There May Be Nothing Wrong With You.

I almost left after the fourth inning.

The Athletics were down 8-0 on a blistering July afternoon at Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento. Alexandra was attending only her third baseball game ever, and she had that look, the one that says, Whatever you decide is fine with me. My decision was pointing toward the parking lot.

A twenty-three-year-old pitcher named Eury Pérez had quietly become the center of the afternoon.

Nobody wearing green had come to watch Eury Pérez. We had come hoping our hometown team might somehow make a game of it against the Marlins. Instead, somewhere around the middle innings, eight thousand people found themselves rooting for exactly the same thing. Not for Miami. Not against the Athletics. We were rooting for possibility itself.

For seven innings Pérez retired every batter he faced.

That word, perfect, gets tossed around carelessly in ordinary life. Baseball guards it with unusual jealousy. In the entire history of the game, only twenty-four pitchers have ever thrown a perfect game. What stayed with me wasn't the twenty-four who had.

It was the legends who never could.

Nolan Ryan never did. Greg Maddux never did. Tom Seaver never did. Roger Clemens never did. Bob Gibson never did. Walter Johnson never did. Steve Carlton never did.

Some of the greatest pitchers who ever lived never had one perfect afternoon.

This twenty-three-year-old was six outs away.

By the seventh inning, the score was almost beside the point. Eight thousand people had quietly changed their emotional allegiance. We weren't hoping Miami would win. We were hoping baseball would give us something we might never see again.

Then the eighth inning began.

Eury Pérez never came back out.

There was no drama at all. The inning simply began, another pitcher jogged in from the bullpen, and one of the rarest opportunities in the history of sports disappeared without another pitch from the man who had created it.

Ninety-two pitches. Twenty-one batters. Twenty-one outs.

His perfect game ended on a bench.

Maybe it was the right decision. He had missed all of last season recovering from Tommy John surgery. Organizations protect their investments, and young arms don't last forever. Every one of those arguments makes complete sense.

They just don't sound like baseball.