| Jun. 3rd, 2010 @ 08:33 am Better than a Perfect Game? |
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Okay, so I have been lamenting the lack of appreciation of people who do the little things right in the sporting world. Sports fans have increasingly had to wonder if they are reading the crime section or the tabloids as they read the sports page. (Of course they increasingly haven’t been reading a sports page at all, but the decline of the print media is a different story.) I remember a few years back watching the Detroit Pistons playing the San Antonio Spurs. Both teams were such good all around teams, but the basketball world almost panicked because of the lack of superstardom. They were playing basketball the way many critics argued the game should be played, but those critics were muted or drowned out by the criticisms of boring basketball. Only Tony Parker’s celebrity girl friend and then wife seemed to make anybody happy at all. In tennis, Pete Sampras and Roger Federer, who might have been celebrated mightily in the age of Gehrig and DiMaggio, have been criticized for being too boring and too focused on winning tennis matches. Instead they have been pointed at celebrity tennis players like Andre Agassi and the Williams sisters as an example of how to be more exciting and entertaining.
Yesterday afternoon while I was scanning the news of the baseball world I watched and listened to a tragedy unfold and the Perfect Crime took place. Young Armando Galarraga, a 28 year-old Venezuelan who had been having trouble finding a place in the major leagues, who had never pitched a complete game, pitched eight innings of a perfect game. Then Mark Grudzielanek, who hadn’t had an extra base hit all season, ripped a ball deep into the gap in Comerica Park. The no hitter and the perfect game were over. But then, the thing that happens in all no hitters happened. Young Austin Jackson ran and ran and made an improbable Willie Mays style basket catch over his shoulder to preserve the perfect game. It was one of the greatest baseball plays I have ever seen.
Now it was his Galarraga’s moment, and he is the type of player who will very likely not have a way into the annals of baseball on career numbers, but he was making a bid to enter the record books from a single game accomplishment, call it the Fernando Tatis route. Only twenty perfect games had previously been pitched. Black Jack! A perfect twenty-one as a slow roller harmlessly bounced to the right side of the infield. As the play winds out, the presses start to roll, the third perfect game in a month. The mathematical probability of three perfect games in thirty days is astoundingly slight. No perfect game was thrown from 1922 to 1956. That gap is larger if you only count regular season games. There were no perfect games in the entire decades of the thirties, forties, and seventies. The decade of the pitcher, the sixties, only had two perfect games. And here comes the most unlikely third perfect game of a season. link
“Safe!” Jason Donald had run down the first baseline as first baseman Miguel Cabrera ranged slightly out of position to field the ground ball and then toss the ball to Armando Galarraga who covered the base in time, caught the ball, and then put his foot on the base well before Donald arrived on the base (a half step). Umpire Jim Joyce astonishingly called Donald safe and Cabrera and manager Jim Leyland erupted in impassioned protest. The fans in Detroit, a city starving for good news, cascaded the field with boos. Their part of history had been brazenly stolen from them. The feeling was that someone had to right this wrong and quickly, but nobody did. The game resumed and Galarraga did what he had been doing the whole game, he got the next batter out and his team won the game.
The sports news cycle erupted in coverage at this outrage. The eruption was so tremendous it overwhelmed the building hype for the coming Lakers-Celtics NBA finals and the retirement announcement of baseball great Ken Griffey, Jr. Replays revealing the injustice played in loops, from multiple angles, and everywhere in the sportosphere and beyond. Likely this would become as or more memorable than any bona fide perfect game. It was now becoming an event that would get its own name that would be discussed for decade, the perfect crime. But instead it became something even better, the twenty-eight out perfect game. What went initially unnoticed was the way that the two key players in the story handled things. I was talking to my friend Brad as a sought out a conversation about the event. We talked while I sat on my sidewalk and he watched ESPN and the MLB network and saw the play dissected. We, along with the commentators of baseball were coming to terms with what had happened. It was baseball analyst Harold Reynolds who first said of Joyce that he would be the first person to admit if he missed the call. Reynolds experience as a former baseball player defending an umpire made this seem very credible at the time. Also lost in the shuffle was the reaction of Armando Galarraga, who quietly walked back to the mound and went back to the business of helping his team win a game. He was robbed of the biggest individual moment in his baseball career and he threw no tantrum.
It is not only the call that will be remembered for decades, it is the reaction of Galarraga and Joyce to the call. "It was the biggest call of my career, and I kicked the (stuff) out of it," Joyce said after the game, according to the AP. "I just cost that kid a perfect game.” link Galarraga soon emerged to talk to the press and among his comments was this, “I feel sad,” Galarraga said. “I just watched the replay 20 times and there’s no way you can call him safe.” link Joyce asked to see Galarraga after the game and offered a full apology. Galarraga said Joyce told him, “I’m so sorry in my heart. I don’t know what to tell you.” “I told him, ‘Nobody’s perfect,' “Galarraga said. “What am I going to say?”
So what happened? In the midst of injustice two people stood up and did the right thing. The world could use a lot more Jim Joyces and Armando Galarragas. The debate will go on, but the lasting memory of this event will be the way the key players set an example for all of us and did the right thing when it was difficult. One admitting making the mistake of his career as soon as he realized it, and the other for handling a major career injustice with grace and dignity. |
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