Perfect
The Inside Story of Baseball's Twenty Perfect Games
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Among baseball achievements, the perfect game—one in which no runners reach base—remains the greatest. Though many have come close, only 20 pitchers have achieved such perfection in more than a century of baseball. This exhaustive compendium examines the fascinating story behind every perfect game and uncovers details both great and small, illuminating the majesty of these titanic achievements. The faithfully narrated record of all 20 games—punctuated by statistics, trivia, little-known anecdotes, and personal memories from both witnesses and the pitchers themselves—gets inside the minds of the players who made baseball history. In addition to profiling some of the game’s greatest pitchers, such as Cy Young, Sandy Koufax, and Randy Johnson, or others including Charley Robertson who had otherwise unremarkable careers, this updated edition features new chapters devoted to Dallas Braden, Mark Buehrle, and Roy Halladay, the three latest pitchers to throw a perfect game, and a comprehensive appendix profiles several pitchers who almost achieved perfection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Buckley (The Visual Dictionary of Baseball and Play Ball: The Official Major League Baseball Guide for Young Players) offers a breezy infield-banter tone to his scenarios of baseball's 16 perfect games, events in a stadium that could be overshadowed only by the apparition of Abner Doubleday in the upper deck. Buckley is a bleacher bum: "what ifs" abound throughout the thin bleacher talk analysis. While his press-box chatter can get tiresome, it does work in the last chapter, "Nearly Perfect," about those who "also-pitched," such as Pirate Harvey Haddix whose 12 innings of perfect ball were lost to the record books by a hit in the 13th inning. Certainly Buckley is too casual for baseball's elevated class of statisticians: perfect games are located in the deep stats outfield but he offers only a few averages (perfect games occur "about once every 7.5 years") and mentions an individual perfect game probability theorem as "a formula so complicated I won't even bother to explain it." In the end, he doesn't explain much about the significance of a perfect game, but casual readers and fans will leave the book with Buckley's hoots and cheers ringing in their ears. Photos not seen by PW.
