Another Imperfect Man Throws a Perfect Game

When Don Larsen pitched the only perfect game in World Series history in 1956, Joe Trimble of the New York Daily News famously wrote, “The imperfect man who pitched a perfect game.” And now 67 years later, the Yankees had another imperfect man - Domingo German - throw a perfect game. Quite a night in Oakland which helped the Yankees take two of three from the hapless A’s.

Hey, did you hear the big news from Oakland Wednesday night? Aaron Judge played catch before the Yankees took on the A’s. Ah, just kidding.

No, the really big news was that the Yankees scored 11 runs - as many as they had scored in their previous five games combined! Ah, just kidding again, although that actually was rather seismic, headline-worthy news on any other night than this one.

Domingo German. Holy shit, where did that come from? A perfect game, 27 up, 27 down as the Yankees pummeled the putrid A’s 11-0 at the mausoleum known as the Oakland Coliseum.

“So exciting when you think of something very unique in baseball,” German said through the Yankees overworked interpreter Marlon Abreu. “Not many people have an opportunity to pitch a perfect game. To accomplish something like this in my career is something I’m going to remember forever. I felt an amount of pressure I’ve never felt before.”

Actually lots of people have a chance to pitch a perfect game, but a microscopic number have done it.

How unique is it? To be exact, there are now only 24 pitchers in the history of MLB to have authored a perfect game. That’s if you count two that occurred in 1880, but those came before the mound was moved back to 60 feet, 6 inches. Not to diminish the fine work of Lee Richmond of the Worcester Worcesters or John Montgomery Ward of the Providence Grays (who pitched his perfecto against the Buffalo Bisons), but the real number should be 22 because Mr.’s Richmond and Ward pitched when the game was certainly a bit different.

So it’s 22 perfect games in the modern era, 1903 to the present, the first thrown by a guy you may have heard of, Cy Young of the Red Sox in 1903. And now 120 years later German joins an ultra-exclusive club that includes Hall of Famers Sandy Koufax, Catfish Hunter, Randy Johnson and Roy Halladay, plus Yankee alumni Don Larsen, David Wells and David Cone.

“When he gets rolling like that, he’s just so fun to watch at his craft,” said Aaron Boone after watching the first perfect game in MLB since Seattle’s Felix Hernandez in 2012 against the Rays. “He’s so good at commanding all of his pitches. His curveball was great tonight. But because his changeup and his fastball were good, too, it made that curveball even more special. I was actually pretty calm over there. Again, just enjoying watching him kind of paint a masterpiece.”

After the game, German revealed that he put forth this brilliant performance with a heavy heart which made it all the more impressive and special.

“Unfortunately, two days ago an uncle of mine passed away and I cried a lot yesterday in the clubhouse,” he said. “I had him with me throughout the whole game. I was thinking about him and it happened. This game is a tribute to him. He would be so happy. He was always someone who really brought joy to our family. And it happened for him to watch this from up there.”

The 30-year-old threw only 99 pitches and 72 were for strikes. That means this game also gets classified as a “Maddux.” For those who don’t know, Hall of Famer Greg Maddux made his career out of pitching brilliantly, but also efficiently, so baseball writer Jason Lukehart coined a new phrase.

Any pitcher who throws a complete game shutout of nine innings or more and needs less than 100 pitches is credited with a “Maddux.” And these days, when starters not only get pulled before 100 pitches but almost never go the distance, the Maddux is pretty rare. Maddux himself had only 13 such games in his 740-start career.

Consider this: By the end of Thursday night, German’s complete game was just the 17th in MLB this season in 1,216 games, meaning 2,432 pitcher starts.

To his credit, German realized his curveball was really biting so he and catcher Kyle Higashioka leaned into that and the pitch mix consisted of 51 curves, 30 fastballs, 17 changeups and one sinker, and he generated 17 swings and misses while striking out nine.

“He threw that curveball in any count that he wanted to,” A’s second baseman Tony Kemp said. “It was spinning differently and moving differently. He put his fastball where he wanted to. Changeup as well. He just kind of mixed them. We got a couple of good swings off him, but no results.”

