Jim Joyce and Armando Galarraga Together
As a pitcher in baseball, a perfect game is one of the greatest single-game achievements you can earn. For those who are unaware, a perfect game is when a pitcher gets every batter out without giving up a single hit or a walk. Going against the world’s best in batting, you can imagine how rare an occurrence like this is in a game. In fact, across all 210,000 games played in the history of Major League Baseball (MLB), only 23 perfect games have ever been tossed. Well, 24 if you unofficially include Armando Galarraga’s unbelievable outing against the Cleveland Indians in 2010.
To further illustrate the situation of the awful night in MLB history, I will have to explain the scenario of the game. Armando Galarraga, a pitcher for the Detriot Tigers at the time, has retired 26 batters in a row. Given there are only 27 outs total in a game of baseball, Galarraga was pitching against the potentially last batter. It’s bottom of the 9th with two outs and the Detriot Tigers are at home. The entire crowd and viewers around the world are excited to witness sports history. First pitch: Strike. Second pitch: Ball. As Armando Galarraga send the third pitch down the center of the plate, the batter swings, spending a routine ground ball to the first baseman. Due to the location of the ball, Galarraga runs to first and catches the ball clearly before the batter touches the bag.
Armando Galarraga’s “Final” Play
As the whole crowd erupts with joy, Jim Joyce, the first umpire, yells “SAFE”. How? How could this be? How could history be ruined by a single person without a way to change the obviously blown call? The entire sports world was baffled. Often referred to as the “28-out Perfect Game”, Armando Galarraga was completely robbed of his spot in history. He went on to finish the game, striking out the very next batter, but the game was already tarnished in history.
The Call for the Play
Baseball was one of the last sports with instant replay added into a professional game. Due the how the rules were written in 2010, there was no way to change this catastrophic mistake. This methodology truly makes you question the amount of responsibility we place in one person’s hand to make the right decision. Although he truly impacted the history of the MLB forever, luckily Jim Joyce was suspended from calling games for the Major League Baseball until his actions improved. Even the base runner knew the call was wrong, given his reaction.
Although the MLB has now introduced instant replay, I personally do not like the way it was implement. The smallest of calls get corrected while other are still blatantly missed, slowing down the longest professional sport even more. Baseball is baseball. It should be played without instant replay until an extreme error like this occurs. What is your opinion on this controversy? What do you think the best solution for the MLB replay scenario?
Thank you for reading. Signing off, Woz.
I used to be big into baseball, right around 2010 in fact, and I had never heard of this blunder. First of all, the statistics about the number of games played and number of perfect games are mind-blowing. Also, just to nerd on the writing for a second, it flows super well from the opening to the body. Anyway, what are the chances that the horrible call gets made on the last out, it’s literally the stuff of fairytales. My first reaction is that the umpire had some sort of vested interest, or he was just a jerk. The animation you included (props for that btw) clearly proves that the runner was out by enough that it would have been visible to the umpire without question. I’m glad he was suspended and honestly, I would hope he doesn’t umpire another MLB game in his career, however harsh that sounds. Luckily, with articles like this one and the one you linked to, Jim Joyce has a chance of remaining in the ears of dedicated baseball fans so that his heroic day of pitching will be remembered. In fact, his game might eclipse the fame of even official perfect games just because of the circumstances. In response to your thoughts on instant replay, I get where you’re coming from. They recently added instant replay for international soccer (it was available for goal line decisions prior) and I also felt they wasted time watching plays that meant nothing, but didn’t review important plays. I also think, though, that it’s easy to look from the outside and think something obviously shouldn’t be reviewed, when from the field it was much harder to tell. I think they should just have a team watching from other angles sitting in the booth somewhere and they call down to the field when they feel like something was missed, or the ump can call up to them when he is unsure. But as you said, its baseball, sports are not about rigorous proof of what actually happened, they’re about excitement and competition and most of all chance, so players should be ready to roll with bad calls. So like you said, blatant, history altering calls should be reviewed, but in general let the game play, that’s what umps are paid for. It can just be hard to determine what plays should be reviewed from any definition.
When I said Jim Joyce, I meant Armando Galarraga, whoops
I actually played baseball before, but I never watch any games on it. This story is really amazing, I feel so bad about that “SAFE”! Nevertheless, I think people will still believe that he is a great player even though it’s an imperfect game.