Nice article, but you can’t tell the story without mentioning the game on 4 August 1989. It may have ended as a two-hitter, so doesn’t fit as neatly into the author’s narrative of five one-hitters in a 15-month sequence from May 1988 to August 1989. Nevertheless, it was definitely a much bigger game than most, if not all, of those one-hitters with Stieb losing a perfect game with two outs in the ninth to Roberto Kelly. Really it was this game on everyone’s mind, along with the previous one-hitter in Cleveland the year before, when Stieb finally got his no-hitter a month later in Cleveland on 2 September 1990.

If those three had turned into two more no-hitters and a perfect game, would Stieb be a Hall of Fame candidate?