Higashioka was behind the plate in 2021 when Corey Kluber pitched the Yankees’ previous no-hitter, but he said he had less work to do in this one because German was simply untouchable. He was so good - or the A’s were simply so bad - that he only needed one great play in the field to preserve his historic achievement, a diving stop of a grounder down the first-base line by Anthony Rizzo who threw to German to nail Seth Brown in the fifth inning.

“Actually, it was quite different,” said Higashioka, who also caught two no-hitters in the minor leagues. “Honestly, I just felt like I was a passenger for this one. Don’t miss the ball and don’t mess it up. Domingo was definitely driving the ship. He had a plan, we both had a plan, but he had ultimate confidence in his stuff. When he liked a pitch, he was sticking with it. It was just a privilege to be back there for him. The way his stuff was working, I think he would have thrown it to anybody. I’m just lucky to have been back there.”

Every player crafts his own story, and man, German’s with the Yankees has been quite a ride - plenty of good and sometimes great mixed in with some really bad both on the field and off.

He signed with the Marlins as a 16-year-old out of the Dominican Republic in 2009 and when he was 20 he actually started eight games in 2013 for the Batavia Muckdogs in the New York-Penn League and had a 1.76 ERA.

But German never even reached Double-A in the Marlins system and was traded prior to the 2015 season to the Yankees along with Nathan Eovaldi in a deal that sent Garrett Jones, Martin Prado and David Phelps to Miami. He finally got to Double-A and then Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre in 2017 and at long last got the call to New York in June of that year, working seven games out of the bullpen.

Click the image below to see the final out:

He scuffled through most of 2018 and missed more than two months with an injury, finishing 2-6 with a 5.57 ERA, but in 2019, out of nowhere, it all clicked for German. He went 18-4 with a 4.03 ERA and looked like a future star before everything came to a halt late in September when he was suspended 81 games for a domestic abuse incident. He missed the 2019 postseason and all of the 2020 Covid year and by spring training of 2021 he was kind of a forgotten man.

And to some, that was fine. Do you remember what Zack Britton said when told German would get a chance to compete for a job on the 2021 team? “Sometimes you don’t get to control who your teammates are,” Britton said.

However, German pitched too well to ignore, he apparently cleaned up his personal life to the team’s satisfaction (though we never really know, do we?) and he regained the trust of the Yankees brass and was a solid contributor in 2021 and 2022. He made a combined 32 starts and had a 4.17 ERA and then early in 2023, with all the injuries in the rotation, German stepped up and for most of this season has been the Yankees’ second-best starter behind Gerrit Cole. But then came another speed bump.

On April 15 against the Twins, German was checked for a foreign substance and it was clear that his hand was sticky, yet somehow he was allowed to continue pitching, even after a second warning. Still, he was now on the umpires’ radar so the prescient path for him would be to stop using whatever he was using, but he didn’t.

On May 16 he got flagged again in Toronto and this time he got tossed and drew an automatic 10-game suspension, during which the Yankees could not replace him on the roster so they had to play a man down those 10 days which incensed the fan base, and probably Boone and the Yankees.

Up on returning he pitched well in his first three starts and New York won each game he started against the Mariners, Dodgers and Red Sox, but his next two starts were abject disasters - 17 runs allowed in just 5.1 innings in losses to the Red Sox and Mariners which sent his ERA soaring to 5.10 as he headed into Wednesday’s start against the A’s.

If ever there was a good time to be facing the worst offense in MLB, this was it, but no one could have possibly expected the dominance German displayed. Just another example of why baseball is the greatest game because crazy things like this are always possible on a nightly basis.

Here are my observations on the three games against the A’s.

June 27: A’s 2, Yankees 1

➤ Before all the fun with German, the opener of this series was simply horrendous. Against a team that had a 6.08 team ERA when the game started, the Yankees managed seven hits and one run - a Josh Donaldson home run which was a miracle in itself - and lost.

