May
18, 2004. A Tuesday evening. It was my senior year in college, final exam week,
and like any serious academic, I was preparing for my tests by drinking beer
and watching television. I sat on the couch, flipping through the 30 or so channels
we had, trying to find something, anything, to engage my restless mind on that most lackluster night of the week in a college town.
“Wait,”
my roommate Smoothie said. “Go back.”
I
shifted my thumb to click the “down” channel button on the remote and found the
screen filled with dirt, grass, and grown men wearing hats, gloves, and high socks.
The station was TBS, the Turner Broadcasting System, as in Ted Turner, the billionaire
owner of the Atlanta Braves. “Fuck the Braves,” I immediately said, the team being
one of my least favorite in Major League Baseball.
Smoothie,
on the other hand, loved the Braves, and quickly developed an argument to leave
the channel where it was. “Randy Johnson is pitching for the Diamondbacks
tonight.”
“Fuck
Randy Johnson,” I said, the pitcher being one of my least favorite in Major
League Baseball.
But
if anything, Smoothie was persistent. “The guy’s forty years old. This might be
one of our last opportunities to see the one the greatest pitchers of this era
play the game.”
He
brought up a good point. Randy Johnson wasn’t only one of the best pitchers of the
past fifteen years, but one of the most dominant in the long history of the
game. Standing at 6’ 10”, it was like watching some sort of human/dinosaur hybrid
hurl unrelenting heat toward grown men who couldn’t help but have horrified
expressions plastered across their faces. I was sold.
The
game started. We watched Randy work his magic. Out. Out. Out. Next inning. Out.
Out. Out. Next inning. Out. Out. Out.
Three
innings went by and the Atlanta Braves had failed to reach first base. No hits.
No walks. No errors. Randy was pitching a perfect game. I looked toward
Smoothie. “Randy’s pitching a perfect game.”
“It’s
only been three innings,” my friend promptly replied.
But
then it was four. And then five. Then six.
“Well,
I’m going to the gym.”
I
looked at Smoothie as if he was out of his mind. “What do you mean you’re going
to the gym? Randy Johnson is in the midst of pitching a perfect game. You can’t
leave now.”
“Oh,
he won’t do it. There’s three innings left. Do you know how rare a perfect game
is?”
Smoothie,
always a man of science, was right—perfect games were extremely rare. How rare? Before May 18, 2004, there had been
only 16 perfect games in the history of Major League Baseball. With close to
200,000 games played, that meant they occurred .00008 percent of the time, or
once every 12,500 games. Seeing a perfect game in real time was akin to winning
a small lottery jackpot. It had been five years since the last one happened,
and at one point, from 1922-1956, thirty three years passed without a single
one occurring. If you were a Pittsburgh Pirates fan and you watched every
single one of their games, from their establishment in 1882 to the present day,
you would have never witnessed a single perfect game, for or against them.
Since baseball was invented, there have been more Presidents of the United
States than there have been perfect games. I would say that’s pretty rare. And
yet, Smoothie was out the door, off to the gym.
Seventh
inning. Out. Out. Out. Eigth inning. Out. Out. Out. Ninth inning. Out. Out.
Out. I was ecstatic, jumping up and down in my living room, screaming at the
top of my lungs. Who cares if it was against the Braves? (Actually, I was glad
it was against the Braves. Fuck the Braves!) Who cares if it was Randy Johnson?
(Who just happened to become the oldest person to ever accomplish the feat.) I
just saw a perfect game! I just witnessed a motherfucking perfect game on live
television! And then, Smoothie walked through the door…
“What
are you so excited about?” he asked.
“He
did it!” is all I could say. “He did it!”
“Who
did what?”
I
could see in his eyes that he already knew the answer. “Randy Johnson! He just
pitched a perfect game!”
“Bullshit.”
“I
swear on my life, for the love of baseball, Randy Johnson just pitched a
perfect game and you missed it in order to go to the gym.”
A
look of pure devastation fell across my friend’s face. Few people loved baseball
more than Smoothie, and almost immediately, he understood the error in his ways.
A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity squandered in order to work on his biceps.
“At least I can watch the
post game.” He dropped his gym bag on the floor and sat on the couch. At that
exact moment, the television went dark. We hadn’t paid our cable bill. Now, what
were the chances of that?
No comments:
Post a Comment