The San Francisco Giants played their own game, just down the stairs from the home clubhouse at Oracle Park, but Carlos Rodón and some of his teammates stayed inside. On the Coast, Clayton Kershaw worked on a perfect game for the Los Angeles Dodgers. The story was streamed via a laptop.
At least there was probability of the story, and that was enough to intrigue Rodón, who had come so close to his own piece of it in 2021. When he fielded for the Chicago White Sox against Cleveland in April, Rodón knocked out the first 25 batsmen before his 2-0 shifter scored the top of Roberto Pérez’s shoe.
That spoiled Rodón’s perfect game, but he was thrilled to settle for a no-hitter, one of 317 in major league history. But only 23 of those were perfect games, and as they watched Kershaw’s attempt against the Los Angeles Angels on July 15 — which ended in an eighth-inning double — Rodón and his teammates realized they hadn’t seen one in a long time.
“So we went back, I think to Baseball Reference or something, and we found that the longest streak was like 30 years, so it was kind of crazy,” Rodón said. “We said, ‘We’re not even close.’ That’s like the third longest, only 10 years.”
This month marks a decade since Mariners’ Félix Hernández froze Tampa Bay’s Sean Rodríguez with a crushing switch and pointed to the Seattle sky on August 15, 2012 to celebrate the last perfect game in the majors. Since then, more than 22,000 games have been played, and in all of them both teams have put at least one runner on base.
This is baseball’s longest streak without a perfect game from 1968 (Catfish Hunter) to 1981 (Len Barker). As Rodón found, the longest stretch ever was 34 years, from 1922 (Charlie Robertson) to 1956 (Don Larsen, in the World Series).
However, as Hernández dominated the Rays, the perfect play seemed to have become more common. Mark Buehrle had thrown one in 2009, followed by Dallas Braden and Roy Halladay in 2010, and Philip Humber and Matt Cain in 2012 ahead of Hernández. There would have been another in 2010, by Armando Galarraga, if there had been a replay to undo a blown call from referee Jim Joyce about the possible last-out.
So that was six perfect games (plus Galarraga’s efforts) in just over three years – immediately followed by a decade of sheer imperfection. What a sport.
“Am I surprised? Not really,” said David Cone, who threw a perfect game for the Yankees in 1999. “I was more surprised when more were thrown than now. That surprised me more than the gap of 10 years.”
There’s never been a combined perfect game, and for Cone, the chances of a one-pitcher perfecto appear slimmer now that starters rarely get a chance to play nine innings. Still, there were seven complete no-hitters in 2021 and one more this season from the Angels’ Reid Detmers on May 10.
Because a pitcher cannot face more than 27 batsmen in a perfect nine-inning game, pitch counts tend to be lower. Only a perfect game (Cain’s) has a known pitch count greater than 120, and most managers will not allow a pitcher to walk around that mark except on rare occasions, like Kershaw’s seven-inning, 80-pitch try on his season debut in April , at a cold day in Minnesota after ending last season with an injury.
Corbin Burnes of Milwaukee threw eight no-hit innings with 14 strikeouts and a walk in Cleveland last September. But he had pitched 115, a season high, so Josh Hader finished the no-hitter in ninth place. Burnes insisted he was far from perfect that night.
“I don’t think there’s ever been a no-hitter or perfect game where a guy can look back and say, ‘I threw every pitch where I wanted and I absolutely dominated and they didn’t stand a chance ‘” Burnes said. “I left a cutting knife over the plate, hung a curveball, hung a changeup. If you’re able to blur it out enough and mix pitches, you can get away with making mistakes. But you have to have people in the right place at the right time.”
Burnes spoke at the All-Star Game at Dodger Stadium last month, where Sandy Koufax (1965) and Dennis Martinez (1991) had achieved perfection. Koufax is one of eight Hall of Famers to make it, but even a no-hitter has eluded some of the greats, like Steve Carlton, Lefty Grove and Greg Maddux.
Houston’s Justin Verlander has pretty much every superlative a pitcher could wish for: three no-hitters, two Cy Young Awards, a Most Valuable Player award, a World Series title. But he’s not chasing a perfect match to top off the resume.
“I don’t think you can aim for that,” said Verlander. “It’s like no-hitters, some of the best, like Roger Clemens, never had a no-hitter. It’s something you can’t say, ‘This is what I want to achieve.’
“So I really focus on everything: do I want to get 300 wins? Secure. Do I want to reach 4,000 strikeouts? Secure. You name it, of course I want to do that, but it’s not my goal. A perfect game isn’t a goal, it just happens in the moment. It’s such an incredible thing, the stars must align.”
Since Hernández’s jewel, three pitchers have lined up 26 stars until the 27th fizzles out. Yu Darvish and Yusmeiro Petit gave up singles with two outs in the ninth inning in 2013, and Max Scherzer hit the 27th batter with a 2-2 backup slider in 2015. (Scherzer, then with Washington, finished with the first of his two no-hitters.)
Darvish and Scherzer were consistent All-Stars, but Petit was mostly a helper in 14 six-team major league seasons. A few years ago, before spring training with Oakland, he recalled his near miss in detail.
Petit played at home for the Giants against the Arizona Diamondbacks, who fielded a veteran, Eric Chavez, to hit with two outs in ninth place. Chavez won the first five pitches – a curveball, three fastballs and a changeup – and his patient approach unsettled Petit.
“Everything worked together — my command, batters hit early, pitch count was low, it’s my night,” said Petit, 37, who was recently released from the San Diego Padres’ AAA team.
“I just don’t know why Eric Chavez didn’t swing two pitches earlier. At that moment I thought, “Something’s wrong here” because 25, 26 guys in front of him are automatically swinging. I know it’s a veteran but he didn’t swing on two good pitches. To myself I said, ‘Wow, I have to live or die here.’ I know it was my last chance because I want to win everything, I want the perfect game so I don’t want to chase him. It was 3:2 and I want to throw my best throw.”
Petit had thrown only 92 pitches. He attempted to finish his masterpiece with a fastball, down and away, but Chavez pulled it down a line, just in front of diving right fielder Hunter Pence’s glove. Petit retired as the next batter for the only shutout of his career, and a year later, mostly as a reliever, he set a major league record by retiring 46 straight batters.
Of course, because Petit did this for several weeks, the major league streak continued without a perfect game. And while strikeout rates have skyrocketed in recent years—meaning there are fewer balls in play, and therefore fewer chances for errors or shots—the drought continues.
“Even if you have a lot of strikeouts — 10, 11, 12 in a game is a lot — that still means you have about 15 outs on the field that need to be hit straight to a player,” Atlanta Fried’s Max said. who won the World Series clincher last fall but never came close to a perfect game.
“And you have to do it without walking or meeting anyone or making a mistake. So there’s a lot of things that have to go your way for that to have any effect. Above all, it is almost a team effort.”
And there’s no advance warning as to which team will do it. In 2012, Cain and the Giants won the World Series, but Hernández and the Mariners finished last. A century ago came Robertson’s perfect game for a White Sox team that went 77-77.
Likewise, pitchers of the perfect game have had picture-perfect careers (Koufax), otherwise disappointing careers (Humber), and ordinary careers (Barker). On the right day, anyone could join the group.
“Kershaw would be a great guy for the club – a Hall of Famer, come on!” said Kegel. “But then there are other guys who had that special day, and the random variance comes into play. The further I get away from it, the more I appreciate the ball bounce, the luck factor, whatever you want to call it.
“I mean, it will never happen more often. There are 23 out of tens of thousands of games. Even if you were 25, 30, 35 – that would be fine. It’s still incredible.”