In his first start of the 1956 World Series, Don Larsen could not complete two innings. He faced only 10 batters, and six reached base. By the time the game was over, the Brooklyn Dodgers had pelted the Yankees for 13 runs.
In his next start, of course, Larsen authored a perfect game. Joe Trimble of The Daily News started his article on the performance this way: “The imperfect man pitched a perfect game.”
Domingo Germán, the right-hander who joined Larsen, David Wells and David Cone on Wednesday by throwing the fourth perfect game in Yankees history, is imperfect, too. The setting for his gem — the crumbling Oakland Coliseum, home to the moribund Athletics — was hardly baseball paradise. The 11-0 victory ended after midnight in New York.
But that’s the magic of the perfect game: It can happen to any pitcher at any time. Wells and Cone had 20-win seasons and made multiple All-Star teams; not so for Larsen or Germán. Two A’s have been perfect: One is a Hall of Famer, Catfish Hunter, and the other is a current Oakland broadcaster, Dallas Braden, who had a losing record for his career.
The threadbare A’s are baseball’s worst team, already 40 games under .500, consumed by their vision of a new home in Las Vegas. Yet they have endured many dreadful seasons, and this was the first perfect game against the franchise since 1904, when Boston’s Cy Young did it to the Philadelphia Athletics. Their manager, Connie Mack — then only 42 years old — had more than half a lifetime left in the dugout, and he never saw another.
When Larsen did it, the feat had not been accomplished since 1922, by a nondescript Chicago White Sox rookie named Charlie Robertson. The drought before Germán’s was not nearly as long, but it was significant: No pitcher had been perfect since Seattle’s Félix Hernández in August 2012.
The 10 regular seasons in between (2013 through 2022) featured 22,765 imperfect games. Yu Darvish, Yusmeiro Petit and Max Scherzer each lost a bid when the 27th batter reached base. The Yankees’ Carlos Rodón — as a member of the White Sox in 2021 — lost his attempt when a slider nicked the top of a batter’s shoe in the ninth inning.
“It really has to be your day,” Rodón said, reflecting on that game last summer. “You have to be on, they have to catch every ball, and you can’t hit anybody. There’s a luck element. It’s kind of like a lottery thing.”
Like Larsen, Germán gave no warning he was about to hit the jackpot. He was booed off the mound in the Bronx last Thursday, pounded for 10 runs in three and a third innings against Seattle. The start before that, in Boston, Germán allowed seven runs in two innings.
He spent part of May serving a suspension after umpires in Toronto found a sticky substance on his pitching hand. He served a much more serious suspension, for domestic violence, from mid-September 2019 through the shortened 2020 season that followed.
Since then, the Yankees have never known quite what to do with Germán. He hinted at retirement in a cryptic social media post in 2020. Shoulder trouble cost him parts of the last two seasons. He was a depth piece before spring training, the sixth man in a five-man rotation, and chose a new uniform number: 0.
Then injuries struck, and the Yankees had no choice but to sign up for Germán’s inconsistency every fifth game. One start he was giving up six runs to Minnesota, the next he was shutting out Cleveland into the ninth inning.
He took the mound in Oakland on Wednesday with a 5.10 earned run average. He left it in triumph with the 24th perfect game in the history of Major League Baseball.
A History of Yankees Perfect Games
Benjamin Hoffman
There have only been 24 perfect games in major league history, and with Domingo Germán’s masterpiece against the Oakland Athletics on Wednesday, the Yankees are responsible for four of them. A look at all four →
Oct. 8, 1956
Larsen’s legendary performance against the Brooklyn Dodgers in Game 5 of the World Series was only the fifth perfect game in major league history and is still the only one thrown in the Fall Classic.
May 17, 1998
Wells, known affectionately as Boomer, beat the Minnesota Twins for M.L.B.’s 15th perfect game, which was the first one thrown at Yankee Stadium. Years later, Wells claimed to be hung over during the game.
July 18, 1999
A little more than a year after Wells, Cone threw M.L.B.’s 16th perfect game. The right-hander needed only 88 pitches to cruise past the Montreal Expos, becoming the first pitcher to be perfect in an interleague game.
June 28, 2023
It had been nearly 11 years since there had been a perfect game, and Germán was an unlikely candidate to throw one. But his curveball baffled the hapless Oakland Athletics and he needed only 99 pitches to slam the door.
More on Domingo Germán and the recent stretch without a perfect game.
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