How many of us, baseball fans of Britain, have witnessed a perfect game in baseball?<\/p>\n
Not many, I bet. On this rock of an island, we would have probably been \u00e2\u20ac\u0153watching\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s game in Oakland reached first base against the funky left-hander Dallas Braden.<\/p>\n
A perfect game. A perfecto. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen one (1) in person, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll never forget it. More on that later.<\/p>\n
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 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 perfectly.<\/p>\n
Twenty-seven up, and twenty-seven down. For only the 19th time in Major League Baseball history.<\/p>\n
Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s beautiful inconsistencies are, a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153perfect game\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s wonderful harmony of where the damn ball falls.<\/p>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not saying that Dallas Braden didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t pitch a brilliant game. He did. Nothing looks so brilliant in print as the line score or the box score of a perfect game.<\/p>\n
But our Dallas had eight other players behind him to make sure it happened. And luck.<\/p>\n
Luck, luck, luck. Dallas Braden joins the ranks of perfect-game pitchers. Some were legendary ones \u00e2\u20ac\u201c (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.<\/p>\n
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 \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc84 season, goes in the record books as a perfect-game pitcher.<\/p>\n
And so does Dallas Braden. When that ball settled into shortstop Cliff Pennington\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s glove and he fired to first for the final out, Braden had done something most pitchers can only dream about.<\/p>\n
I saw the dream play out one time, and I was lucky to have done so<\/strong>.<\/p>\n 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153tossed\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I mean that \u00e2\u20ac\u201c he didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t bear down at all. Every ball was hit hard, but every ball had a result.<\/p>\n Twenty-seven outs in a row.<\/p>\n There were warning-track shots, too. Line drives off of people\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s chins. Bullets in the hole, one of which I fielded and managed to get the runner out.<\/p>\n In the seventh inning, that time-worn baseball superstition of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153never talk to the pitcher when he has a no-hitter going\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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.<\/p>\n This is one of baseball\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unwritten rules.<\/p>\n 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 if it looks like a hit, knock it down, and throw it into the stands, so it goes into the scorebook as an error.<\/p>\n Fortunately, it never came to that. Our Perfect Game Hero\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to handle a chance in that inning.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n It lasted 27 outs, exactly. Unforgettable.<\/p>\n Buy a ticket. Go see some baseball. You never know what is going to happen in this great game. It just might be perfect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153watching\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the spectacle on Gameday, in all its crystalline perfection, which would have showed you that not one player on the Tampa Bay Rays in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlb-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7866"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7868,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7866\/revisions\/7868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}