OT: Philip Humber Throws Perfect Game

Submitted by MichiganMan2424 on

Philip Humber of the White Sox just threw the 21st perfect game in MLB history vs the Seattle Mariners. Congrats to him.

Matthew

April 21st, 2012 at 6:40 PM ^

No comments on the check swing by Ryan?  Is this not MGoBlog, home of Debbie Downers and Buzz Killingtons from the greater Ann Arbor area and beyond?  Color me surprised.

NateVolk

April 21st, 2012 at 10:36 PM ^

That's nothing. I saw Gary Matthews Jr. hit for the natural cycle in September 2006 in Detroit in  a torrential rainstorm.

It's been done 14 times, and like 4 times in 33 years.  Perfect games are way more common. 

The critical difference is I'll bet very few people knew it was happening that night because it was a visiting player and the Tigers were in an intense pennant race at the time. I didn't learn until a few days later.

Unbelievable day for Humber. Probably baseball's greatest individual one-game accomplishment, pitcher or hitter.

 

 

ChopBlock

April 22nd, 2012 at 9:20 AM ^

According to the ever-reliable wikipedia, hitting for the cycle has been done 293 times since the 1880s. Hitting for the cycle is more common than perfect games, but less common than no-hitters, IIRC. 

On the other hand, perfect games are starting to be much more common than they used to. About half of them have occured within the last 20 years, which is roughly one every two years. That's why they aren't as "special" as they used to be. I wonder why that is. It probably has something to do with the fact that there's almost twice as many teams (30) as there used to be (16) in the majors, but that doesn't fully explain it. 

ChopBlock

April 22nd, 2012 at 6:37 PM ^

If anything, there's MORE talent in the bigs than there way years ago because the scouting system is way better so talented players don't get overlook and end up playing for some semi-pro in North Dakota. The most important source of talent, however is international players who are coming to the bigs in ever-increasing numbers. Plus, if the talent was really getting watered-down, we'd see a few good players among a sea of mediocrity. That would be reflected in a greater disparity between the elites and the normal players in, say, batting average. But if you look at it, the standard deviation of batting average has been on a pretty steady decrease since the early 1900s. Hence the argument that there's less talent isn't really substantiated.

If, then, we take the remaining issue, more games, let's again examine the numbers. When there were 16 teams each playing 154 games per year, there were 1232 games played per year. During those years (1901-1961), there were 4 perfect games, which means that there were 18,480 games played per perfect game. During the past decade, there have been 5, for a total of one perfect game per 4,860 games played. Obviously this is not a rigorous statistical analysis, and I've forgotten too much stats to actually do so, but it seems to me that despite there being more games played, the numbers would seem to indicate that it's disproportionately more frequent than it used to be.