Once upon a time, a pitcher called Shufflin’ Phil Douglas was facing a team called the Pittsburgh Pirates. Douglas was on that day. He didn’t walk anybody or hit anybody and the only basehit he allowed came in a flukey sequence: On a routine grounder to the first baseman, Douglas shuffl’d over to cover first base, received the throw in plenty of time, and then he just… missed the bag with his foot. The batter got credit for a hit.
An absolutely brutal way to lose a perfect game, and yet not brutal at all: It was the first batter of the game. Technically, Douglas lost his perfect game bid because of it, but we live sequentially. He didn’t even have an out yet, so he hadn’t yet built up anything to lose. (This, by the way, happened in 1921.1)
I’ve been thinking this month about the odd emotions of a lost perfect game. Even after a perfect game gets broken up, that start will in most cases remain the best and most memorable performance of the pitcher’s career; but/except he did get smacked in the face with a shovel right in the middle of it. That’s the deal in a near-perfecto: Best day of your career, fully encircling one of the more disappointing moments of your career.
Some of these can hurt more than others. (Once on a podcast, in fact, we discussed the most painful way to lose a perfect game.) This is a first-draft attempt at putting the pain through a basic rubric based on this very simple pair of ideas:
Idea 1. Anger and disappointment are emotional responses to unmet expectations. Thus, the more we have allowed ourselves to expect, the greater the pain.
Idea 2. A perfect game is an unlikely accumulation of likely events. We don’t expect a perfect game, except a little bit more and more as it gets closer to the end. But we do expect each individual out that makes up a perfect game, because an out is the most likely outcome of each plate appearance in isolation.
And so breakup pain comes down to this:
How UNEXPECTED was the event that broke up the perfect game? I call this the Grrrrr score, because the more unexpected the event, the angrier we feel.
How EXPECTED had the perfect game become? I call this the Awwwww score, because the closer we get to the end, the more disappointment we feel.
with a sprinkling of variable three:
How much was lost? Obviously, a perfect game was lost, which is substantial enough on its own. But was the no-hitter lost, as well? The shutout? The victory? The pitcher’s health? This is the Ooof score. (It’s never lower than a 6.)
We’ve seen four lost perfect games (six innings or deeper) this month. I’m going to score them.
***
Least Painful:
Luis Castillo allows a hit with none out in the seventh inning, April 16
One way I think about the Grrrrr variable is: Can I make a screengrab from any point in the at-bat where the pitcher looks like he’s definitely going to get that guy out? In Castillo’s case, the answer is “not really.” He threw Jurickson Profar a 2-2 meatball. You can’t even see Castillo’s reaction because the pitch he threw was so middle-middle that the graphic of it blocks his whole face:
You can see the face of the Mariners fan sitting in the top-left of that image, and from that fan’s face you know this was a hit off the bat, all the way. Jurickson Profar hit a clean single between the outfielders. By Statcast’s estimates, a ball hit at that speed and trajectory is a hit 93 percent of the time. Fair play.
I’m obviously just making this all up, but here’s the scale I’m using for the Awwwww score:
8-9 outs away from finishing the game: 1 point
7 outs away: 2 points
5-6 outs away: 5 points
4 outs away: 6 points
3 outs away: 8 points
2 outs away: 9 points
1 out away/extra innings: 10 points
So Castillo lost his perfect game on a clean single against a pitch that didn’t deserve much better, and he lost it before we had come to really expect he’d finish it. It was painful, but about as unpainful as a lost perfect game can be. The pain is elevated slightly because, in a 1-0 game, this put the tying run on base and meant Castillo was just one more mistake away from potentially taking the loss.
Grrrrr: 1
Awwwww: 1
Ooof: 7
Pain score: 3.0
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