perfect game not

There have been Dodgers fans in my Brooklyn born and raised family since 1910 when the team was also called the Brooklyn Superbas and played at Washington Park #2. My grandfather grew up three blocks from the old Eastern Park in Brownsville. We have been through the highs and lows of being Dodger fans, including of course the lows of the shot heard around the world and the fateful move to Los Angeles. (Obviously, Roy Campanella’s tragic accident is a whole different subject, not merely a baseball matter.)

To my mind, pulling a pitcher as he enters the 8^th inning of a perfect game ranks up there with the baseball lows. Professional baseball, like any professional sport, is ultimately an entertainment enterprise.  No, it’s not all about winning. It's about all the things that get fans to pay $100 for a ticket. Winning championships attracts fans, but so do beloved players like Gil Hodges, sympathetic figures like Ralph Branca (a three-time all-star who is known for giving up a home run), a manager who spent 7 decades with the team and said he bled Dodger blue, heroic figures like Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese (and others) for supporting him, Hall of Famers like Snider, Reese, Sutton, and Drysdale (and Hodges and Robinson), Koufax and Campanella, the guy behind Fernandomania, and the announcers’ announcers Vin Scully and Red Barber. All of that stuff makes us come to games, buy caps and posters, and subscriptions for watching the games remotely. All of that stuff makes us Dodger fans. If sports were only about winning, it would be a frustrating enterprise since even the Yankees didn’t win most years.

Equally important are big moments like Kirk Gibson hobbling around the bases after his home run, Shawn Green hitting that fourth homer in one game, and Jackie Robinson stealing home which Yogi Berra complained about for fifty years. See all the things I named that are not championships? All that stuff keeps us as Dodger fans. All of them are as important as championships in giving a team character.

The organization has to remember the big picture of fandom and baseball. I don’t know what happened here specifically, but I can tell you that whoever made the decision to pull Kershaw doesn’t understand baseball the way many of the fans do. Fans of all teams still feel pain when remembering how umpire Jim Joyce took away Armando Galarraga’s perfect game with a bad call. Joyce is a baseball man, so he felt really bad about it. Once he saw the tape, he realized his mistake. It was an innocent mistake. We live with it. It is part of baseball. We still talk about it.

This incident was not an innocent mistake. Seems to me that it may have been the result of the corporatization of baseball, reducing it to formulas and robbing it of its soul. I say that you should have let the man pitch despite all the concerns.

Baseball already suffers from its slow pace in an era of frenetic activity. You need excitement and there’s nothing more exciting than a perfect game. I would say that in all of sports the perfect game is the most spectacular of achievements. Think of the all-time greats that never had one: Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, Lefty Grove, Whitey Ford, Tom Seaver, Bob Gibson, Greg Maddux, Nolan Ryan, Pedro Martinez. We haven’t had one in a decade. There have been 23 in all of baseball history out of over 220,000 games played. I imagine that you have been reminded of that a few times recently.

Seven innings. No hits, no walks, no hits-by-pitch, no errors. I can’t wait for the eighth.

Uh oh. What’s going on here? No. They aren’t. They wouldn’t. They couldn’t.

They did.