on flyouts that required just three pitches total. But after consecutive seven-pitch walks by Travis d’Arnaud and Ruben Tejada, his pitch count was at 115.
Brown ran another count full before striking out swinging to end the seventh inning. Harang had two walks apiece in the sixth and seventh innings, and used a strikeout to end each inning. But he used too many pitches to get a third out after the first two quick outs in the seventh. When he came off the field, Gonzalez was waiting.
“I said, I’m good, I’ve got this, just have somebody up and ready to go,” Harang said. “And he’s like – he’s biting his lip – he’s like, ‘Dude, I hate doing this….’ But the fact that I went through it a couple of years ago in San Diego, I know how it works. You see guys get hurt and they’re just not the same afterward because they threw a ton of pitches. It’s just the track record.
“So you’ve got to commend him for being able to put his foot down and say, I don’t want to be responsible for you getting hurt when I have a say in it right now.”
Harang entered Friday with a .145 opponents’ average that was the second-best among major league starters. The stocky, 6-foot-5 right-hander whittled that away while carving up Mets hitters with well-located, 88-90 mph fastballs and an array of changeups, sliders and curveballs.
His opponents’ average was down to a majors-leading .110 by the end of the night.
“He’s been huge,” Freeman said. “Our whole starting staff has been incredible, especially what he’s doing. He came over here at the very end of spring training and he’s just been lights-out. If he can keep doing that it’ll be pretty special. But hopefully we can get some runs for him.”
The Mets were quite familiar with Harang: Most of them faced him for years, and he made four starts for the Mets last September after getting released by Seattle. Harang went 5-11 with a 4.69 ERA in 22 starts for the Mariners, and was also let go by the Indians this spring after asking for his release when they told him he wouldn’t make the opening day roster.
Braves scouts saw something more in Harang than did talent evaluators on some other teams in the past year. They Braves released veteran Freddy Garcia on March 24 and replaced him the same day with Harang.
The Braves thought his still-respectable velocity helped make Harang a more viable option in the rotation for at least a few weeks, and then perhaps in the bullpen when Mike Minor or Gavin Floyd came off the disabled list. But Harang has exceeded all expectations, and if he keeps pitching near this effectively he isn’t likely to be bumped from the rotation.
