There is no caveating a perfect game.
Such is the nature of perfection: It does not allow room for but or almost or well, actually… There are only the smooth zeroes of the box score. The feat remains far too rare to argue with. Until this week, MLB had seen just 23, not even two dozen across nearly a century and a half of history. Baseball is full of flukes and quirks and capricious twists of fate. But the bar for perfection is high enough that there is no backing into it. With so few perfect games in so many years? Accidents do not exist here.
The A’s entered Wednesday with one of the worst offenses in the game. Their .219 batting average is the lowest in MLB; if it holds, it would be among the lowest ever recorded in a season, currently tied for ninth-worst in league history with the 1963 Mets. They had just two hitters in the lineup Wednesday with an OPS above .700. (They had none above .800.) Their whole season has been a sad, slow exercise in what happens to a team when its roster is systematically starved and stretched, and the effect is harder to ignore some days than others.
Yankees starter Domingo Germán entered Wednesday having one of the worst seasons of his career. With a 5.10 ERA, and peripheral stats just as bad, he was on track for his least memorable campaigns in years. His fastball seemed to have lost its zip: Hitters were barreling up 23% of his four-seamers compared to just 9% last season. He was allowing more hard contact across the board, on all his main pitches, and he was walking more batters, too. And he’d spun himself into other frustrations. Germán was suspended 10 games after being ejected for using sticky substances in May. (That followed an earlier incident where he was cast under suspicion for sticky substances in April.) But he’d since returned—to mixed results—though his two most recent starts had been especially atrocious. He’d given up seven or more runs while failing to make it out of the fourth inning in each.
Germán faced the A’s offense on Wednesday. The outcome felt as close to obvious as it possibly could. All of his pitches were working. He got 12 whiffs on his curveball alone; Germán ultimately struck out nine. There were no close calls here: He worked with stunning efficiency. Germán was perfect. He needed just 99 pitches. Even at his best, he is not a pitcher who goes deep with any regularity—it has been years since he’s thrown more than a 100—but he did not leave room for questions about how far he might be allowed to go here. He simply worked.
The Yankees entered the ninth inning up 8–0. They took their time getting the ball back to Germán: They scored three runs with four baserunners in that final frame. (The A’s helped, of course, with a costly error that extended the inning.) When Germán finally returned to the mound to finish the job, facing A’s shortstop Aledmys Díaz, his first pitch was far, far outside. For a moment, it seemed as if all the time in the dugout may have knocked him off his game. And then he snapped back in. He retired Díaz with a grounder to short. He got the final two batters to swing on the very first pitches they saw, quickly coaxing them into a flyout and groundout, respectively. His work was done.
And as his teammates swarmed him with hugs and cheers—their uniforms and chewing gum and water bottles suddenly pieces of history—it felt obvious. There is no caveating a perfect game.
