Without doubt, it’s the most famous pitching performance in World Series history and without a doubt, that’s never likely to change. This week is the 69th anniversary of the perfect game pitched by a mediocre New York Yankees right-hander, Don Larsen.
The only perfect game pitched in the Series has withstood challenges by hundreds of pitchers more gifted than Larsen. On any given World Series day, none of then was perfect. Larsen was.
While records are made to be broken, as the cliche goes, it’s unthinkable this one will be. Today’s pitchers rarely throw complete games, never mind no-hitters, never mind perfect games. That’s so yesteryear.
Take the Toronto Blue Jays. Last weekend, rookie pitching sensation Trey Yesavage took a no-hitter into the sixth inning, one walk short of being perfect. He’d thrown 78 pitches, well below this era’s “maximum” of 100. The Jays were ahead by 12 runs.
And they took Yesavage out!
The rumbling (or grumbling) heard was old-timers muttering: “It would serve the Blue Jays right if they lost.” They didn’t, of course, but the pitchers who followed Yesavage were lit up for seven runs and 10 hits.
In Larsen’s day, such strategy would’ve usurped his date with destiny, although he did finish three pitches shy of 100. He also came close to “imperfection” three times. On the way to retiring 27 batters in a row, Larsen’s day was saved three times: a near-impossible infield out on a grounder by Jackie Robinson, an equally improbable backhand catch by Mickey Mantle on a Gil Hodges liner to deep left-centre, and a rocket hit by Sandy Amoros that curled around the foul pole in right field before there were foul poles, by “four inches.”
The game leaves behind indelible images, none greater than catcher Yogi Berra leaping into Larsen’s arms for an embrace that for New Yorkers rivalled Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. The check-swing strikeout to end the game by Dale Mitchell, who struck out less frequently than all but 14 hitters in baseball history. The artifacts in the Baseball Hall of Fame — Berra’s mitt that caught the final strike, the ball, Larsen’s cap, a ticket stub, Yogi’s bust as a Hall of Famer. No bust of Larsen, author of what Dodgers’ announcer Vin Scully called “the greatest game ever pitched in baseball history.”
One artifact not enshrined in Cooperstown was Larsen’s uniform. He loaned it to another hall of fame until 2012, then decided to sell it to finance a college education for his two grandsons. It sold at auction for $756,000.
In my home, there is a Larsen artifact…of sorts. I was in elementary school that October 8th, riding my bike home for lunch about the fourth inning. My mother, knowing my infatuation with keeping score, charted the game for me and her printing was so neat I let her do the whole game while I went back to school.
Many years later, I had an opportunity to interview Don Larsen the day before a baseball old-timers game. On that October afternoon in 1956, my mother could never have imagined such a meeting.
For her, that might’ve been like watching her son pitch a perfect game in the World Series.
