I Saw a Sports Miracle
The Yankees’ Domingo Germán threw the league’s first perfect game since 2012.
Updated at 12:03 p.m. ET on July 1, 2023
The game seemed destined to be utterly forgettable. The New York Yankees have underwhelmed this season, especially since their best player got hurt, and the Oakland Athletics are the worst team in baseball. Intent on moving the team to Las Vegas, the A’s owner seems to have given up trying to field a watchable product, like a real-life version of the villain in Major League. The stakes, on a Wednesday night in June, were almost pathetically low.
But I’m a Yankees fan living on the wrong coast, and I like to see them in person when I can. As my train pulled into the Oakland Coliseum, a dreary concrete slab of a ballpark, I checked the starting lineups on my phone. When you go to a baseball game, you hope to see one of your team’s best pitchers. Alas, the Yankees’ starter was Domingo Germán, an undistinguished 30-year-old who was booed off the mound by his own fans in his previous outing. Not a lot of star power. Oh well: I’d drink a few beers, eat some popcorn, and watch some meaningless baseball.
There’s a religious quality to attending any baseball game, no matter how uneventful, like taking your seat in a church or synagogue. You’re part of a crowd observing a set of rituals established more than a century ago. The basic rules of the game have barely changed since the 1890s. It’s not quite nostalgia, which implies a longing for something lost. It’s more like stepping outside time entirely.
If your standard ball game is vaguely religious, a perfect game—when a pitcher gets through the entire contest without allowing a man on base—has a touch of the miraculous. Before Wednesday, in the 154-year history of professional baseball, there had only been 23 of them. Germán was an unlikely candidate to pitch the 24th. He has never made an All-Star Team. His salary is one-14th that of his teammate Gerrit Cole, the Yankees’ pitching ace. And he’s at best a flawed hero. A few years ago, he served an 81-game suspension for domestic violence, and earlier this season, he was suspended for 10 games after using a foreign substance to improve his grip on the ball. Then again, no one has ever been a likely candidate to pitch a perfect game. Although most perfect games are thrown by great pitchers, most great pitchers never throw one. Since 1880, more men have been elected president of the United States than have pitched a perfect game. Before Wednesday night, no one had done it since 2012.
For the first few innings, nobody seemed to notice that Germán was churning through the A’s batters. It felt normal, because they’re terrible. After the fourth inning, however, I turned to the friend sitting next to me. Do you realize Oakland hasn’t had a base runner yet? Still, we didn’t make much of it. A perfect game for Domingo Germán? In a half-empty Oakland ballpark, in a trivial midsummer game between two crummy teams? After each inning, almost as a joke, I would nudge my friend. He’s perfect through five! He’s perfect through six! I was savvy enough to know Germán wouldn’t pull it off. Still, it was funny to pretend that he might.
If you don’t follow baseball, it might not be clear why perfect games are so rare. Even the very best hitters get on base less than half the time, giving the pitcher the advantage in any individual at-bat. But to pitch a perfect game, the pitcher must retire 27 batters in a row. (That’s three outs per inning over nine innings.) The A’s hitters have an average on-base percentage of .300, meaning they make an out 70 percent of the time. The chance of something with 70 percent probability occurring 27 times in a row works out to about one in 15,000. That’s close to the actual historical rate of perfect games, which have occurred about once every 10,000 games, according to the website Baseball Reference. Even against the worst team in baseball, those odds are unfathomably long.
The eye observes what the numbers prove. Once a batter makes contact with the ball, the outcome is largely random. A hard-hit ball might fly straight into a fielder’s glove for an out, while a scuffed ball could bloop its way into an empty patch of grass for a hit. Every time an Oakland hitter put the ball in play, the New York fans in the crowd braced for it to drop onto the grass or scoot between infielders. And every time, the ball found its way to the glove of a Yankees fielder, who calmly made the play. By the eighth inning, we were roaring with each Oakland out. By the ninth, we were on our feet. When the Yankee third baseman, Josh Donaldson, fielded the final batter’s ground ball, we erupted. Even the poor Oakland fans, aware that they had witnessed something extraordinary, seemed more surprised than upset.
Baseball provides irresistible fodder for metaphor and moral instruction. If a guy like Germán can achieve immortality through one night of perfection, what does that mean for the rest of us? Do we all have within ourselves the potential for just one moment of transcendence, no matter how much we struggle? It’s nice to think so, but—no, probably not. Germán might not be a star, but as a professional baseball player, he is already one of the best and most successful athletes on the planet. In fact, he threw six no-hit innings in his very first Major League start. He’s not really an everyman.
Maybe, then, we should think of Germán’s perfect game as a testament to the role of luck and privilege in any individual achievement, no matter how impressive. In the most pivotal play of the night, the Yankees’ star first baseman, Anthony Rizzo, made a slick grab to stop a hard-hit ball from making it to the outfield. Rizzo has won four Gold Gloves, the award for the best defensive player at each position, and makes $17 million in annual salary. Would his counterpart on the A’s, who earns the league’s minimum salary of $720,000, have made that stop? Maybe not. The Oakland fielders bungled quite a few easy plays that night. If Germán had been pitching for them, bad fielding would have ruined his perfect game early on.
That’s all true enough, but I prefer a third interpretation. You will probably not achieve any miracles. But if you get lucky, you might just witness one.
This article originally misstated the Yankees player who recorded the final out of the game.
