"Forward, the Light Brigade!" / Was there a man dismay'd? / Not tho' the soldier knew / Some one had blunder'd
–Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Charge of the Light Brigade"
"Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life."
–Aristotle, Poetics
On October 31, 1998, Armando Galarraga signed a contract with the Montreal Expos as a free agent. He was sixteen years old. He pitched for two more years in his native Venezuela before moving to America to play for the GCL Expos, a short season minor league team. Over the next seven years, Armando charted a peripatetic course through the minor leagues, moving from the Expos to the Savannah Sand Gnats, the Harrisburg Senators, the Potomac Nationals, the Frisco RoughRiders, the Bakersfield Blaze, the Spokane Indians, the AZL Rangers, and the Oklahoma RedHawks. He was called up to pitch in three games for the Texas Rangers in 2007 before being traded in 2008 to the Detroit Tigers. At Detroit, he began to see regular starts as an injury replacement for Dontrelle Willis. Galarraga was lucky in 2008: remarkably few of the men who managed put bat to ball made it safely to base. He finished 5th in Rookie of the Year voting. His second season was underwhelming, though, and after a poor showing in 2010 spring training, he was sent briefly down to the Toledo Mud Hens. He reentered the Tigers’ starting rotation in May.
Major League Baseball, like every league at the highest level of its sport, is an incredibly rarified realm. There is short season, A, A+, AA, and AAA Minor Leagues (as well as a slew of local and overseas professional leagues) and the Major League, with only a select few from each level advancing to the next level. All of the facile inspirational messages, the whole cottage industry of sloganeers and poster makers rely upon a simple truth: you cannot make it through this gauntlet by accident. It requires hard work, a life-consuming dedication to honing one's skill. The ruthless precision with which the best are chosen springs from the very arbitrariness of the sport’s structure. It is abstract, formalized - in other words, it is play. Good pitching, like good hitting, good cycling, or good pole-vaulting, is wholly asocial and amoral, and thus is largely immune to the vagueness and vagaries of human society; it is purely teleological, its success or failure measurable in numbers. For all the disagreements over the relative merits of Wins, ERA, WHIP, and BABIP, the vast majority of pitchers simply cannot throw a baseball well enough to consistently get outs against Major League hitting. Indolence and injury prevent many who could from ever realizing their potential. Simply to reach the majors is the unlikely culmination of a life's work. And the wholly arbitrary actions of strangers on a distant field take on an enormous weight in our collective imaginations. They are playing for their lives.
On June 2, 2010, Galarraga took the mound for a home game. The game started like every one before it, but something went differently. Maybe his stuff was better than normal, maybe his command, or maybe he was just lucky, but the outs kept coming. He retired the side in the first inning, then the second, and still the outs kept coming. Through eight innings he retired every batter he faced. As he walked across the close-cropped grass to take the mound for the ninth time that night, the applause was deafening. Mark Grudzielanek hit a fly ball to deep center field, into the glove of a running Austin Jackson. Mike Redmond grounded out. Jason Donald stepped into the batter's box.
After Roy Halladay's gem just four days before, there had been twenty official perfect games in the history of Major League Baseball. By way of reference, there have been 282 human spaceflights. In its difficulty, rarity, and historical import, a perfect game sits at the pinnacle of athletic achievement. In a stroke, a perfect game places a pitcher on equal footing with Cy Young and Sandy Koufax. Careers and reputations are made from less.
These moments, where enormous human and historical stakes meet the finest distinctions of performance, where an inch can literally mean the difference between one unimpeachably great act forever recorded in your name and continued mediocrity, are incredibly rare. Few of us have the dubious distinction of defining our whole selves through one single pursuit. We have jobs, families, hobbies, educations and friendships to define us, and with this broader foundation, our lives have a certain stability. Should things go wrong in one sphere of our lives, the consequences are bounded, for we can take solace elsewhere. But our highs are commensurately bounded. Those who dedicate their lives to pursuing the highest level of sport are allowed to become, in the words of David Foster Wallace, "a transcendent practitioner of an art - something few of us get to be. They've allowed him to visit and test parts of his psychic reserves most of us do not even know for sure we have (courage, playing with violent nausea, not choking, et cetera)."
And in reaching such a preposterously rare and beautiful corner in the structure of a game as a perfect game, the daunting human scale of the achievement is in a flash both revealed and dwarfed. These moments, grown colossal in our minds, lose nothing to their size. There is no blurring, no loss of definition. Their fallow potential brings thousands to late-season games between teams long since knocked from contention; their stories are told through generations.
Armando Galarraga threw the ball. Jason Donald knocked it softly to first baseman Miguel Cabrera. Galarraga sprinted towards the bag and, planting his foot on the bag, gloved Cabrera's toss half a stride before Donald reached base. Jim Joyce, the first base umpire, ruled Donald safe.
After the game, Jim Joyce was in tears. After the play, Miguel Cabrera swore and argued at length. The announcer called it a "travesty" and a proclamation issued from Lansing reading, "I, Jennifer M. Granholm, governor of the state of Michigan, do hereby declare Armando Galarraga to have pitched a perfect game."
But Galarraga? Walking back to the mound to face a 28th batter, Galarraga just smiled.
[Alex Birdsall, as Oil Can Samson, is half of the team blogging the transcendence and hypocrisy of sports and those involved in it at There Are No Fours. He would like to bike to the moon or dunk on an eleven-foot rim and will keep writing until he's there.]
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