OMAHA, Neb. — Before today’s no-hitter thrown by Arkansas right-handed pitcher Gage Wood, it had been 64 years and 364 days since the last no-hitter was thrown at the Men's College World Series.
On June 15th, 1960, Oklahoma State’s Jim Wixson wound up throwing that last MCWS no-hitter in a 7-0 win over North Carolina in an elimination game.
There is only one person who was in the stadium for both games, Omaha's Sandy Buda. If the name sounds familiar, Buda just so happens to also be the former head coach of the University of Nebraska-Omaha Mavericks football team from 1978 to 1989. But before that, rather, long before that, he had a much different job. He was the scoreboard operator at Rosenblatt Stadium.
In June of 1960, you could find him literally sitting inside the scoreboard at the ‘Blatt manually placing placards of the runs, hits, and errors into slots (the balls, strikes, and outs were electronic lights). And that gig included working Wixson’s no-hitter.
“I lived three blocks from Rosenblatt,” Buda said. “I started working there as a 10-year-old selling popcorn. I later worked on the grounds crew and also ran the manual scoreboard for two years.”
His duties there required him to watch the game from a hole in the scoreboard and put the numbers into the right slot. If he made a mistake or if he had a question about whether there was a hit or an error on a play, there was a phone on the wall he could use to communicate with the scorer in the press box to make sure he had the right call.
In that North Carolina-Oklahoma State game, as the innings kept stacking up, he remembers that he kept calling the press box to ask if there were any hits yet.
“They kept saying ‘No, don’t put anything in there yet,” Buda said. “They kept the slots empty if there were no hits and I kept asking them if I had it right that there were no hits, and they kept saying ‘Don’t put anything in there.’ They wouldn’t say it was a no-hitter because they didn’t want to jinx it.”
Eventually, Buda would put a “0” in the hits slot for North Carolina, but not until the final out was recorded and he was absolutely sure there were zero hits.
“They finally called and told me I could put the zero in the slot,” Buda said.
Today, Buda was in the stadium but didn’t see a single pitch of Wood’s masterpiece live. He helps work security for Charles Schwab Field and sits up on the media level by the elevators. It’s his face that all the media members see when they get off the elevator on the fourth floor of the stadium. He only caught a few glimpses of the game on the nearby TVs, but he was technically in the stadium for it.
Having grown up on 16th Street near the old yard, Buda was a long-time football coach, having played both football and baseball at Kansas and then coached as an assistant at KU and at Kansas State before becoming the head coach of his hometown Mavericks. He went 84-49 in his time at the helm of UNO, as the school was known then.
When asked if he remembers anything in particular about the day that Wixson spun his gem; like any plays that stick out, the weather, the crowd or any pretty girls in the stands, he just says with a smile, “Oh no. We’re talking 65 years ago.”