➤ Jhony Brito pitched well, but as is usually the case, the Yankees pitching staff has to be nearly perfect or they lose. It figured that on a night when the Yankees scored 11 runs they got a perfect game from their pitcher, but when they needed to score in support of Brito, they were helpless. Brito pitched into the sixth inning and retired 15 of the 21 batters he faced, allowing just four hits and two walks. He got burned on a ground ball down the first-base line in the third inning that turned into a triple because ex-Yankee Tyler Wade is one of the fastest runners in MLB. He quickly scored on a bloop single by Esteury Ruiz. And then in the fourth Brito made a bad pitch and Seth Brown - who’s hitting .191 - sent it over the fence in right to make it 2-0.

➤ Yay. Donaldson hit a home run. That gave him nine hits on the season, seven of those homers. Later in the game, reality returned as he whiffed in the seventh and whiffed in the ninth after Gleyber Torres led off with a single. Not to be outdone was Giancarlo Stanton. Another wonderful night for him - 0-for-4 including a pop out, a strikeout, and two weak ground outs.

➤ The lone bright spot was Anthony Volpe who had three hits, though he did get caught stealing for the first time in his career, breaking his 14-for-14 start.

BOX SCORE

June 28: Yankees 11, A’s 0

➤ German’s perfect game broke quite a streak for the A’s. They had not been no-hit since July 31, 1991 - a span of 5,010 games which was the longest active streak in MLB. That day four Orioles pitchers combined to mute an Oakland lineup that included Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, Rickey Henderson and Harold Baines. It wasn’t a perfect game - there were four walks - but that was probably a more difficult feat than German carving up this awful A’s team which is on pace to be one of the worst in MLB history.

➤ As much as German needed to pitch against the A’s after his two previous disastrous outings, it also has helped Donaldson and Stanton. Donaldson hiked his average all the way up to .139 as he had an RBI double plus added a sacrifice fly, though both of those came with the issue long decided. Stanton was more impactful because he hit a solo homer in the fourth to open the scoring against ex-Yankee JP Sears and then ripped a two-run single during the big six-run fifth inning when the Yankees sent 11 men to the plate. It was his first three-RBI game of the season, and it matched his previous RBI total for the month of June.

➤ Harrison Bader hadn’t done much since returning from the IL but he had two hits, and Volpe had two more hits, one a bunt single in the fifth that led to an Oakland error and a Yankee run as Higashioka scored. Higashioka kick-started the big inning with a two-run double.

➤ I found this pretty amusing, though I’m sure it wasn’t for Michael Kay and John Stirling. Both the TV and radio voice of the team decided to skip this road trip and thus missed the thrill of calling a perfect game. Ryan Ruocco and Jeff Nelson had the YES call, and Justin Shackil and regular analyst Suzyn Waldman had the radio call. And wasn’t it a shame that the game took place on the West Coast so most of us probably weren’t awake when it ended, and it was in Oakland where the announced crowd was 12,147 and was probably less?

BOX SCORE

June 29: Yankees 10, A’s 4

➤ Don’t we all wish the Yankees could play the A’s more often? Man, what a brutal pitching staff as the Yankees went double digits again thanks to an eight-run explosion in the sixth inning. They were trailing 3-2 at the time but they sent 13 men to the plate. Runs are fun. Hopefully once they get back to playing actual major league teams again they can keep up at least some of this. The 21 runs they scored in the last two games? That was how many they scored in the nine games prior to Wednesday.

➤ Isiah Kiner-Falefa hit his fifth homer of the season to tie it at 1-1 in the second. That’s one more in 62 games this season than he had in 142 last season. It almost got stolen by Ruiz in center, but he just missed it and then lost his glove over the wall. For a second I thought he caught it.

➤ Bader started the sixth with a single and he trotted home on Donaldson’s go-ahead two-run homer, a massive 472-foot shot to left-center. Look, I can’t stand Donaldson, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want him to get straightened out and help this team and there were certainly positive signs in this series. From there, the big blows were a two-run single by Torres, a two-run double by Stanton to make it 8-3, and Bader’s second hit of the inning, an RBI single.

