The Imperfect Man Threw a Perfect Game

Today, I’m taking you back to 1956, and one of the most unexpected and amazing days in Yankees history when Don Larsen - who was certainly no Whitey Ford - pitched the only perfect game in World Series history.

NEW YORK (Oct. 8, 1956) – Three days earlier, Casey Stengel stood in the visitors’ clubhouse at Ebbets Field, steam billowing from his floppy ears, as he talked to the press following the Yankees’ embarrassing 13-8 loss to Brooklyn in Game 2 of the World Series.

“I’ll tell you what’s really wrong with our pitchers,” Stengel said. “They’re making the wrong pitches. They’re throwing exactly what they shouldn’t be throwing.”

The Yankees had ripped Dodger ace Don Newcombe for six runs in the first two innings and seemed on their way to a Series-tying victory. But Brooklyn responded with six runs in the bottom of the second to tie the score, and none of the Series-record seven pitchers Stengel used were able to derail the Dodgers’ potent offense thereafter.

“If they could have got out the right men in the right spots, it might have been different today,” Stengel said of his beleaguered mound staff.

One man Stengel was particularly angry with was starter Don Larsen. The right-hander walked four, gave up one single, a long sacrifice fly, and was hurt by first baseman Joe Collins’ error which meant the four runs he allowed were unearned. Although all the damage wasn’t Larsen’s fault, he wasn’t sharp, Stengel knew it, and he had yanked him.

The Yankees pitching woes dissipated over the next two days as Whitey Ford and Tom Sturdivant turned in back-to-back complete game victories at Yankee Stadium to even the Series at two games apiece. But in the critical fifth game, it was the unpredictable Larsen’s turn in the rotation to pitch, and the defending champion Dodgers couldn’t think of anyone they would rather be facing.

“He was no problem for us in Game 2 and I really figured that while the Yankees were tough hitters, I would probably win the game because we could score all day against Larsen,” Sal Maglie, the Dodgers’ Game 5 starter, told author Mike Blake years after.

Not only did the Dodgers not score all day, not one of them reached base as Larsen pitched the first and only perfect game in World Series history. Twenty- seven up, 27 down, and a memorable bear hug from Yogi Berra when the 2-0 victory was all over.

“I still find it hard to believe I really pitched the perfect game,” Larsen said many years later. “It’s almost like a dream, like something that happened to somebody else.”

Larsen wasn’t the only one who thought that way. Sports writer Dick Young summed up the occasion succinctly when he muttered in the press box, “The imperfect man just threw a perfect game.”

Two years before his historic performance, Larsen had fashioned one of the worst pitching records ever (3-21) for a bad Baltimore team, which prompted this remark on the back of his 1955 bubble gum card: “It is safe to say that Big Don would have won more games with a better hitting team behind him.”

Then again, even though he had won his final four decisions of the 1956 regular season to finish 11-5, he brought a deficient 30-40 lifetime mark into Game 5. Clearly, Larsen had proven throughout his uneven career that he wasn’t the type of pitcher you could rely on in a clutch situation.

Off the field, Larsen was equally erratic. Never one to turn down an opportunity for revelry - Stengel once said, “The only thing Larsen fears is sleep” - Larsen had wrapped his car around a telephone pole in St. Petersburg, Fla. in the spring of 1956. “The pole was speeding,” he cracked.

That penchant for the night life not only held him back as a pitcher, but it led to the crumbling of his marriage. In fact, the very day that he put on the most famous pitching display in history, his wife, Vivian, filed a Supreme Court action seeking to withhold his World Series money.

Mrs. Larsen charged that her husband was delinquent in his support payments and that he had subjected her and their 14-month-old daughter, “to the pleasures of a starvation existence.” She also implied that he had deserted her in July of 1955, three months after they had been married, “with no intention of returning because he was not ready to settle down and preferred to live a life of free and easy existence.”

Imagine if social media had existed back then.

