James Buckley, Jr.: Perfect: The Inside Story Of Baseball's Sixteen Perfect Games

James Buckley Jr. leads off his book Perfect by claiming that the act of retiring 27 consecutive batters in a complete-game major-league victory comprises the only truly impressive act of perfection in sport. "You can bowl a perfect game," he writes, "(but) thousands of people have accomplished that feat, so, while it certainly is hard to do, it's also not so unique as to boggle the mind." Of course, if Buckley's book took into account perfect games pitched on the minor-league, college, high-school, semipro, and American Legion levels, the number might get closer to the number of perfect games that have been bowled. Still, he's right in the most important respect: A major-league-baseball perfect game is rare and mysterious. The MLB perfect-game pitcher's fraternity includes all-time greats (Cy Young, Sandy Koufax, Jim Bunning, Jim "Catfish" Hunter), respectable grinders (David Cone, David Wells, Kenny Rogers, Dennis Martinez), and veritable nobodies (Mike Witt, Len Barker), and Perfect attempts to determine the commonalties of all 16. Buckley notes that the weather during those games was generally damp and the score was generally close, which perhaps forces pitchers into a higher state of concentration. He also follows the development of the perfect-game ritual: a pitcher's teammates ignoring him so as not to disrupt the flow, the lineup of post-game talk-show appearances, and so on. In the early days of pro ball, the pressure and buzz was subdued, because in the absence of cable television and a century of painstakingly assembled sporting lore, no one really knew what a perfect game was. (Until Don Larsen threw one in the 1956 World Series—he was the sixth major-leaguer to do so—writers referred to the feat as a "no-hit, no-run, no-man-reach-first" game.) All of these random facts don't quite add up to a grand statement, mainly because the author isn't up to the task. Buckley's wide-eyed reportage is full of phrases like "If you put that in a movie script, they'd laugh you out of the theater" and reiteration of the rarity of the perfect game, followed by exclamations like "Simply amazing!" Perfect's best chapter is its final one, about the games that were perfect until some late-inning bloop fell in. Tellingly, Buckley farms out this appendix to writer David Fischer, establishing the key difference between the main author and his heroes: The subjects of Perfect didn't need a closer.