One year ago, Armando Galarraga pitched baseball’s first 28-up, 28-down perfect game, even if those pesky record books didn’t agree on that being an official accomplishment. He was the toast of baseball. Jim Joyce, on the other hand, was receiving death threats. He was the most reviled figure in baseball since A.J. Pierzynski played in a game earlier that day. It was ugly.
Armando Galarraga And Jim Joyce: One Year Later
It’s been a year since Armando Galarraga retired 28 straight hitters*. A look back at the imperfect perfect game.
Today, Armando Galarraga is on the Reno Aces. He couldn’t stick with the Arizona Diamondbacks, and now he’s scraping and clawing to get back to the big leagues. He walked five batters in his first start for Reno. Joyce is still known for the blown call, but he’s also still a respected umpire -- considered one of the best. A lot can change in 365 days.
There are a lot of angles to take on the anniversary of Galarraga’s perfect game that wasn’t. There’s the fallibility-of-human-umpires angle -- does it add to or subtract from the game? There’s the game itself -- a masterpiece by definition -- and there’s the unlikeliness of Galararaga being the one who came so close to being the 19th pitcher to throw a perfect game in the modern era.
The most memorable moment of the game for me, though, was one of the greatest moments in sportsmanship that I’ve seen:
Is that how you’d look after an umpire blew your perfect game? There must have been liters of adrenaline pumping through Galarraga’s body. Just pitching in a regular game can bring out an understandable hyper-competitiveness, but getting so, so close to a perfect game must do even stranger things to a player’s brain chemistry. He would have been excused if he’d taken a bite out of his hat bill and thrown his glove into the stands. Yet Galarraga’s reaction to losing his perfect game on a blown call was a disappointed, bemused look. It was the look of a player who had more perspective than you’d expect from an entire roster.
That was the peak of Galarraga’s career. He couldn’t have known for sure, but he probably had a decent idea that a perfect game would probably be his greatest accomplishment as a major leaguer. His legacy instead will be the perfect game that wasn’t. Galarraga and Joyce collaborated on a book, and the two have become friends, which led MLB to prohibit Joyce from umping a Galarraga game. You know, in case we ever see Galarraga again. The timing of that edict is just a little cruel.
There are a lot of interesting facets to the Galarraga/Joyce game. But one of my favorite moments in baseball over the past decade was that look. It’s a small thing, but danged if it still doesn’t impress me a year later. His reaction at the time, and the subsequent class he showed in the post-game interviews, makes Galarraga one of the easiest players to root for in sports.
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