Even the night before his Game 5 start, which was the most important of his career to date, wasn’t excluded from his social calendar. Larsen had gone out with a few friends, including Yankees backup outfielder Bob Cerv, and had not returned to his room until nearly dawn. Game time was 1 p.m.

Cerv would later tell esteemed baseball writer Roger Kahn, “I left him at 4 a.m. I called his hotel in the morning to make sure he got out of bed. He said, ‘No.’ At the ballpark, he took a whirlpool bath, a cold shower and had a rub. You know what happened next.”

Jim Gilliam struck out to start the game, and Pee Wee Reese, Brooklyn’s second batter, did the same, but little did anyone know that Reese’s appearance would be the longest any Dodger would stand in the batters’ box all day. He worked Larsen to a full count before looking at strike three. That was the only three-ball count Larsen would be faced with.

In the bottom of the first, Maglie, a ferocious competitor who, even at the age of 39, could still bring it and had gone 13-5 in the regular season, let it be known that he had his best stuff.

Two weeks before the Series, Maglie had thrown a no-hitter against Philadelphia in a pressure-packed pennant race game. And in Game 1 five days earlier, he had handcuffed the Yankees with a complete-game 6-3 victory.

Maglie breezed through the first three Yankee hitters and he and Larsen matched perfection through 3 1/2 innings. Then Maglie made a mistake, and it was all Larsen would need. He hung a two-out curveball to Mickey Mantle, and as Maglie said, “Mantle just blasted it for a home run. It was a curve that broke, I’d say, right over the middle of the plate.”

The large crowd stirred in the fifth when Gil Hodges lifted a deep fly to left-center which Mantle tracked down with a backhanded catch, and again when Sandy Amoros hit a foul ball home run down the right-field line before ultimately grounding meekly to second.

After a much more comfortable sixth, Larsen was given a little more of a cushion in the bottom half of the inning.

Andy Carey led off with a single and Larsen sacrificed him to second. Hank Bauer then singled to left to chase Carey home and it was 2-0 New York. Maglie allowed Collins to single, but he averted further damage when Mantle grounded out to Hodges, who then threw home to Roy Campanella when Bauer considered scoring on the play. Bauer wound up caught in a rundown and was tagged out.

Gilliam hit a hard one-hopper to short to open the seventh, but Gil McDougald made the play flawlessly, and Reese and Duke Snider flied out to end the inning.

“By the seventh, I was still pitching a great game and we were down 2-0 and it dawned on us that Larsen was pitching a smooth game and we didn’t have a hit,” Maglie said. “Then we realized he hadn’t given up a walk. It kind of snuck up on us.”

It hadn’t snuck up on the Yankees or their fans. Everyone knew what was happening and the stadium rocked with every strike and out Larsen delivered. As Arthur Daley wrote in The New York Times, “The crowd seemed to get a mass realization of the wonders that were being unfolded. Tension kept mounting until it was as brittle as an electric light bulb.”

In the eighth, Jackie Robinson grounded back to Larsen, third baseman Carey caught Hodges’ low liner, and Amoros struck out, leaving Larsen three outs away from immortality.

Carl Furillo worked Larsen hard to start the ninth, fouling off four pitches, but he finally succumbed on a fly to right. Campanella followed with a grounder to Billy Martin at second, and that brought Dale Mitchell, pinch-hitting for Maglie, to the plate as the last Dodger hope.

“He really scared me,” Larsen said of Mitchell. “I knew how much pressure he was under. He must have been paralyzed. That made two of us.”

After looking at a ball, Mitchell took a strike, swung and missed at a fastball, then fouled the next offering into the stands leaving the count 1-2. Mitchell considered swinging at Larsen’s 97th and final pitch of the game, but he deemed it to be a bit outside and checked his swing. Plate umpire Babe Pinelli, umpiring the final game of his 24-year career, thought otherwise and called Mitchell out on strikes to end the game.

Before the perfect game, Stengel had once pointed to Larsen and said: “See that big feller out there. He can throw, he can hit, he can field and he can run. He can be one of baseball’s great pitchers anytime he puts his mind to it.”

For one day, he was.