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The New York Yankees have been mired in a stretch of disappointing baseball of late, but Domingo Germán helped turn things around in dramatic fashion Wednesday.
The right-hander pitched a perfect game in his team’s 11-0 victory over the Oakland Athletics.
Germán struck out nine and didn’t allow a baserunner while throwing 99 pitches in a performance he will never forget. It is the first perfect game in Major League Baseball since Félix Hernández accomplished the task in August 2012 during a win over the Tampa Bay Rays.
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“So exciting. When you think about something very unique in baseball, you know not many people have an opportunity to pitch a perfect game,” Germán said, per ESPN.com. “To accomplish something like this in my career, you know, it’s something that I am going to remember forever, be part of history, so exciting.”
While every perfect game is impressive and historic, this one stood out because the 30-year-old was seemingly never threatened.
Oakland managed a bunch of soft contact and rarely worked the count. In fact, Germán didn’t even reach the century mark in pitches as he consistently got ahead in the count and steamrolled his way through the Athletics lineup.
This is nothing new for the Yankees.
As Matt Snyder of CBS Sports noted, the Bronx Bombers have thrown four of MLB’s 24 perfect games. No team has thrown more, and Germán’s performance snapped a tie with the Chicago White Sox at three.
David Cone (1999), David Wells (1998) and Don Larsen were the other three New York pitchers to throw a perfect game, and the latter’s famously came during the 1956 World Series win over the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Perhaps the most unbelievable part of Germán’s outing was how much he had struggled coming into the start.
He allowed a combined 15 runs in 5.1 innings in his last two outings, and Sonja Chen of MLB.com noted he would have become the fifth pitcher in Yankees history to allow seven or more runs in three consecutive games if he struggled at such a level again on Wednesday.
Instead, he made baseball history and helped New York move to 3-1 in its last four games after going an ugly 7-12 in the previous 19.
The Yankees and Athletics will face off in the rubber match Thursday after splitting the first two contests in their three-game set.