Twenty-seven batters, twenty-seven outs, nobody reaches. It has happened 24 times in the entire history of the American and National Leagues.
To put that against the size of the sport: more than 200,000 major league games have been played, and a perfect game requires one specific pitcher to be untouchable on one specific afternoon while eight fielders behind him make no mistakes at all. Three of the 24 came in a single season, 2012, and then it did not happen again for eleven years.
This is the complete list, the near-misses that faced exactly 27 men and still did not count, and what the pitch counts say about how it is actually done.
The complete list
Two came in 1880, in the first decade of professional baseball: Lee Richmond on 12 June and John Ward five days later. Every one since:
| # | Pitcher | Date | Club | SO | |---|---|---|---|---| | 3 | Cy Young | 5 May 1904 | Boston Americans | 8 | | 4 | Addie Joss | 2 Oct 1908 | Cleveland Naps | 3 | | 5 | Charlie Robertson | 30 Apr 1922 | Chicago White Sox | 6 | | 6 | Don Larsen | 8 Oct 1956 | New York Yankees | 7 | | 7 | Jim Bunning | 21 Jun 1964 | Philadelphia Phillies | 10 | | 8 | Sandy Koufax | 9 Sep 1965 | Los Angeles Dodgers | 14 | | 9 | Catfish Hunter | 8 May 1968 | Oakland Athletics | 11 | | 10 | Len Barker | 15 May 1981 | Cleveland Indians | 11 | | 11 | Mike Witt | 30 Sep 1984 | California Angels | 10 | | 12 | Tom Browning | 16 Sep 1988 | Cincinnati Reds | 7 | | 13 | Dennis Martinez | 28 Jul 1991 | Montreal Expos | 5 | | 14 | Kenny Rogers | 28 Jul 1994 | Texas Rangers | 8 | | 15 | David Wells | 17 May 1998 | New York Yankees | 11 | | 16 | David Cone | 18 Jul 1999 | New York Yankees | 10 | | 17 | Randy Johnson | 18 May 2004 | Arizona Diamondbacks | 13 | | 18 | Mark Buehrle | 23 Jul 2009 | Chicago White Sox | 6 | | 19 | Dallas Braden | 9 May 2010 | Oakland Athletics | 6 | | 20 | Roy Halladay | 29 May 2010 | Philadelphia Phillies | 11 | | 21 | Philip Humber | 21 Apr 2012 | Chicago White Sox | 9 | | 22 | Matt Cain | 13 Jun 2012 | San Francisco Giants | 14 | | 23 | Félix Hernández | 15 Aug 2012 | Seattle Mariners | 12 | | 24 | Domingo Germán | 28 Jun 2023 | New York Yankees | 9 |
Don Larsen, and the only one that mattered
Larsen's, on 8 October 1956, is the only perfect game ever thrown in the postseason. It was Game 5 of the World Series, against the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the Yankees won 2 to 0.
Larsen was a career 81 and 91 pitcher with a 3.78 earned run average. Two years earlier he had gone 3 and 21 for Baltimore, which is one of the worst won-lost records any pitcher has posted in a full season. Then he threw the most famous nine innings in the sport's history.
That is the thing about this list. It is not a list of the best pitchers. It is a list of the best single days.
Koufax and Cain, 14 strikeouts
Sandy Koufax in 1965 and Matt Cain in 2012 each struck out 14, which is the most in a perfect game.
Koufax's is the more absurd of the two because of what happened at the other end. Bob Hendley, pitching for the Cubs, went eight innings and allowed one hit.
So the two pitchers combined to allow a single base hit in the entire game, and Hendley lost it 1 to 0. He finished his career 48 and 52, and the best game he ever pitched is remembered as the other half of somebody else's.
2012, the year it happened three times
Philip Humber on 21 April. Matt Cain on 13 June. Félix Hernández on 15 August.
Three perfect games in a single season had never happened before and has not happened since. There were more perfect games in those five months of 2012 than in the 48 years between Charlie Robertson and Jim Bunning.
Humber is the outlier of the three by some distance. He finished his career 16 and 23 with a 5.31 earned run average across eight seasons, and 2012 was the only one in which he was a regular starter.
Cain and Hernandez were the opposite case, both genuine aces in their prime. Put the three together and the season produced one of the best pitchers in baseball, one of the most reliable, and a man with a career 5.31 earned run average, all doing the same thing within five months.
