Looking back on the last perfect game in Major League Baseball
In today’s era of Major League Baseball, when strikeouts are rampant, the fact that the Giants’ Matt Cain struck out fourteen batters wouldn’t make it anywhere near the front page of any newspaper except on the West Coast. However, a few more details from that game from five years ago remain unmatched to this day.
For example, those fourteen tries accounted for more than half of the hitters Cain faced that day, and four of them came against future batting champion José Altuve. Retiring all 27 batters in Houston’s lineup could mean only one thing, and that Matt Cain pitched a perfect game that day.
A rare feat to be sure, a perfect game had only been achieved 20 times prior to that 2012 season, and Cain was only the 22nd in baseball history. Remarkably, just a few weeks earlier, White Sox right-hander Philip Humber pitched a perfect game for Chicago against the Seattle Mariners.
Even though Humber managed to eliminate former MVP Ichiro Suzuki, the Chicago starter finished five fewer strikeouts than Cain during his perfect game. In fact, Humber came close to losing his flawless fight in the bottom of the ninth, when he fully counted on two of the three batters in that inning before both swung and missed.
However, the fact that two perfect games were pitched in the same season, remarkable as it was, did not set a record. Just two years earlier, in 2010, Major League Baseball had witnessed two perfect games in the same season. Believe it or not, those two pitching gems happened in the same month, just over two weeks apart.
On May 9, Oakland left-hander Dallas Braden retired all twenty-seven Tampa Bay batters, managing just six strikeouts in a game that took just over two hours to complete. Exactly twenty days later, Roy Halladay of the Philadelphia Phillies pitched a one against the Florida Marlins, striking out eleven batters in a 1–0 victory.
Thus, the almost impossible feat in the 2012 season had already been accomplished two years earlier, but on August 15, Félix Hernández turned it into a historic year. The Seattle Mariners ace had a flawless outing against the Tampa Bay Rays, the same team that had fallen victim to Oakland’s Dallas Braden just two years earlier.
The former Cy Young Award winner fanned twelve Tampa Bay batters as the only run scored by his teammates held off the narrow victory. Hernandez’s gem was his third of that season, and no other pitcher has posted a perfect game since.