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This Day In Sports…April 21, 2012:
Safeco Field in Seattle sees a perfect game pitched for the first time, but the Mariners are on the wrong end of it. Chicago White Sox hurler Philip Humber tossed the 21st perfect game in major league history in a 4-0 blanking of the M’s. It was only the second time a perfecto had ever been thrown in April. Humber needed only 96 pitches in recording his first career complete game. And, 11 years before the introduction of the pitch clock, it still took only two hours and 17 minutes. Really something for a guy the White Sox had claimed on waivers from Oakland just 15 months earlier.
The Mariners kept coming up—and kept sitting down again. The M’s last gasp in the bottom of the ninth came from pinch-hitter Brendan Ryan, who raised the drama level when he worked Humber to a full count. Humber’s next pitch was a slider, which had been handcuffing Seattle all day. This one handcuffed White Sox catcher A.J. Pierzynski, as it was so far outside he couldn’t corral it. But Ryan had gone after it and tried to check his swing. Umpire Brian Runge called it strike 3, and while Ryan was arguing the call, Pierzynski was able to track the ball down and throw it to first for the 27th and final out.
There have now been 23 perfect games in the big leagues, and Humber’s is considered the most unlikely of all. He was a 29-year-old journeyman making his 30th career major league start. Humber would go 5-5 that season with a 6.44 ERA, having been demoted to the bullpen in August. He was placed on waivers after the season. In 2013, Humber wound up in Houston and was 0-8, and that was it for a big league career that stretched over parts of eight seasons. Humber’s career line: 16-23 with a 5.31 ERA.
But the most well-known perfect game aberration remains the one that has been talked about for nearly 70 years. Don Larsen threw the only perfect game in World Series history in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series for the New York Yankees. Larsen is not in the Hall of Fame and never even made an All-Star Game. He did have a better career than Humber’s, though, pitching for 14 seasons and compiling an 81-91 record with a respectable 3.78 ERA. The 1956 season was Larsen’s best, as he was 11-5. His worst came two seasons earlier in Baltimore, with a record of (are you ready?) 3-21. Larsen, by the way, spent his twilight years in Hayden Lake and passed away there in 2020.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
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