The pitch counts
For the games since pitch counts were reliably recorded:
| Pitcher | Pitches | |---|---| | David Cone | 88 | | Dennis Martinez | 96 | | Philip Humber | 96 | | Kenny Rogers | 98 | | Domingo Germán | 99 | | Tom Browning | 101 | | Dallas Braden | 109 | | Félix Hernández | 113 | | Roy Halladay | 115 | | Mark Buehrle | 116 | | Randy Johnson | 117 | | David Wells | 120 | | Matt Cain | 125 |
The range is 88 to 125, and it clusters near 100. That is the practical truth of a perfect game: it is nine innings at about eleven pitches an inning, which means a great many first-pitch outs and almost no long at-bats.
David Cone's 88 is the most efficient of the modern ones, and it came fourteen months after his teammate David Wells needed 120 for the same result. Two perfect games by two Yankees starters inside fourteen months.
Count the club column in the table above and the Yankees have four, more than any other franchise: Larsen, Wells, Cone and Germán. The White Sox have three.
The two that faced 27 men and were not perfect
Here is where the definition earns its keep.
A perfect game requires that no baserunner reaches by any means at all. A pitcher can face exactly 27 batters, allow no hits, issue no walks and hit nobody, and still not have one, because a runner can reach and then be removed from the bases before the inning ends.
It has happened twice.
Terry Mulholland, 15 August 1990. Nine innings, no hits, no walks, nobody hit by a pitch, exactly 27 batters faced. A batter reached on an error and did not stay on base. It is a no-hitter, and it is not a perfect game.
John Means, 5 May 2021. The same line, and a stranger cause. Means allowed no hits, no walks, no hit batsmen, and his fielders made no errors. The only man to reach base did so on a dropped third strike, and was then thrown out on the bases. It is the only no-hitter in major league history in which the opposition recorded no walk, no hit batsman and no error, and it is still not perfect.
Means faced 27 men and got 27 outs. So did Mulholland. Neither is on the list above.
Harvey Haddix, 12 perfect innings, and a loss
On 26 May 1959, Harvey Haddix of the Pittsburgh Pirates retired the first 36 Milwaukee Braves he faced.
Twelve perfect innings. Thirty-six up, thirty-six down, which is a third more than any perfect game on the list above, and the Pirates had not scored either.
In the thirteenth an error put a man on, a walk followed, and then came the only hit Haddix allowed all night. His final line was 12 and two-thirds innings, one hit, one walk, one run, and that run was unearned. He lost.
For decades it was carried in the record book as a perfect game anyway. The definition was later tightened to require that the perfection last the entire game, and Haddix's name came off the list. He had thrown more consecutive perfect innings than anybody in history and ended up with nothing, twice.
Armando Galarraga, 28 batters
On 2 June 2010, Armando Galarraga of Detroit retired 26 Cleveland batters in a row and got the 27th to ground out to first base.
The umpire called the runner safe. Replay showed he was out, there was no review system to consult, and the call stood. Galarraga got the next man and finished with a one-hit shutout: 27 outs, 28 batters faced, no walks, no runs.
It is the only game in history in which a pitcher recorded 27 outs, faced 28 men, allowed no walk and no run, and is not credited with a perfect game. The box score is the closest thing the record book has to a typographical error.
Galarraga and the umpire, Jim Joyce, exchanged the lineup card together the following afternoon.
What the list tells you
Look at the names. Cy Young, Koufax, Randy Johnson and Roy Halladay are inner-circle Hall of Famers. Charlie Robertson won 49 games in his career. Philip Humber won 16. Len Barker won 74. Dallas Braden won 26.
Great pitchers are on the list at roughly the rate they appear in the sport, which is to say a perfect game is not much more likely for an ace than for a fifth starter having the afternoon of his life. Randy Johnson threw his at 40, in his 17th season, second on the all-time strikeout list and still pitching. Philip Humber threw his in the fourth start of the only year he was a regular starter.
What every one of them shares is not talent. It is that for three hours, twenty-seven consecutive plate appearances went the pitcher's way, including the ones that were hit hard and caught.
That last clause is the part the box score never shows. Every perfect game contains two or three balls that were struck well and found a glove, and at least one play that a fielder had to make properly. Mark Buehrle's in 2009 is remembered as much for the catch his centre fielder made leading off the ninth as for anything Buehrle threw.
Which is the honest summary of the whole list. Twenty-four times in a century and a half, a pitcher was excellent for nine innings and nothing at all went wrong behind him.
Twenty-four names, and the hard half is Robertson, Barker, Witt, Braden and Humber. Try naming an all-time list against three outs in MLB Top 10 Quiz, or pick the real pitcher out of a lineup of plausible ones in Two Truths.