Ditto. Nice work!
I don’t know if it’s ever been done, but a team can make an error and not ruin the perfect game. If someone muffs a foul pop up, he gets an error for prolonging the at bat but of course the batter could still make an out later in the at bat to preserve the perfecto.
Minor rules nitpick: a perfect game requires 27 up 27 down and your team must win. If the game goes into extra innings, you must continue to retire every batter if you want a perfect game.
Pedro Martinez lost a perfect game this way when he was with the Expos. He retired the first 27 batters, but his team failed to score. He gave up a hit in the 10th.
Got it - I had assumed a no hitter meant that no ball had been hit. So foul balls and pop flys and ground outs don’t count, as long as the batter never reaches base.
Hmmm…I has thought that would be easier. No one has ever gotten one in a major league game. Good to know!
Thanks!
If you’re counting foul tips and foul balls, then your idea of a no-hitter (one where no opposing bat touches the ball at all) is all but an impossibility at any competitive level of baseball.
A rather pointless coincidence: yesterday my wife and I (and a friend) went to have breakfast at a place just down the street from the condo where Buehrle lived when he was in high school. My wife lived across the street and went to high school with him (she didn’t really know him).
Apparently, he was cut from the high school baseball team.
I’m comfortable saying the chances at a no-contact game are vanishingly small, i.e., statistically impossible.
Well done, Mr. Buehrle! And you’d better take Mr. Wise out to a very nice dinner, too.
Why mention that, and not Harvey Haddix of the Pirates taking a PG into the 13th inning in 1957, before losing?
Because it was the one that came to mind, and I didn’t know about the Harvey Haddix game.
Kids. Humph!
It’s so impossible that I’d wager that any able bodied person who has previously played slow-pitch softball and gotten a hit could bat 27 times against a major league pitcher and make physical contact with a ball at least once.
Whoa, whoa, WHOA! No one said there’s never been a no-hitter (that sentence makes sense, right?) We said there’s never been 27 strikeouts in a row.
No contact - Never happened. Will never ever happen. Impossible.
27 strikeouts - Never happened in the majors. Could possibly, but not likely ever.
Perfect game - No hits, walks, hit batters, or errors. No one reaches 1st base. Happened 17th (18th?) time today with Buehrle.
No-Hitter - No hits. Walks happen, though, and sometimes it’s errors that spoil the perfect game. Happens once or twice a year. Two or more pitchers can combine to throw a no-hitter. 5 guys contributed to a 196x ('63?) no-hitter.
So Buehrle now has a no-hitter, a perfect game, a WS ring, and pretty decent career stats. He has a good shot at 200 wins. Are we looking at a potential Hall of Famer here and no one is seeing it? I certainly don’t even consider him when I think about active players who would possibly make it into the Hall. I’m positive a lot less has gotten in, though I can’t think of examples right now.
I don’t know if there’s an exception for perfect game pitchers, but 300 wins is usually the benchmark.
There aren’t going to be many 300-game winners in the post Randy Johnson group of pitchers, though. Unless no starters are ever going to make it to the HoF again, they might have to revisit the traditional benchmarks soon.
If that stays the case there aren’t going to be many more pitchers getting into the HoF. 300 game winners seem to be a dying breed.
We’ll have to see about that. It doesn’t look like anyone is going to make until late next decade at the soonest. But “there may never be another 300 game winner” is a common refrain, and I remember hearing it a lot of times in the '90s. After Nolan Ryan won his 300th in 1990, nobody made it for another 13 years. Then Clemens, Maddux, Johnson and Glavine all made it within five years, and everybody pretended they’d never said it… and then started saying it again after Johnson because it was evident nobody was going to get there soon, so they could not be proved wrong in the short term.
As for the Hall of Fame, it’s way too soon to tell. Buehrle is in heady company, but nobody’s in the HoF on the strength of a perfect game. Most of the guys who have thrown a perfect game (10 out of 16) are not in Cooperstown.
However, including Buehrle, six guys have thrown a perfect game and a separate no-hitter. Four of them are in the Hall of Fame and the fifth is Randy Johnson. So that looks good, but you can’t seriously tell me that Mark Buehrle appears to be the equal of Randy Johnson.
So the perfect game was saved by a awesome catch and yet the perfect game is credited to the pitcher. Granted the pitcher is the most important player but given that the perfect game depends on other players not to error, catch all the balls, etc it seems somehow unfair that the picther gets 100% of the credit.
Brian
Not really. Every story I’ve read describes the awesome catch, and I don’t think there’s a pitcher with a perfector or a no-hitter who doesn’t credit the defense. That catch will be part of the lore of the game, and will be one of Wise’s favorite bragging rights until the day he dies.