Congratulations Mark Buehrle. Now go buy Dewayne Wise a new car or something.
If you haven’t heard, Buehrle just threw the 18th perfect game in major league history. He was brilliant, putting a powerful Tampa Bay line-up to sleep, 27 up and 27 down. Well, sort of. He got 26 batters out. Wise got Gabe Kapler out.
Inserted as a defensive replacement in the 9th inning, Wise didn’t have to wait long to spring into action. Kapler was the first batter of the inning, and he launched a pitch deep into the left center field gap. Wise took off, got to the fence, and made a leaping stab to pull the ball down from over the top of the wall. Then, he crashed into the wall and a lost handle on the ball, finally bare handing it before he crashed to the ground. Instead of a home run, Kapler was simply out #25. You can see the video here.
Buehrle did the rest, capping off history by striking out Michael Hernandez and getting Jason Bartlett to ground weakly to shortstop. 27 months after he no-hit the Rangers, Buehrle one-upped himself, and wrote his name into the history books, with perfection.
His final line? 9 IP, 0 H, 0 R, 0 BB, 6 K. 76 of his 116 pitches were strikes. His WPA for the game was 0.29, mostly thanks to an early grand slam from Josh Fields that put an end to high leverage situations.
Congratulations to Mark Buehrle. From all accounts, he’s one of the good guys in baseball. You’ll never be forgotten now.
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Fantastic to follow. IM’s, text messages were flying and I finally found a link to the game so I could watch the final three outs without being extorted or shortchanged by Gameday while at work.