In a Half Hour

Dave covered Mark Buehrle’s perfect game earlier, but the most impressive aspect of the performance might be the time it took for him to do the feat. The Rays television crew recorded exactly how long Buehrle was on the mound today. The total time of the game is listed at 123 minutes (2:03 in hours). Of those 123 minutes, Buehrle was only pitching during 32 of them.

Easy math: 32/123 = 0.26, times 100…that means that 74% of today’s game involved the Rays on the mound. The other 26% involved the Rays not making a sound. Impressive doesn’t begin to describe that figure and while I don’t have similar measures for any of the other perfect games, we do have the total time of game in each instance. To compare with the past five perfect games:

Randy Johnson 2004 2:13
David Cone 1999 2:16
David Wells 1998 2:40
Kenny Rogers 1994 2:08
Dennis Martinez 1991 2:14

In fact, we haven’t seen such an amazing performance go by this quickly in two decades. Tom Browning’s perfect game in 1988 took just under two hours at 1:51, Mike Witt’s perfect game a few years prior clocked in at 1:49.

On a personal level, this marks the first perfect game I’ve experienced from beginning to end. It was surreal realizing that history was knocking entering, oh, say the fifth or sixth innings. At that point it seemed like destiny.