When I first heard that Mark Buehrle had thrown a perfect game, I went through a quick mental calculus that minimized the feat almost immediately. I figured it was a getaway day that featured the kind of strike zone a command pitcher like Buehrle would exploit. Thinking about the Rays, I dismissed them as a team that can’t hit lefties, and one that likely played some of its bench players for the day game after a night game that closed the four-game set. It seemed to me, initially, that this would be the perfect setup for a pitching feat, one where the context of the performance was as critical to the story as the performance itself.
As it turns out, I was wrong about all of that. My first clue was that Buehrle threw 116 pitches, 4.3 per plate appearance, out of line for a pitcher of his ilk. He threw 40 balls. He threw 76 strikes to retire 27 batters despite having just six strikeouts. That’s not the line of a pitcher throwing to a big strike zone. The Rays took 61 pitches, not the act of a team looking to get to the next city. Eric Cooper called 40 of those pitches balls and just 21 of them strikes, not the approach of a home-plate umpire checking his watch. I could sit here and pick apart any individual call, but then again, I could do that for any of the 15 games played yesterday. The second inning was typical, as Buehrle got ahead 0-2 on all three batters without a swing and miss (four called strikes, two fouls), then went to 3-2, 2-2, and 2-2 before getting the outs.
As a result, the time of the game and the travel schedules of the participants cannot be used to wave away Buehrle’s feat. It’s clear that his perfect game wasn’t the product of some outsized strike zone or a hacktastic opponent.
The Rays took two-thirds of Buehrle’s first pitches, 10 for strikes and eight for balls. They got themselves ahead in the count with increasing frequency as the game wore on, but were never able to convert good situations because of how effectively Buehrle changed locations and speeds. He forced the Rays to take a number of weak swings with two strikes throughout the game. Buehrle was down 2-0 to B.J. Upton in the fourth, battled back to 3-2, and got him swinging on what was a terrible swing at a changeup over the outside corner. He fell behind Gabe Kapler 2-0 in the sixth, then got a fastball up and in that Kapler could only bounce to third base. Two batters later he had his only 3-0 count of the day, then slipped in two high strikes to Jason Bartlett, and eventually retired him on a grounder to short.
Kapler came into the game with an OPS above 1.000 against lefties; Bartlett had that going for him as well. A year after being susceptible to southpaws, the Rays are actually a bit better against them than they are against righties. The lineup they played yesterday consisted of eight regulars or platoon regulars and Michel Hernandez, starting in the usual spot for a backup catcher. This wasn’t Eric Milton‘s no-hitter a decade ago against the Salt Lake City Bees dressed in Angels gear; this was beating the starting lineup of a team that came in with an .800 OPS against southpaws.
The Rays really made Buehrle work in the eighth, when he threw 17 pitches, 12 of them strikes, in what appeared to be a determined effort to challenge the hitters. (It’s notable that Buehrle was far from dominant-the Rays swung at 55 pitches yesterday, and made some contact on 47 of them.) Carlos Pena, Ben Zobrist, and Pat Burrell had professional, patient, high-quality at-bats… and all went back to the dugout unhappy.
What was remarkable about the game was how rarely the Rays came close to hits. There were a couple of foul balls late in the game, one by Upton, one by Burrell, that nearly snapped the string of outs. Alexei Ramirez made a couple of nice plays, but they were nothing outstanding. Until the play that made DeWayne Wise‘s short career, the Rays didn’t have anything notably close to a hit.
The Wise play is the signature moment of this game; it deserves every bit of attention, and Wise every ounce of praise, that you can bestow upon it. Sometimes, great plays at the wall don’t so much save a homer as they do save a double, or add some unnecessary effort to what should be an F8 at the track. This play, though… this was a great catch. Wise, playing somewhat shallow and in straightaway center field, covered a tremendous amount of ground just in getting to the wall, timed his jump perfectly, and took away a home run-the ball was over the line and almost behind the fence when he caught it-from Kapler, then recovered from the impact at the wall to recover the ball with his bare hand as he stumbled away.
Had Nyjer Morgan made the catch in the eighth inning of a dreary Nationals blowout loss, it would have been the play of the day. Wise made it to convert the 25th out of a perfect game for a team in contention. We hype things to the moon these days, and we become jaded because of it, but this catch is worth every bit of hype you can crank up. It was sublime.
