When the late Don Larsen pitched his perfect game in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series, New York Daily News writer Joe Trimble was stuck for an opening line. His News colleague Dick Young handed one to him, practically in a glass case: the unperfect man pitched a perfect game.
That pretty much robs anyone of using it as a headline for Domingo Germán, who became the fourth Yankee pitcher to come away with a perfect game Wednesday night. Which is a shame, because Germán can be seen as having made Larsen resemble a saint.
Before he married in 1960, Larsen was a wild oat whom no less than Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle called the greatest drinker he'd ever known. That was saying something considering Mantle's own prodigious taste for distilled spirits. The night before he went to a no-windup delivery and reached baseball immortality, Larsen went out — still steaming over an early Game 2 hook — and got smashed.
Germán's is a more grave backstory. He missed 2019's final 18 games plus the entire pan-damn-ically shortened 2020 after slapping his girlfriend during retiring Yankee legend CC Sabathia's charity party late in the 2019 season. His 2021 return didn't thrill all his teammates, even though there'd been Yankee fans swearing that a lack of formal criminal charges meant he should have been back in 2020.
"Sometimes," relief pitcher Zack Britton said, before Germán's 2021 return, "you don't get to control who your teammates are."
The Yankees entered spring training this year without figuring Germán in their starting rotation plans. Not until Frankie Montas needed shoulder surgery, Carlos Rodòn injured his forearm and then his back, and Luis Severino incurred a lat injury. And Germán himself — who has said he started undergoing treatment for depression following his 2019 incident and counseling to improve as a husband and father — dealt with shoulder inflammation last year.
Nothing in Germán's 2023 entering Wednesday suggested he'd have anything coming such as what he'd do in Oakland's RingCentral Coliseum — pitching the 24th perfect game in Show history and the fourth in Yankee history, following Larsen, David Wells, and — with Larsen and his Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra in attendance for a ceremonial pre-game first pitch — David Cone.
Germán was ejected, then suspended 10 games, for too much of that new old-fashioned medicated goo on his hand after a May outing in Toronto. Before that, in April, he was suspected but allowed to wash his hands during a game against the Twins.
From early May through mid-June, Germán became, perhaps surprisingly, the best Yankee starting pitcher who wasn't named Gerrit Cole, including a 2-hit performance against the Guardians 1 May and 6 2/3s 1-run ball against the Dodgers on a Sunday night game in June that was televised nationally.
Then, his two outings prior to Wednesday night saw Germán abused by the Red Sox for 7 runs in 2 innings; and, bushwhacked by the Mariners for 10 runs, including on 4 home runs.
I don't know what Germán did last Tuesday night. I do know that he went out to the mound last Wednesday night with absolutely nobody in the sparse-enough RingCentral house, perhaps including himself, expecting him to come away with the first perfect game ever pitched by a man whose previous start saw him take a ten-run beating.
That includes factoring that the A's were the opposition. This year's A's have become such a pathetic set after long enough dismantling and disemboweling under the all-thumbs hand of their owner that a perfect game against them might be considered doing it the easy way.
Especially since, during the top of the fifth, the Yankees made bloody well certain that Germán could go back out to the mound, pull up a lounge chair, and pitch from a sitting position serving up balls on tees without incurring serious damage.
They entered the inning with a mere 1-0 lead thanks to Giancarlo Stanton's fourth-inning, two-out, first-pitch home run. They finished it with a 7-0 lead following an RBI double (Kyle Higashioka), a run home on a throwing error off a bunt (by Anthony Volpe, who stole third during the next at-bat), an RBI single (D.J. LeMahieu), a 2-run single (Stanton) after another A's error enabled the bases loaded, and a 2-out RBI single.
The Yankees then scored once in the top of the seventh (on Josh Donaldson's sacrifice fly) and thrice in the top of the ninth (a run-scoring throwing error, an RBI double, a run-scoring ground out) to finish the 11-0 pile-on. It's the fattest winning score in a perfect game since the Giants staked Matt Cain to a 10-0 conquest in 2012 and only the second time a perfect game pitcher had double-digit run support to work with.
All the while, Germán kept feeding the A's things onto which they couldn't attach sneaky eyes through the infield or wicked distractions in the outfield. He struck 9 batters out, all before the eighth inning, and should have handed his defense at least equal credit for the perfecto as he might have accepted for himself. This is Germán's gem with a win factor (WF) assigned, the result of his strikeouts divided by the sum of his ground and fly outs, plus his fielding-independent pitching rate (FIP: essentially, your ERA when defense is removed from the equation) entering the game:
Score: 11-0
K: 9
GB: 8
FB: 10
WF: .500
FIP: 5.30
Essentially, Germán himself was responsible for half the game's perfection. Which actually places him well enough ahead of Larsen's perfecto (WF: .350), but behind those of Wells (.688) and Cone (.588).
Among the perfect games pitched in the World Series era (1903 forward) with available game logs, Germán's win factor is higher than six perfecto pitchers (Larsen plus Charlie Robertson, Tom Browning, Dennis Martinez [the lowest at .227], Kenny Rogers, Mark Buehrle, Dallas Braden), but lower than 11. (Cain, Wells and Cone, plus Jim Bunning, Sandy Koufax [tied for highest with Cain: 1.077], Catfish Hunter, Len Barker, Mike Witt, Randy Johnson, Roy Halladay, and Felix Hernández.)
You might care to know that Germán shares a .500 WF with one perfecto pitcher, one-time Yankee Philip Humber. But Germán's curve ball, considered a sharp pitch when it's thrown right, was responsible for nineteen of his 27 outs, including 7 of his strikeouts.
"He threw that curveball in any count that he wanted to," said A's infielder Tony Kemp postgame. "It was spinning differently and moving differently. He put his fastball where he wanted to. Changeup, as well. He just kind of mixed them."
Larsen beat a somewhat aging but still formidable Dodgers team who'd ground their way to their final pennant during their Brooklyn life. Germán took on an A's team that's been compared often enough to the 1962 Mets — while lacking that team's circumstantial popularity and flair for inadvertent ensemble comedy.
Those Mets merely got no-hit by Hall of Famer Koufax — who threw one of the most voluptuous curve balls in history himself — while Koufax's Dodgers slapped eleven runs out of Met pitching ... on June 30, 1962. These A's accomplished something on June 28, 2023 that those Mets didn't. They were victimised by Germán and the Yankees without the relief of the five walks Koufax surrendered.
Washington Post sportswriting legend Shirley Povich led his story of Larsen's World Series perfecto with, "The million-to-one-shot came in." It's not unfair to suggest Germán was the 10 million-to-one shot.
But you wonder whether his unusual uniform number — the only available single-digit number on the Yankees anymore, chosen when he gave Rodón his usual number 55 to indicate a new beginning for himself — didn't look more swollen in the A's eyes, adding insult to injury, than it looked on Germán's back. Zero.
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