Baseball, that statistics-mad enterprise, has served up its share of rare performances by individual players. Fifteen fielders have turned unassisted triple plays. Thirteen hitters have hit two grand slams in a game, including one, Fernando Tatis, who in April 1999 did so in the same inning, which may be the game’s most remarkable anomaly, though Don Larsen’s perfect game for the Yankees against the Dodgers in 1956 — the only no-hitter thrown in the World Series — is better known and better remembered.

No-hitters themselves are not all that uncommon. Almost 300 of them have been pitched in the big leagues, and even their famous subset, perfect games, has 23 entries.

Five times in the major leagues’ modern era, a team has given up no hits and failed to win. But in perhaps the game’s starkest good-news-bad-news case, only once did a single pitcher complete a nine-inning game without yielding a hit and still manage to lose it. The man who owns that two-faced distinction, Ken Johnson, whose otherwise middling 13-year career in the major leagues included stints with seven teams, died on Saturday in Pineville, La. He was 82.

His son Kenneth Jr. said that his father had been bedridden with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases and that he died after contracting a kidney infection.