A pregnant Lori Leiter was relieved when her husband, Al, changed his mind about wanting Chinese food for his pregame meal Saturday. Nothing like a little egg foo yong to make her morning sickness an all-day affair.
But when they drove to the Italian spot where they usually eat pasta, it was closed. So, they wound up in Beijing Garden, the Chinese restaurant in Plantation where they’d eaten before Leiter’s last start, a win.
They sat at the same table, were served by the same waitress, and then broke open their fortune cookies before leaving for Joe Robbie Stadium.
“When do you ever find a message like that in a fortune cookie?” said Lori Leiter, who urged her husband to hold onto his top-of-the-world forecast for good luck.
Alice Pai is part-owner of Beijing Garden. No, she said Sunday afternoon, she didn’t know Al Leiter, the pitcher, or Lori, his attorney wife. And, no, she isn’t a baseball fan. But she promised to buy a newspaper.
Not because 30-year-old Al Leiter, the youngest of six brothers and a twin sister born 17 minutes before him, was the first Marlins pitcher ever to throw a no-hitter. But because Al Leiter, who late Saturday night fished the little slip of paper out of the pocket of his jeans and remembered, was the first customer whose fortune had actually come to pass.
“I’m very happy for him,” she said. “Thank you for telling me.”
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“He’s being mobbed by his teammates on top of the pitcher’s mound and right now, Al Leiter is on top of the world.”
– Marlins radio broadcaster Joe Angel, after the final out of Al Leiter’s no-hitter.
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Jose Sotolongo, the team’s director of community relations, presented him with the box of Camacho cigars that he’d saved for just such an occasion. Mike Wallace, the equipment manager, cracked open the bottle of Moet-Chandon champagne he always keeps on ice, just in case.
“The only other time I’ve opened a bottle,” Wallace said, “was the first year, the night we won to guarantee we wouldn’t lose 100 games.”
Al Leiter smoked his cigar and drank his champagne, but says he didn’t fully realize what he had just done until Marlins publicist Chuck Pool asked what he wanted to send to the Hall of Fame.
Until then, Leiter said, the closest he’d ever come to Cooperstown was when he played A ball in Oneonta, a neighboring town in upstate New York.
“Right when it happens, it’s more of like a shock, an amazed-type feeling – omigod, it’s actually happened,” Leiter said.
That feeling never wore off Saturday night. He and Lori went to the Davie Ale House after the game. “No one recognized him, which was great,” Lori said. “It was just the two of us.”
When they got home, they found a “Congratulations” sign on the garage of their Plantation home, just as someone had strung a banner up in the neighborhood where Lori’s parents, Bill and Dana Salsburg, live. The answering machine was maxed out with messages. Sleep was out of the question.
This was a night for a replay that would never end in Al Leiter’s head. And what did he send to Cooperstown?
“A ball and a hat,” said equipment man Wallace, “and your bat – because that has no hits, either.”
“And the C-note you have to pay for coming here late today,” added reliever Terry Mathews. —
“I’m kind of embarrassed, but I didn’t realize a no-hitter was going on. I said to Terry Mathews and Robb Nen, Al’s due to hit in the seventh, this may be his last inning. Then I looked at the scoreboard and realized what was going on.”
– Marlins backup catcher Bob Natal, who was in the bullpen during Al Leiter’s no-hitter
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Natal wasn’t the only one oblivious to Leiter’s looming date with history. Marlins third baseman Terry Pendleton said he didn’t notice until the seventh inning, when the crowd at Joe Robbie Stadium gave Leiter a standing ovation when he came to bat. Lori Leiter, who was occupied with the couple’s 14-month-old daughter, Lindsay, until Craig Grebeck’s dad, who was sitting next to her, asked how close Al had come before.
Close to what, Lori wondered. Then she saw the scoreboard.
“It was the quietest dugout you’ve ever seen for a team with an 11-0 lead,” said left-fielder Jeff Conine.
First baseman Greg Colbrunn made the mistake of sitting in Leiter’s spot on the Marlins’ bench. This was early, about midgame. “He asked me to scoot over,” Colbrunn said. “I went all the way to the other end of the dugout.”
With such a big lead, manager Rene Lachemann said, he normally would have taken out some of his regulars. But not with a no-hitter in progress. “You don’t step on Superman’s cape,” he said.
Leiter said that he nearly jinxed himself in the eighth, when for just a second, he started thinking about how he should react if he got the no-hitter, a capital no-no.
He forced himself to focus on the task at hand, which in the end, was simplified to its most basic element: Catcher Charles Johnson put one finger down for a fastball, Leiter threw it. Last two innings, he said, that’s all he threw.
“I wasn’t going to lose this with anything but my best pitch,” he said. —
“I love you, mom.”
– Al Leiter to his mother, Maria, on ESPN Radio after his no-hitter Saturday night.
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The radio people had tracked down Maria Leiter in Ocala, where she was staying with Alexia Dunkley, Al’s twin sister and mother of a week-old son. Maria Leiter was born outside of Liverpool, more famous for the Beatles than baseball, with a soft accent that bespeaks the King’s English more than the Jersey shore, where she raised her family.
Five of her six sons played baseball, three professionally – Al, Mark (now with the Giants) and Kurt, who was in the Orioles’ organization. “I can’t even tell you how much baseball I’ve watched,” she said. “It just turned out to be my life.”
She watched the no-hitter in Alexia’s living room. “If I’d been there,” she said, “I would have been a nervous wreck.”
Kurt, who works for Reebok in Boston, saw the end of the game in a sports bar and called. Mark called from Pittsburgh, where the Giants were playing the Pirates.
He told Al how Barry Bonds walked over and said, “Is that your brother? What team does he play for? Is he a rookie?” Mark also noted how Leiter showed so little excitement after he’d struck out Eric Young to end the no-no.
“I couldn’t do like a moondance, or throw up my hands, or jump up and down like I remember Jerry Reuss doing,” said Al Leiter, recalling the Dodgers’ lefty who threw a no-hitter in the early ’80s. “That’s not me. But I feel as happy as any other guy.”
And how happy is that?
“I was very, very feliz navidad,” Leiter told a Spanish-language radio reporter.
He wasn’t alone. “What was I doing? Wiping down the hairs on my arm that were standing on end,” said Marlins President Don Smiley, who was watching from his private box.
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“Man, you’re on top of the world.”
– Val Chevalier, Al Leiter’s best friend from high school in Whiting, N.J., in a phone call to the Marlins’ pitcher Sunday morning
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Two pitches in the ninth inning, two outs. “After the first out, there was this foggy feeling of hearing the fans, I definitely felt that,” Al Leiter said. “Then after the second out, the fans definitely got louder. That pumped me up.”
Then Young swung and missed, and Al Leiter passed into the mists of remembrance, as forecast by a fortune cookie.
“That was probably the best day in Marlins history, don’t you think?” Rene Lachemann said.
