Congratulations to Mark Buehrle on his perfect game!
July 28th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »On 7/23/09, Mark Buehrle of the Chicago White Sox pitched a perfect game. He retired 27 consecutive batters. That’s every batter the opponent sent to the plate for the entire game. There were no hits and no walks. That’s one of the most rare things in all of baseball. The last perfect game thrown was 10 years ago and there have only been 18 in history.
To put a frame around just how rare of a thing it is, there are currently 30 MLB teams that play 162 games each season. That’s 4,860 games per year. In the past 10 years since the last perfect game, that’s almost 50 thousand games. So it’s only happened one time in the past 50 thousand MLB games!
Without a ton of reasearch, I can’t say how many teams and games there were over the course of the past 100 years, so I’ll just estimate. If there were always 30 teams at 100 games per year for 100 years, that would be (roughly) 300,000 games. That works out to a rough average of in 16,500 games!
Then, this evening I read that he extended his perfect game to the next game he pitched and retired the next 18 batters he faced as well. That allowed him to set another Major league record for the most consecutive batters retired.
Any way you work those numbers, it is quite an accomplishment. Congratulations to him.