Mets Minor League Team Gets Retconned Into The Wrong End Of A No-Hitter

In the second inning of Saturday’s Double-A tilt between the Trenton Thunder and the Binghamton Rumble Ponies, Binghamton catcher Tomas Nido hit a grounder past Trenton third baseman Dante Bichette, Jr., for a single. The next batter walked, putting Nido into scoring position, but the Thunder killed the threat with a double play to end the inning. No big deal.

Trenton pitcher Justus Sheffield found a groove over the next few inning, and left after the fourth having just allowed the one hit, along with a couple walks. Taylor Widener picked up exactly where Sheffield left off, blowing through nine outs with relative ease, and without giving up a hit. And then a funny thing happened: the scoreboard, to that point recording a tidy one-hitter by Thunder pitchers, suddenly showed a zero in the hit column. Binghamton went from being one-hit to being no-hit a full five innings after that single by Nido, which had now been retconned to an error.

It’s not especially unusual for a close play to be recategorized after the event, especially if the initial ruling is unfavorable to a player on the home team, but it is certainly very unusual for that recategorization to take place five innings later! You wonder what piece of new information was discovered almost two hours after the fact that changed the score-keeper’s mind about an otherwise completely meaningless play. Sure took ‘em a while to work up that video review! Did they have to find a friggin’ VCR?

Here’s a video of the totally legitimate and not at all wildly suspect no-hitter, compiled by the Trenton Thunder themselves, and perhaps not coincidentally omitting the hit/error in the second inning:

Gooooooooo Thunder!

h/t Graham