Domingo German’s perfect game night no match for our family’s

Have you ever experienced one of those eerie, bigger-than-life moments where you suddenly and startlingly realize that everything is right and proper with the universe and that you are smack dab, exactly where you are supposed to be at that very moment in time?

The other night was one such evening.

I was driving home from dropping off my father when my cellphone buzzed, delivering the most improbable sports update.  Considering the CBS Sports notification informed me of a sporting event that had occurred only 24 times in the history of a game that has been played for 150 years, I’d classify that as “highly unlikely.”  The incidents surrounding this event made it even less likely, and that much more special.  Considering the CBS App didn’t exist the last time a perfect game was thrown, this was the first time it had ever alerted those two words to its subscribers.

Yankees starter Domingo German had taken the mound at 7:05 that evening and pitched himself a perfect game.  The date was June 29, 2023.  Major League Baseball’s last perfect game came eleven years ago in 2012, courtesy of Felix Hernandez.  The last New York Yankee to pitch a perfect game was David Cone in 1999.  In other words, perfect games don’t grow on trees.  With managers monitoring pitch counts in today’s game more than ever, if you told sports fans they’d never see another perfect game in their lifetime, they might just believe you.

A perfect game means that not only has a pitcher not allowed a hit, but he has also not walked a batter and the defense behind him has not committed a single error.  Despite the perfect game being accredited solely to the pitcher, more than anything these rarities are a team effort as the eight other players must also perform flawlessly.  With balls leaving the yard at an increased rate over the past ten years, it has become even more surprising to see a pitcher shut down 27 batters in a row.

Despite all the hugs and celebration that came after one of sports’ rarest achievements, German’s perfect game night paled in comparison to the one my family shared that very same evening.

I’d picked up my father and brought him over to the house to play a game called Things.  In Things, each player must submit a hand-written answer to questions like “Things you don’t want to say to break the silence” or “Things you don’t want to do on a first date.”  Each player turns in their answer while the others guess who submitted which.  It’s a game of imagination and misdirection, one that results in non-stop laughter when played among the right crowd.

It did just that, perfectly that night, a game night we haven’t had in ages, a game night the likes of which we’re not sure how many more we’ll have.  So, when I dropped my dad back off, only to return home and have my phone buzz with Domingo German’s perfect game update, it was tear-jerkingly larger than life, like everything had aligned right at that moment and that one game was far more relevant than the other in historical significance.

That buzz took me back to a time when baseball was important, or at least important to me.  A time when arguing about my father’s love for the Yankees, and my hatred for them, was a daily occurrence, when scouring the box scores for only the statistics you could fit on the back of a baseball card mattered, quantifying all we needed to know about a player’s value.

It was good to talk baseball with dad again because we hadn’t in so long.  Even if the perfect game came to a man wearing pinstripes, that’s a small price to pay for memories, reconciliation, and heartfelt laughter.

Any other pitcher could have thrown a perfect game on any other night, for any other team, but they didn’t.  That’s how I knew everything was right where it was supposed to be. 

Domingo German will never forget the night he threw that perfect game.  My family won’t either.

Side note: This week, German willingly checked himself into a treatment center for alcohol addiction, thus ending his historic season.  As one who hails from a family with a history of addiction, we wish German the best for a speedy and healthy recovery.

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