The Baseball Historian’s Notes for April 14, 2013

The 2013 baseball season has gotten off to a rollicking start. From Yu Darvish’s near-perfect game to the exciting emergence of young players like New York Mets’ pitcher Matt Harvey, there has been a lot of good stuff for fans to digest. For all the fun baseball provides, the game also sometimes has a darker […]

A Baseball with Matt Year in Review

Hey baseball fans! Happy blog-iversary! Yup, that’s right, folks; today is the one year anniversary of Baseball with Matt. I just want to thank all of my viewers, without whom I would have never gotten to this point. Anyway, in honor of this special day, I am going to give you all a year in […]

36 Up, 36 Down, But Still Lost

Hey baseball fans! In honor of the perfect games last season, I wanted to blog about a very strange ALMOST-perfect game: Harvey Haddix, of the Pittsburgh Pirates, was nothing special, but on one day, he happened to just be a pitcher who pitched a perfect game through 12 innings, but gave it up in the 13th. It […]

Breaking Down the 2012 N.L. Cy Young Race

Pitching in the National League this season has seen its fair share of surprises; both the good and the bad. Former stalwarts have seen injury (Roy Halladay) and inexplicable decline (Tim Lincecum), but into those voids have stepped other hurlers looking to establish their own legacies. The result has been some inspired pitching, contributing to […]

No-Hitters on the Road

Like every Mets fan my age, I’ve only been waiting since 1962 for their first no-hitter. Well, that might not be accurate. In those early years there were few illusions about the potential of any Mets pitcher to pitch a no-hitter. We weren’t like the fans of the expansion Montreal Expos in 1969, who got […]

Yankee Stadium and the Lost Mystic

Mystic relates to something essentially religious, one of two currents. One is Renaissance poetry, the other, the lyrical: the Mystic Fray Luis de León, the beautiful poem “Vida retirada”. In this conception, mystic might relate to something in mysterious character and even the occult. My son Sergio, who has not seen Yankees players more than […]

Humble Phil, Powerful Paul

April 26, 2012 Philip Humber will always be associated with perfection. He just won’t always pitch that way. One start after throwing a perfect game against the Seattle Mariners, the White Sox right-hander plummeted back to reality Thursday night at Chicago’s U.S. Cellular Field, surrendering nine earned runs in a 10-3 loss to the Boston […]

Juego perfecto: ¿Arte o circunstancia? (Perfect game: Art or circumstance?)

Existen muchos momentos de un juego de béisbol cuando pueden estar ocurriendo tantas cosas a la vez que quienes se quejan de la lentituddeljuego se llevarían la mano a la barbilla. Un juego perfecto. 27 bateadores. 27 outs. En fila. El gran logro de todo pitcher. El sueño de cualquier aficionado. Es la situación ideal […]

Here Come the Miami White Sox

Mark Buehrle has long been the best pitcher in the National League and that distinction will likely grow more evident now that he’s actually going to be pitching in the National League. After 12 seasons, 161 victories, four All-Star games, three gold gloves, one no-hitter, a perfect game, a World Series victory and the coolest […]

What To Do About Jerry Meals

I feel compelled to write a few thoughts about the controversial call made by 14 year umpire Jerry Meals in the 19th inning of the Braves and Pirates 19 inning game that concluded early in the morning on July 27th. Baseball has had an ongoing debate about the use of instant replay and the reliability […]

Koufax or Ryan? Tough choice for Torborg

Don’t ask Jeff Torborg to choose between Sandy Koufax and Nolan Ryan. The only man to catch no-hitters thrown by both can’t make up his mind. A former back-up catcher for the Dodgers and Angels, Torborg caught a perfect game thrown by Koufax in 1965 and no-hitters thrown by Bill Singer in 1970 and Ryan […]

“Nobody’s Perfect”

Just one step away. One break. We all know the feeling. What separates us is what we do when the moment comes and what we have learned to prepare us. That’s what this week’s read, “Nobody’s Perfect,” is about. The “almost-perfect game” is merely part of the story. Read Armando Galarraga and Jim Joyce’s story […]

Let’s Play Two

The Sunday doubleheader was a staple of baseball in the Golden Era of the game, you know, when the World Series was played in the first half of October and kids listened to Don Larsen’s perfect game on the radio in Ms. Hill’s sixth grade class.  The Nationals and Brewers played a Sunday doubleheader today. […]

The Ultimate Seven-Game Fall Classic: Game Six

In part one of my Ultimate Seven-Game Fall Classic series, I featured Game One of the 1988 World Series between the Oakland A’s and Los Angeles Dodgers, won by the latter on Kirk Gibson’s walk-off two-run homer off Dennis Eckersley, ironic because it was Eck who coined the phrase “walk-off piece.” Part two featured an […]

A Humorous Look at Recent Baseball News

The Indians were expecting close to 35,000 fans to attend Sunday’s game against the Nationals, the team’s highest attendance since Opening Day. I think it’s great that so many Indians fans are excited about seeing highly touted prospect Carlos Santana play. Hear he plays a mean guitar.  Or maybe they are excited about the rejuvenated […]

That’s Just Me, I Like to Get the Question Right

Armando Galarraga should have pitched a perfect game.  He should have retired twenty-seven batters in a row.  He should have joined the twenty other pitchers in Major League history to have accomplished this feat. He didn’t.  Instead he got screwed.  This was a once-in-a-lifetime, overwhelmingly improbable, shockingly emotional screw-job comparable to when Vince McMahon and […]

The Game That Changed Baseball History

I don’t have to tell you what happened last night. Armando Galarraga pitched a perfect game–according to the rules of baseball–but umpire Jim Joyce’s failure to apply Rule 6.05(j) [a batter is out if “after he hits a fair ball, he or first base is tagged before he touches first base”] on the 27th out […]

Fun Facts about the 19 (no, 20) Perfect Games in MLB History

A while back I completed a project of chronicling most of major league baseball’s perfect games. What fun is that if you can’t make out a list of trivia about the games? So yes, the following list (updated to include Braden’s feat, and Halladay’s) is trivial—but then, much of life is trivia, and sometimes trivia […]