Chris Holt doesn’t remember the exact details of his first meeting with John Means. But the Orioles’ pitching coach and director of pitching recalled Friday his early impressions of the left-hander who some two years later pitched Baltimore’s first complete game no-hitter in more than half a century.
Two days removed from Means striking out 12 in a dominant no-hit performance against the Seattle Mariners, Holt thought back to the spring of 2019, when he was a newly hired minor league pitching coordinator plucked from the Houston Astros organization and Means was scraping simply to make Baltimore’s major league roster.