Perfect Game

Again, not a Cubs post, but I feel like I should acknowledge Mark Buehrle's perfect game which happened yesterday against the Tampa Bay Rays. It was the 18th perfect game in the long history of Major League Baseball, and the first since Randy Johnson's in 2004. It was the second no-hitter of his career, the first being in 2007 against the Rangers. That game itself was also a perfect game. As I recall, the only batter to reach was Sammy Sosa on a walk, and he later got picked off of 1st. As always, Buehrle worked incredibly fast. He threw 116 pitches, and the Sox scored 5 runs in their halves of innings, and yet the game lasted all of 2 hours and 3 minutes.

This perfect game in particular is an impressive feat and sort of a strange event for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Buehrle is a guy who pitches to contact, and the White Sox defense has been pretty bad this year. Yesterday he struck out 6, and so 21 outs were left up to the defense. The play that will be remembered for a long time is the play that saved the no hitter in the 9th: Dwayne Wise scaling the outfield wall in left-center and just barely hanging on to the ball to rob Gabe Kapler of a home run. Wise had just entered the game as a defensive replacement in center, subbing in for Carlos Quentin and moving Scott Podsednik over to left. Podsednik, who isn't as fast as he used to be due to injury and who often takes bad routes to balls, most certainly doesn't make the catch. Its very much possible that Brain Anderson wouldn't have either, who was recently sent down when Quentin was activated from the DL. A lot of people, myself included, were pretty confused when Wise was kept on the roster over Anderson. Anderson has had a pretty tumultuous MLB career with the Sox, having not turned in to the top-level prospect he was once projected as, but he certainly is a better player than Dwane Wise, who has spent most of his career in the minors and is currently hitting under the Mendoza line. At least for a day though, the White Sox looked like geniuses, as a career minor league, below replacement-level player saved the 18th perfect game in Major League history. Sometimes baseball is weird like that.