Twenty-five years ago Terry Harvey threw a historic no-hitter

Sometime during the seventh inning of a late March baseball game at Doak Field, the starting pitcher bounded joyously into the NC State dugout, where his teammates were avoiding him like a telemarketer at dinner time.

“Damn, that’s a lot of zeroes on the scoreboard,” said Terry Harvey, the sophomore right-hander who had yet to allow a hit against a formidable Florida State lineup that included four future Major Leaguers.

Yes, it was a baseball taboo — it’s a no-no to talk about a no-no.

Harvey was never superstitious, though. He not only stepped on the foul lines as he ran off and on the field, sometimes he would drag his toe through them just to leave a mark. He thought his tightening teammates needed an ice-breaker.

“It sort of loosened everybody up for the end of the game,” Harvey recalled recently.

The young pitcher from Dacula, Georgia — who doubled as NC State football’s quarterback of the future — had been in the situation before. In his first career start as a freshman, after successfully and indignantly begging then-head coach Ray Tanner for a chance, Harvey held Wake Forest without a hit for 8 1/3 innings. A ninth-inning bobble by the Wolfpack shortstop was deemed an infield single by the official scorekeeper to end his no-hit bid.

Harvey got the win anyway.

The next time he had a chance — on March 26, 1993 — he wanted to make sure he completed it. In the second inning, shortstop Ryan Ferby had mishandled a hard-hit grounder for a fairly obvious error. The next inning, third baseman Tim Tracey made an exceptional play on an infield bleeder, throwing out the FSU runner in a bang-bang play at first.

Harvey scattered four walks, but only two lazy fly balls left the infield the entire game, and he struck out what was then a career-high 11 batters.

In the critical final two innings, Harvey mowed down the Seminole offense, ending the no-hitter with three easy ground balls in the ninth.

In the 2,262 games Florida State played before that day, and the 1,710 games it has played after, no other pitcher has ever no-hit the Seminoles, who will host the Wolfpack in a regular-season-ending, three-game series this weekend in Tallahassee, Florida.

“Is that still true?” an incredulous Harvey asked 25 years after his remarkable feat.

It is.

“Oh, boy, do I remember that game,” said Mike Martin, Florida State’s head baseball coach for the last 39 years. “That particular night, Terry was dominant. We didn’t have but a handful of balls out of the infield the whole game. We had a couple of chances early in the game, but we couldn’t get anything going.

“From that point on, Terry was like ‘Boys, you had your chance.’”

That season, Harvey was still throwing a split-finger fastball. He had good movement on a cooler-than-normal afternoon, and the warm-weather Seminoles couldn’t dial in on what he was throwing.

“My guys were coming into the dugout saying they had never seen anything like it,” said Martin, fondly remembering the no-hitter as a proud blemish on his remarkable record of 1,981-710-4, which is the most wins in college baseball history. “He was just nasty.”

Along with the moving fastball, he had pinpoint command of every pitch.

“It was just one of those days where my control was really on,” Harvey remembered. “It was like I was throwing with a remote control or a SEGA joystick.”

Tanner noticed in admiration from the dugout.

"What stands out distinctly for me is that you often hear about athletes who are in a zone," said Tanner, the former Wolfpack coach who is now the athletics director at South Carolina. "That's what Terry was that day. You could see it every time he came off the mound. It wouldn't have mattered who he faced, and that was a good Florida State lineup, he was going to shut anyone down.

"He had that extra level of energy and execution. He was absolutely locked in."

It is, and should be, remembered as one of the greatest pitching performances in NC State and ACC history, especially given the live aluminum bats in use at the time.

“If you had a 3.50 or 4.00 earned run average back then, you were really dealing,” Harvey noted. “Those old-style aluminum bats were lethal. There was no such thing as a 1.00 or under ERA.”

Martin proudly recognizes the significance of the game.

“Terry Harvey got everything he deserved out of that game,” said Martin, a native of Charlotte who was recently inducted into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame, along with late Wolfpack baseball player Chris Cammack. “It was just beautiful.”

The only NC State games remotely close to Harvey’s performance were by two future major leaguers.

On April 16, 1911, NC A&M (as NC State was then known) pitcher Dave Robertson, in a duel with future Boston Red Sox standout Ernie Shore, struck out 23 Guilford College batters in a nine-inning game, which would have been an NCAA record had the organization existed for baseball at the time.

Fifty years ago this season, freshman Mike Caldwell clinched NC State’s first Atlantic Coast Conference championship with a one-hitter against Wake Forest. Caldwell allowed a hit on the first pitch of the game, but catcher Francis Combs threw the runner out trying to steal second. He walked the same batter in the fourth inning, but the next guy in Wake’s lineup hit into a double play.

He completed the one-hit, 4-0 shutout with just 77 pitches.

Since 1984, there have been three other no-hitters in NC State history: Freshman Bud Loving pitched a seven-inning no-hitter against UNC Charlotte on March 3, 1984; Gib Hobson did it against Maryland on March 12, 2005; and current Chicago White Sox pitcher Carlos Rodon combined with Karl Keglovits for one on Feb. 23, 2013 against LaSalle.

For Harvey, now a successful Triangle businessman in the commercial and residential title insurance industry with long-time partner Chris Corchiani, the no-hitter is a nice memory among the many he made as the ace of the baseball pitching staff and a two-year starter at quarterback for the football team.

But the length of time since it happened is kind of sobering. As he told Wolfpack coach Dave Doeren during a recent golf outing, no one on today’s football or baseball rosters were alive when either of them played college athletics and their accomplishments, no matter how significant, are fading.

“It sure doesn’t seem like it was that long ago,” said Harvey, who was drafted by major league teams four times and spent three seasons with the Cleveland Indians minor league system. “I still feel fairly young.”