Major League Baseball has existed since 1876. Over those years, about 20,000 pitchers have appeared in approximately 240,000 games. Of those pitchers, just 24 have pitched a perfect game. In other words, 24 people, 24 perfect games.
Rare air.
As I write this, a man named Shoehei Ohtani set a single game standard some people think qualifies as the best game ever played: 6-for-6 with three home runs, two doubles, a single, two stolen bases, 10 RBIs — and a 50 home run/50 stolen base season. Nobody has ever done that, especially and including the last bit.
This while curtailing his playing time because of injury. Oh yeah. He’s regarded as one of the five best pitchers in the game today.
Rare air.
People who love baseball (I’m not really one of them) love this sort of things. Great statistics and an argument about how it stacks up against the giants of the past. What about the new rules? What about the length of the season? What about World War II! What about . . . !
What’s true is all of this is an act of retrospection. It’s an act of judging a thing after it happened.
A perfect game has a definition. It’s binary. Either the pitcher retires 27 batters in a row without anyone getting on base, or they don’t.
The idea of a “greatest game ever” or “greatest season ever” may have some statistical basis, but it’s all a matter of who’s doing the evaluating.
More importantly, it’s not a helpful idea prospectively.
If you’d asked Mr. Ohtani that morning what a great game that night would look like, the kind that would have made him ecstatic, he wouldn’t have given you that line. For all we know, he may think some other game he played was his greatest ever.
After reading about this fabulous game, I confess I gave some thought to what in my past would go into the bucket “greatest game,” “greatest sales call,” or “greatest anything.”
It was fun. I came up with some ideas.
When I look forward and ask myself what a perfect game, sale, or day would be like, my thoughts go in completely different directions. Some of it is my advancing age. Maybe it’s new wisdom. Maybe my standards have changed. Who knows.
Greatness is in the eye of the beholder. Perfection is a far more arbitrary idea than we believe.
Your greatness, your perfection, is not for someone else to define or measure. They are yours and yours alone.