How many of us, baseball fans of Britain, have witnessed a perfect game in baseball?

Not many, I bet. On this rock of an island, we would have probably been “watching” the spectacle on Gameday, in all its crystalline perfection, which would have showed you that not one player on the Tampa Bay Rays in Sunday’s game in Oakland reached first base against the funky left-hander Dallas Braden.

A perfect game. A perfecto. I’ve seen one (1) in person, and I’ll never forget it. More on that later.

But if you watched it on Gameday, not one single pixelated spot for the lumber-heavy Tampa Bay Rays moved as far as that little pixelated spot which represents first base as Braden mowed them down … perfectly.

Twenty-seven up, and twenty-seven down. For only the 19th time in Major League Baseball history.

Let’s leave it to the stat-heads to bust numbers about whether your chances of winning a lottery are better than pitching a perfect game in the major leagues. Because, as so many of baseball’s beautiful inconsistencies are, a “perfect game” in baseball comes down to dumb luck. It all goes down to the basics of the game as round ball/cylindrical bat and the game’s wonderful harmony of where the damn ball falls.

I’m not saying that Dallas Braden didn’t pitch a brilliant game. He did. Nothing looks so brilliant in print as the line score or the box score of a perfect game.

But our Dallas had eight other players behind him to make sure it happened. And luck.

Luck, luck, luck. Dallas Braden joins the ranks of perfect-game pitchers. Some were legendary ones – (Sandy Koufax, Cy Young); some were great ones (David Cone, Catfish Hunter) and some were serviceable ones (Don Larsen in the 1956 World Series, of course and the porcine hell-raiser David Wells) come to mind immediately without having to hit Wikipedia.

Even lanky Mike Witt for my Angels, against a team of teenagers that the Texas Rangers threw against him on the last day of the ‘84 season, goes in the record books as a perfect-game pitcher.

And so does Dallas Braden. When that ball settled into shortstop Cliff Pennington’s glove and he fired to first for the final out, Braden had done something most pitchers can only dream about.

I saw the dream play out one time, and I was lucky to have done so.

In a high-school game I was playing shortstop when our pitcher (who shall remain nameless but was a lanky, goofy left-hander as well) tossed a perfect game. When I say “tossed” I mean that – he didn’t bear down at all. Every ball was hit hard, but every ball had a result.

Twenty-seven outs in a row.

There were warning-track shots, too. Line drives off of people’s chins. Bullets in the hole, one of which I fielded and managed to get the runner out.

In the seventh inning, that time-worn baseball superstition of “never talk to the pitcher when he has a no-hitter going” kicked in. Our hero was an isolated figure at the end of the bench, possibly not knowing what to do or what was happening to him.

This is one of baseball’s unwritten rules.

The middle infielders and the third baseman had a huddle at the far end of the dugout well away from our pitcher, spitting sunflower seeds and discussing what we would do if the ball was hit to us. Throw it into the stands, was the general consensus … if it looks like a hit, knock it down, and throw it into the stands, so it goes into the scorebook as an error.

Fortunately, it never came to that. Our Perfect Game Hero’s last inning was, actually, perfect. Three pitches. Three outs. The last one was a sinking dinker to left field that was easily handled. Thank Goodness I didn’t have to handle a chance in that inning.

He never pitched a game like it before, or since. He stood there on the mound while we swarmed him. And the dozen or so Mexican kids in the neighbourhood ran up and asked for his autograph on foul balls they had collected off the road. A perfect-game hero.

So it saddens me a bit to reflect that 12,228 paying fans were there in person to watch a game that Dallas Braden pitched, and lasted a phenomenal 2 hours, 7 minutes on a beautiful day in Oakland.

It lasted 27 outs, exactly. Unforgettable.

Buy a ticket. Go see some baseball. You never know what is going to happen in this great game. It just might be perfect.