Domingo Germán proves that perfection can come at any time

In his first start of the 1956 World Series, Don Larsen was unable to 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.

On his next start, Larsen naturally wrote a perfect game. Joe Trimble of The Daily News began his story like this: “The imperfect man pitched a perfect game.”

Domingo Germán, the right-hander who tied Larsen, David Wells and David Cone in the fourth perfect game in Yankees history on Wednesday, is also imperfect. The setting for its jewel — the crumbling Oakland Coliseum, home of the dying athletics — was hardly a baseball haven. The 11-0 victory came to an end 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 won 20 seasons and made multiple All-Star teams. Not so for Larsen or German. Two A’s were perfect: one is a Hall of Famer, Catfish Hunterand the other is a current broadcaster from Oakland, Dallas Braden, who had a losing record for his career.

The worn-out A’s are baseball’s worst team, under .500 for 40 games, consumed by their vision of a new home in Las Vegas. Still, they endured many terrible seasons, and this was the first perfect game against the franchise since 1904, when Boston’s Cy Young did it against the Philadelphia Athletics. Connie Mack – only 42 years old at the time – had more than half a life left in the dugout and never saw one again.

When Larsen did it, the feat had not been accomplished since 1922, by an unremarkable Chicago White Sox rookie named Charlie Robertson. The drought for Germán’s didn’t last nearly that 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) contain 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 effort when a ninth-inning slider hit the top of a batter.

“It really has to be your day,” said Rodón, looking back at that game last summer. “You have to be active, they have to catch every ball and you can’t hit anyone. There’s an element of luck. It’s kind of a lottery thing.”

Like Larsen, Germán did not warn that he was about to hit the jackpot. He was booed off the mound in the Bronx last Thursday, hit for 10 runs in three and a third innings against Seattle. The start before that, in Boston, Germán gave up seven runs in two innings.

He served part of May after referees in Toronto found a sticky substance on his throwing hand. He served a much more serious suspension, for domestic violence, from mid-September 2019 through the abbreviated 2020 season that followed.

Since then, the Yankees have never known what to do with German. He hinted at retirement in a cryptic social media post in 2020. Shoulder issues cost him parts of the past two seasons. He was a spring training low, the sixth man in a five-man rotation, and picked a new jersey number: 0.

Then injuries hit, and the Yankees had no choice but to sign up for German’s inconsistency every fifth game. One start he gave up six runs to Minnesota, the next he shut out Cleveland in the ninth inning.

He took the mound in Oakland on Wednesday with an earned run average of 5.10. He exited it triumphantly with the 24th perfect game in Major League Baseball history.

The 30-year-old German had never thrown a shutout in his 13 professional seasons. He played just one complete game, in the minors in 2017. But there he was, in front of a pro-Yankees crowd of 12,479 fans, turning corner after corner—51 of 99 pitches—for eight ground outs, nine strikeouts and 10 outs. through the air.

As usual for a perfect game, there was a defensive highlight. In the fifth inning, first baseman Anthony Rizzo dove for a backhand grab of a smash down the line by Seth Brown, then flipped off his knees to Germán who covered the bag. Nothing else would come close to being a hit for the A’s.

Biggest threat was a three ball, one strike count for Jonah Bride with two outs in the eighth. But Germán dropped his curveball for a called hit, then another for a foul, and another for an inning-ending groundout. That’s how it ended when Esteury Ruiz tipped a curve to third baseman Josh Donaldson, who fired at Rizzo to confirm the masterpiece.

The Yankees’ four perfect games are the most of any franchise, breaking their affiliation with the White Sox. Seven teams have never been involved in one, including two — the Pittsburgh Pirates and the St. Louis Cardinals — stretching back into the 19th century. The Toronto Blue Jays don’t have one, but their longtime ace, Roy Halladay, got one in his second month with a new team, the Philadelphia Phillies, in 2010.

Germán is the first resident of the Dominican Republic to throw a perfect game, a feat that sorely eluded Pedro Martinez in 1995. Martinez pitched nine perfect innings for Montreal in San Diego, but gave up an opening hit in the 10th inning. Harvey Haddix of the Pirates, at Milwaukee in 1959, stayed perfect through 12 innings, but lost his try (and the game) in the 13th.

And let’s not dwell on poor Armando Galarraga, who lost his perfect game in 2010 – old days, before the replay – when the first base umpire, Jim Joyce, missed a call at first base about what should have been the last out. are.

A night like Germán’s is an outlier to cherish forever, a reminder that perfection just might be out there, waiting to surprise us – whoever we are.

“We are all imperfect and flawed in some way,” said Halladay’s widow, Brandy, in her speech at his 2019 Hall of Fame ceremony. “We all struggle. But with hard work, humility, and dedication, we can imperfect people still have perfect moments.”