By Canadian Press

Canadian catcher Siddall recalls catching perfect game in final day of career

May 9, 2018 | 4:35 PM

TORONTO — Joe Siddall had every intention of retiring from professional baseball when he arrived at McCoy Stadium, home of the triple-A Pawtucket Red Sox in June of 2000. He and his wife Tamara had discussed it and, at the age of 32, after 22 games with Boston’s minor league affiliate, he was ready to call it quits.

But then he saw that manager Gary Jones had put him in the lineup, catching for 24-year-old Japanese phenom Tomo Ohka.

“Well, I won’t say anything, I’ll play the game and tell Jones after,” said Siddall in the Toronto Blue Jays dugout on Wednesday at Rogers Centre. “I catch the game and Tomo throws a perfect game. So of course everybody’s celebrating after the game and we get in the clubhouse and I couldn’t rain on that parade.

“So I celebrate with everybody, went home, then came back early the next day and quit. That was my last game.”

Siddall, from Windsor, Ont., was reminiscing about his final game as a professional player a day after watching fellow Canadian James Paxton throw a no-hitter as the Seattle Mariners shut out the Blue Jays 5-0.

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As part of Sportsnet’s TV broadcast team, Siddall watched Paxton’s seven-strikeout performance in person. Siddall, who played for the Montreal Expos, the Florida Marlins, and the Detroit Tigers before ending his career in the Red Sox minor league system, was impressed with Mariners catcher Mike Zunino, who was behind the plate for Paxton’s no-no.

“Even though in any no-hitter the pitcher is on that night, Paxton was on last night, Tomo was on that night, but you’d like to think that some of the sequences that you called, and the way you handled certain hitters, had something to do with it,” said Siddall. “That’s why most pitchers, you’ll always hear them give credit to the catcher for calling the game.”

Toronto catcher Luke Maile has never caught a no-hitter in the major leagues, but he was behind the plate for a combined no-hitter thrown by five different pitchers with low-A Bowling Green in 2013 because everyone was on tight pitch counts.

“Any time there’s a no-hitter thrown or a perfect game thrown it’s a collective effort,” said Maile, who was behind the plate for a perfect 7 2/3 innings with triple-A Durham in 2016. “You saw it last night, there were four or five plays that weren’t the easiest plays in the world but Seattle ended up making them.

“As a catcher you try to come prepared every day, you try to put down the right signs, but you’ll have days where you might mess up a couple of them here and there, but somebody makes a good play. You might make the right calls but then someone hits a bloop single and you can’t do anything about it. It’s just sort of the way baseball works.”

Superstition holds that players should avoid speaking with the pitcher in the midst of a perfect game or a no-hitter. But catchers are exempt from it, since they still have to speak with their battery-mate.

“Even a catcher might back off, but I’m sure they’re all different, I couldn’t tell you,” said Blue Jays manager John Gibbons, who never caught a no-hitter for the New York Mets when he played for them in the 1980s.

“I’d say you get a read on the guy,” said Maile. “The whole idea of not going near a guy is all about not changing up his momentum. That said, if you’ve got a guy and you’ve been talking through the order the first five or six innings, there’s no reason to stop doing that because you don’t want to break up the mojo you’ve got going on.”

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John Chidley-Hill, The Canadian Press