What was most enjoyable about the game was watching Buehrle work. He operates so quickly that he was actually into his windup a couple of times and had to stop because the batter wasn’t ready. You can take a tape of this game and make every pitcher in the world, eight to 80, watch it twice a week-this is how you do the job. There is a rhythm to pitching, to repeating a complicated set of movements over and over, and when you work at a pace, you make that job so much easier for yourself.
I was prepared to find reasons to downplay the 18th perfect game in major league history. I was set to point to a strike zone or a lineup or a plane waiting on the tarmac. There’s nothing there, nothing, that can take away from what Mark Buehrle did yesterday. He moved the ball around, he threw strikes, he changed speeds, and my god he worked quickly. It was a display of pitching that deserves the one word that will always be attached to it: perfect.
Thank you for reading
This is a free article. If you enjoyed it, consider subscribing to Baseball Prospectus. Subscriptions support ongoing public baseball research and analysis in an increasingly proprietary environment.
Subscribe now
It would seem like an easy theory to (dis)prove, although I've never come across such research...in any case, just glad to be slighly less cynical and jaded that I don't immediately look for ways to minimize every accomplishment.
No pitcher has caused me to reexamine some of my SABR theories more than Buehrle. Sure being a power-pitcher of the Clemens variety is optimal, but having a guy who consistently gives you a quality start, has a golden glove, and the best pick-off move in the game is another way of going about being a great pitcher. PECOTA and the other predictive systems have whiffed more on Buehrle than any other player the past decade. His current ERA is more than a run below expected and it is even below his 90% projection. For us who have watched him during his career, we are not that surprised. One of those few exceptions where you have to watch him pitch on a regular basis to see why he can excel. Despite lacking a wipeout pitch or a fastball that is over 90 mph, he gives the White Sox a chance to win almost every time he toes the rubber.
Why would you even try to do that?
Enjoyed the rest of the article, though. Sox fans are well versed in the Buehrle rhythm and its good to see others catching on as well. As for the Wise catch - it should be noted that he had just entered the game as a defensive substitution. Podsednik does not catch that ball (witness his misplaying of Crawford's inside-the-park HR earlier this week). Brian Anderson probably could have made the play, but he was sent down earlier this week.
Mike Witt, Last game of the 1984 season (September 30)
Tom Browning, September 16, 1988
Dennis Martinez, July 28, 1991
Kenny Rogers, July 28, 1994
David Wells, May 17, 1998
David Cone, July 18, 1999
Randy Johnson, May 18, 2004
Mark Buehrle, July 23, 2009
Can you compare them? Can you compare these 8 pitchers? It looks to me like this is made up of guys from the Hall of Very Good (plus Randy Johnson, future HOFer)
http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYA/NYA199907180.shtml
Those Expos were free-swingers and/or baseball neophytes.
I mean, in order for a starting pitcher to record 27 consecutive outs without allowing a baserunner depends on an incredible degree of luck to begin with, whether that luck manifests in the strength of the defense behind him, the weakness of the lineup he's pitching against, or something else entirely.
So while I can appreciate the instinct to downplay the significance of such a feat by emphasizing that it is just as much the things that are out of the pitcher's control (unlike his skill and talent) that contribute to a perfect game, or no hitter, at the end of the day the feat is just so unusually rare that I just don't think you can eliminate the skill and talent contributions entirely.
Anyway, for weak opponents in a perfect game, I'll raise you with this one:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYA/NYA199805170.shtml
The Padres were a pretty awful hitting team at that point (Dave Magadan hitting cleanup, old Rickey Henderson leading off, no Phil Nevin), although I suppose it was a season when Kotsay and Klesko were marginally useful ballplayers.
So it wasn't like he was nibbling around the plate, he probably just had no idea where his fastball was going (and neither did the Pads).
During the broadcast yesterday, Harrelson said that -- placed in the context of the game -- Wise's catch was the greatest defensive play he's seen in 50 years of watching baseball.
http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/blog/big_league_stew/post/Morning-Juice-Rays-even-Phillies-salute-Buehr?urn=mlb,178540
There are some skills that I don't think PECOTA captures, and Buehrle exhibits an important one: pitching with runners on. He tends to improve with runners, and this year that's been particularly strong as evidenced by these triple slash results:
.270/.303/.460 with bases empty
.203/.257/.320 with runners on
There's a huge BABIP disparity here too, but that doesn't explain the disappearance of extra base hits.
Mays, Chavez, Brooks Robinson, Bill Wambsganss (sp?), Bobby Richardson, Sam Rice...
