Some people are perfect
I love baseball. Go Jays, Go! I like hockey, football, curling and golf, but I love baseball.
OK, I love golf too, but it doesn’t care very much for me.
In Major League Baseball’s 113 years, there have been only 21 perfect games. Definition of a perfect game: 27 opposing batters, no baserunners, no walks, no hits, no hit-by-pitches, no errors.
There are lots of no-hitters (though there are very few complete games by pitchers these days), but perfect games appear, on average, once every five years.
There had never been two perfect games in the same season until 2012, when there were three.
The two earliest recorded PGs occurred five days apart, in 1880, by Lee Richmond and John Montgomery Ward.
The next one didn’t happen for 24 years; Cy Young, in 1904. Then, another drought of 52 years: Don Larsen on Oct. 8, 1956 in the fifth game of the World Series between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers, the one and only perfect game in a World Series. Some of the notable perfect games: Sandy Koufax 1965 Catfish Hunter 1968 Dennis Martinez (Expos) 1991 David Wells 1998 David Cone 1999 Mark Buehrle 2009 Roy Halladay 2010 Felix Hernandez 2012 There hasn’t been one now for five years, so we should see one again soon. Halladay was killed piloting his private plane last November off the coast of Florida. The Toronto Blue Jays retired his jersey two weeks ago. He pitched his perfect game while with the Philadelphia Phillies.
There have probably been miscalls in near-perfect games over the years but the most notable was on June 2, 2010. Armando Gallaraga of the Tigers had retired 26 of 26 Cleveland batters. The 27th, Jason Donald, was called safe on an infield ground ball by umpire Jim Joice. Joice realized he had made the wrong call but it couldn’t be changed, so Gallaraga was cheated out of his perfect game.
After the game, a tearful Joice apologized to the pitcher, even appearing with him in a media scrum where he, Joice, conceded, “Nobody’s Perfect.” The Gallaraga incident is now known as “The 28Out Perfect Game,” “The Imperfect Game” and, simply, “The Gallaraga Game”
Fred Trainor is a retired broadcaster living in Okanagan Falls. Email: fredtrainor@shaw.ca.