Twenty two years ago today, Expos ace Dennis Martínez threw the 13th perfect game in Major League Baseball history, defeating the Los Angeles Dodgers 2-0 in LA. Here is the last half of the ninth, with Expos broadcasters Rodger Brulotte and Denis Casavant calling the play-by-play en français. In a major league career that spanned 22 years, Martínez compiled a 245–193 record, and is one of a handful of pitchers to have won more than 100 games in both the American and National Leagues. There have been 10 perfect games since Martínez threw his, a statistical curiosity Contrarian has pondered here, here, and here. H/T: David Horton...

28 July, 2013

When Philip Humber of the Chicago White Sox pitched a perfect game against the Seattle Mariners back in April, I wrote that the frequency of these exceedingly rare feats had ramped up dramatically over the last three decades. Mathematicians argued that speedup was more apparent than real, a classic example of a Poisson distribution. This is the natural tendency for exceptionally rare but random events to bunch up in ways that appear non-random. Humber's flawless game was the 19th in modern baseball's 112-year* history. Since April, there have been two more, including the 1-0 gem Félix Hernández of the Seattle Mariners pitched against the Tampa Bay Rays...

16 August, 2012

Philip Humber of the Chicago White Sox pitched a perfect game against the Seattle Mariners yesterday. He faced only 27 batters, and got them all out. It's an exceedingly rare feat—Humber's was only the 19th in modern Major League Baseball history—but not as rare as it used to be. Or is it? (Click on the chart to view a full-sized version.) In the first 60 years after the turn of the 20th Century, only four major-leaguers  managed to pitch perfect games; 15 have done it in the 62 years since. It sure looks as if pitching a perfect game got easier around 1980,...

22 April, 2012

Our post on Vin Scully, 81, who just wrapped up his 60th season calling play-by-play for the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers (and plans to stay on through next season), elicited some wonderful reader comments. First, Frank MacDonald (yes, that Frank MacDonald, the other Inverness County writer who deserves a Giller): Enjoyed your reminder of the Koufax perfect game. In my own writing during the baseball season, the game plays the role for me that music plays for many others. Even when it is televised, as it mostly is in this house, it is two rooms away, and the sound of the...

13 November, 2009