➤ Clarke Schmidt didn’t get off to a great start as the A’s jumped out to a 3-1 lead in the third, but he settled in pretty well and pitched into the sixth inning without allowing another run. His line wasn’t great - five hits and three walks with only three K’s - but it was good enough. It’s the eighth consecutive start he’s allowed three earned runs or less.

➤ Ian Hamilton came off the injured list and pitched for the first time since May 16 and he threw a scoreless inning.

➤ This was the 21st game in which the A’s allowed at least 10 runs, and four of those were by the Yankees. Last year, no team had more than 21 such games all season. That’s how bad this team is. In winning five of six against the A’s for the season, the Yankees outscored them 50-16. Taking those games out, New York’s run differential for the other 75 games is only plus-5 which is not good.

BOX SCORE

 ➤ June 28, 2003: When Hideki Matsui joined the Yankees prior to the 2003 season, the man nicknamed Godzilla during his home run hitting days in Japan brought with him expectations as out-sized as that fictional monster, but through his first 58 games in New York he certainly hadn’t lived up to them.

He was hitting just .250 with a .299 on-base and just three homers and no less than George Steinbrenner was wondering why he had given Japan’s biggest baseball star $21 million over three years. After all, this is a man who had a career average of .304 and a .413 on-base during 10 seasons in Japan, not to mention 332 home runs.

But things began to turn for Matsui in early in June when he got on a serious roll and by the time this day 20 years ago ended, Matsui had hiked his average up to .305, his on-base to .370, and his home run total to eight.

The Yankees and Mets played a split doubleheader with the first game in Yankee Stadium and the second at Shea Stadium, just the second time in MLB history that teams played a doubleheader in separate ballparks. And for the Yankees, it was a whole lot of fun as they won the opener 7-1 thanks to a Matsui grand slam, and took the nightcap 9-8 as Matsui contributed four hits, two runs and one RBI.

“I think it was a great day overall for me,” Matsui said. “To be able to contribute in both games feels even better.”

“I think he’s going to be a great player,” Torre said. “Whether he’s recognized as a great player league-wise, I don’t know. I don’t think there’s anybody you’d want hitting with men on base more than him. Maybe a few guys as much as him, but not more. To me, that makes him a great teammate.”

The Yankees will come halfway back across the country to start a three-game set in St. Louis this weekend against one of the most disappointing teams in MLB this season. The Cardinals were a sexy pick to win the NL Central but they will start this series with the fifth-worst record in MLB (33-47), good for last last place in their weak division, 9.5 games out. Even nuttier, they’re further back in the NL wild-card race, 11.5 games out of the final spot.

Thanks to an eight-game losing streak they were 10-24 on May 6 and they’ve played right around .500 ever since, but they’re going to have to start tearing it up if they hope to get to the postseason. They didn’t help their cause Thursday night, losing 14-0 at home to the Astros.

The Cardinals’ stars have been productive - Nolan Arenado leads the team with 16 homers and 54 RBI, Paul Goldschmidt has 14 homers, 42 RBI and a team-best .863 OPS. And Nolan Gorman has 15 homers, 47 RBI and a .780 OPS. Otherwise, there’s not much, though prize rookie Jordan Walker is back up after a demotion and he’s currently riding a 17-game hitting streak, hitting .386 with a .470 on-base over that stretch.

What has hurt St. Louis is its pitching staff. It ranks 26th in starter ERA at 4.96 because 41-year-old Adam Wainwright, who got shelled Thursday, is basically washed, and Jack Flaherty and Miles Mikolas have been inconsistent.

The pitching matchups look like this: Friday at 8:15 p.m. on Amazon Prime it’s Luis Severino (5.25 ERA) against Matthew Liberatore (5.60). Saturday at 2:15 on YES it’s Gerrit Cole (2.78) against Flaherty (4.95). And Sunday at 2:15 on YES, it will probably be Randy Vazquez (1.74) getting called up to face ex-Yankee Jordan Montgomery (3.52) who has been the Cardinals most reliable starter.