An Inside Look at Alec Mills’ No-Hitter
By Jacob Halleen
On Sunday afternoon, Cubs pitcher Alec Mills threw the second no-hitter in the shortened 2020 season. In a season that has taught us to expect the unexpected, Mills’ no-hitter was perhaps the most unlikely event that has occurred thus far.
Alec Mills’ next start will be this weekend against the Twins, and in a division as close as the NL Central, the Cubs will need him to keep up his run of success. In fact, division rivals Milwaukee and St. Louis play each other this week and the Brewers are (-200) moneyline favorites against STL.
Mills, who will turn 29 in November, was a walk-on at the University of Tennessee at Martin. After getting a tryout and making the team, he was drafted in the 22nd round of the 2012 MLB draft by the Kansas City Royals. The Cubs picked up Mills in 2017 after he was let go by the Royals.After undergoing Tommy John surgery early in his career, Mills made his Cubs’ debut in 2018. Spending most of his career in the minors, Mills has only made 15 career starts in the big leagues, over half of those coming this year. If it were not for injuries to Jose Quintana and Tyler Chatwood, Mills would not have been in the starting rotation. Since entering the rotation, Mills has been up and down. Two starts ago, Mills’ ERA rose to 5.50 and he was trending in the wrong direction. However, after a bounce back start last week against the Reds and his no-hitter on Sunday, his ERA has dropped to 3.93.
In a league where it seems everyone values velocity and strikeouts from their pitchers, Mills does not fit that build. His hardest pitch thrown on Sunday was 91 mph. In fact, the Cubs rotation as a whole is ranked 30th in starters’ fastball velocity, 90.5 mph.
Mills wasn’t trying to blow hitters away. He only struck out five batters and generated five swings-and-misses. The five batters he struck out were the lowest in a no-hitter since Henderson Alvarez in 2013 and the five swings-and-misses were the lowest since Dallas Braden’s perfect game in 2010. While throwing 98 mph is an effective way to get batters out, it’s not the only way. Mills, much like his teammate Kyle Hendricks, kept hitters off balance by changing speeds and locating pitches in different areas of the zone. He threw his curveball, which averages 66.5 mph, 20% of the time. That’s about 25 mph less than his fastball. By keeping hitters honest with the curve, he was able to have a more effective fastball. He pitched to his strengths and let his defense make plays behind him.With the increased use of defensive shifts, contact pitchers like Alec Mills benefit as the fielders are positioned better than ever before.
As with every no-hitter, there is a lot of luck involved.Mills gave up 11 hard hit balls (exit velocity greater than 95 mph) and a hard hit percentage of 52.4% according to Fangraphs. That was the most hard hit balls and second-highest hard hit percentage in Mills’ nine starts this season.That is not supposed to take anything away from his excellence, but it shows that luck, along with execution, occurs in every no-hitter.
This was the 16th no-hitter in Cubs franchise history, and first since Jake Arrieta in 2016.