All things considered, you can save a game with a homer-robbing catch almost any night of the week, maybe multiple times a day on occasion. Saving a perfect game with a homer-robbing catch in the 9th has happened how many times in the 18 perfect games in the history of Baseball?
You can argue all time catches, sure, but I'm not sure you can argue against Wise's catch as the best defensive play this year.
For me, the best may still be one of the plays that Jim Edmonds made, diving while running flat out away from home plate and toward RF, to catch a line drive just off the ground. Diving over-the-shoulder catches are the rarest of all.
When I stop doing this and move on to whatever's next in life, constantly being called "biased" by whiny fanboys will be pretty high on my list of reasons.
I think we're comfortably into the realm of the subjective here, and any one person balances the various factors (difficulty, game context, season context) is probably not something I can get too wrapped up about.
Wise helped make a historic event happen. Granderson turned a loss into .99 of a win. If the Tigers win the AL Central by a game...wasn't it also historic?
I think the question is more interesting than the answer.
I agree that it is completely subjective at this point. However, I think you are arguing value in a conversation about greatness. Yes, Granderson's catch may well be historic at season's end, but so could a whole other handfull of plays, pitches, or hits that may push the Tigers into the playoffs. Yes, the intrinsic value of Granderson's catch is greater than that of Wise's catch. The difference is that at the moment it happened, everyone watching knew that Wise's catch was something that was a once in lifetime catch.
I would even argue that in a vaccuum, from swing to out, Wise's catch was a better catch than Granderson's.
I enjoyed your article and this debate, and with that, I rest my case.
The predictive systems are broken on him. You are right to mention that he pitches so much better with runners on. This is precisely why Buehrle is one of the few players that I think challenges SABR principles. I buy the religion (SABR), but it is important to have an open-mind to how some its scripture can be flawed.
Pitchers with Buehrle's basic stats have ERAs and WHIPs around what PECOTA keeps predicting and tend to age the way PECOTA predicts. That's not a flaw in PECOTA; it's a reason to praise Buehrle for defying his innate abilities. PECOTA also has struggled with Tom Glavine...Jamie Moyer...and Ichiro on the other side of the ball. But like anything of this nature, there's going to be outliers at both ends of a normal curve. PECOTA does fairly well, in the aggregate, for most players. I think it's better to look at it as a team-level tool.
Being a Sox fan, I can tell you that it has been a pleasure to watch Buehrle pitch all these years. He is someone that Sox fans can take pride in as being one of their own. The way he competes and how he handles himself makes it easy to cheer for this guy.
And if wants to continue beating the projections of PECOTA, that is fine with me, too. Same goes for the Sox.
Thanks, again.
http://www.nonohitters.com/
You're prepared to find a reason to downplay a perfect game? Before you looked at a box score?
That's not only journalistically negligent, but completely wrongheaded.
And to suggest that a professional team, in the midst of a division race is going to mail a game in because its 'getaway day' is absolutely ludacris.
It is certainly not the objective, data intensive analysis I've come to expect from Baseball Prospectus.
Thanks to Joe Sheehan, and Baseball Prospectus as a whole, I appreciate BABIP, FRAA, etc as metrics that tell you more than a pitcher's W-L record regarding game outcomes.
With those stats, and others, in mind, a no-no/perfecto seems even more unattainable(and that's not just because I'm a Mets fan). I don't ever remember reading that a player or a team's feelings on getaway day are something to be factored into performance.
I had no intention of tearing anyone down, and for that I apologize.
I was hoping to read about one of the rarest (and impressive) feats that happens in baseball, and that first paragraph seemed to shrug off the event, with the rest of the article trying to come to terms with it.
Also note that a disproportionate number of no-hitters have been thrown in September, when teams are out of the race and often playing minor league prospects.
1) Wow. Followed a half-moment later by:
2) What lineup was he up against?
It is human nature to try to explain things.
On their very best days of their careers, most hall of fame pitchers won't throw a perfect game (evidenced by how rare they are vs. the number of pitchers in the HOF).
Therefore, it's natural to ask what circumstances help explain why *this* pitcher accomplished *this* feat on *this* night - i.e. what breaks went in Buehrle's favor last night? The lineup he was facing *could* be at the top of the list, as well as their attitude.
Don't tear down Joe for admitting he's human.
"I was prepared to find reasons to downplay the 18th perfect game in major league history."
I'm surprised that you didn't suggest that the BABIP of .000 suggested a regression to the mean long before 9 innings were up and that Buehrle was just lucky.