Don Larsen

Don Larsen went 3-21 for the 1954 Baltimore Orioles. He crashed his car into a telephone pole at five in the morning during spring training. He got knocked out of Game 2 of the 1956 World Series after recording just five outs. Then, four days later, he walked to the mound against the Brooklyn Dodgers and threw the only perfect game in World Series history.

That's the paradox. Baseball has never quite resolved it, so it just keeps presenting the facts.

The Worst Record That Built a Career

Donald James Larsen was born August 7, 1929, in Michigan City, Indiana -- right on the Lake Michigan shore -- and grew up in San Diego after his family relocated when he was fifteen. He signed with the St. Louis Browns for an $850 bonus in 1947 and reached the majors in 1953, going 7-12 as a rookie. When the Browns relocated to Baltimore and became the Orioles in 1954, he went with them and proceeded to lose twenty-one games.

That 3-21 record is the most famous losing season in modern baseball. But two of those three wins came against the New York Yankees. On July 30, Larsen shut them out 10-0. Casey Stengel -- not a man who enjoyed being embarrassed -- noticed that a pitcher going 3-21 for a hundred-loss team had beaten his club twice with apparent ease. He told general manager George Weiss he wanted that right-hander. In November 1954, the Yankees acquired Larsen as the centerpiece of a seventeen-player deal with Baltimore.

The worst record of the decade landed him in the Bronx.

First and Best

His first Yankees season was his cleanest: 9-2, 3.07 ERA, 19 appearances. Then came 1956, and the spring training car crash -- into a telephone pole at four or five in the morning in St. Petersburg, after a night out. Stengel told reporters: "He must have went out to mail a letter." The Yankees kept him.

He went 11-5 with a 3.26 ERA and 107 strikeouts that season, the best numbers of his career. He'd also started experimenting with a no-windup delivery -- stepping to the rubber, looking at Yogi Berra, and throwing, with no leg kick and no windup. It gave hitters a different look, and it was one of the reasons Stengel penciled him in as a starter when the World Series came around.

It wasn't a decision anyone expected. In Game 2, Larsen allowed four runs in 1 2/3 innings. The Yankees lost. He figured he was done for October.

The Ball in the Shoe

On October 8, 1956, Larsen arrived at Yankee Stadium and found a warm-up baseball tucked into one of his cleats. That was coach Frankie Crosetti's method: leave a ball in a pitcher's shoe and he'll know he's starting. Larsen stared at it.

"I was very surprised," he said later. "I looked at that damn thing and I said, 'Oh geez. Don't mess this one up.'"

He hadn't been expecting the assignment. The night before, he'd shared a few beers with sportswriter Arthur Richman at a restaurant on West 57th Street. Mantle stopped by briefly. Larsen, in what he must have regarded as safe bluster, told Richman: "I'm gonna beat those guys tomorrow. And I'm just liable to pitch a no-hitter." He hadn't known he was pitching at all.

He found out from a ball in his shoe.

Twenty-Seven Up, Twenty-Seven Down

The Dodgers sent out a lineup that included four future Hall of Famers -- Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella -- plus Gil Hodges, who'd get his own plaque in Cooperstown eventually. Starting pitcher Sal Maglie was no gift either. The Series was tied two games to two, and Brooklyn needed a win.

Larsen retired the first batter, then the second. In the first inning he walked Reese to a 3-1 count -- the only three-ball count he'd run all game -- and then Reese flew out to right. Three up, three down. Larsen didn't look at the scoreboard.

The second inning produced the game's nearest escape: Robinson hit a hard smash to third that bounced off Andy Carey's glove and ricocheted directly to shortstop Gil McDougald, who threw to first for the out. One inch either way and the perfect game never happens. Instead it just continued. Campanella grounded out. Maglie grounded out.

Mantle hit a solo home run to right-center in the fourth, giving Larsen a 1-0 lead. Hank Bauer drove in a second run with a single in the sixth. That was the offense -- two runs, enough.

By the seventh, the crowd of 64,519 at Yankee Stadium had gone quiet in a specific way -- the silence of people who know what they're watching. Larsen was still using his no-windup delivery, looking in at Yogi, throwing. He didn't shake off a single sign.

The Final Pitch

The ninth inning. Carl Furillo flied out to right. Campanella grounded to second. Two outs. Manager Walt Alston sent up pinch hitter Dale Mitchell -- a career .312 hitter who struck out roughly once every 34 at-bats, about as pure a contact man as the Dodgers could find. The stadium barely breathed.

Larsen's 97th pitch was a fastball on the outside corner. Home plate umpire Babe Pinelli -- who'd announced 1956 would be his final season, and who'd been behind the plate since 1935 -- raised his right hand and called strike three. Mitchell started to argue and then stopped. It was over.

Pinelli's call ended the only perfect game in World Series history. Game 5 was the last time he'd worked home plate in the major leagues -- he went out to the field in Games 6 and 7 before retiring at Series end. There's no way to plan that. History just occasionally decides to be tidy.

Yogi Berra -- in full catching gear, 190 pounds of it -- sprinted to the mound and jumped. He wrapped his legs around Larsen and locked his arms around his neck, and that image -- Yogi suspended in the air, Larsen's face disbelieving -- became one of the most reproduced photographs in baseball history.

"He was pretty heavy," Larsen said later. "With all that equipment on."

In the locker room: "I wanted to win this one for Casey. After what I did in Brooklyn, he could have forgotten about me and who would blame him? But he gave me another chance and I'm grateful."

After the Miracle

The problem with throwing a perfect World Series game at twenty-seven is that you've already given baseball the best thing you'll ever give it, and you still have a career to finish.

Larsen went 10-4 in 1957 and won Game 3 of the 1958 World Series as the Yankees beat Milwaukee. But his role shrunk, and by 1959 he was 6-7 for the first time as a Yankee. On December 11, 1959, New York traded him to the Kansas City Athletics along with Hank Bauer, Norm Siebern, and Marv Throneberry. The Yankees received outfielder Roger Maris, Joe DeMaestri, and Kent Hadley.

Maris would win back-to-back AL MVP awards and, in 1961, break Babe Ruth's single-season home run record. The trade that sent Larsen out of New York assembled the team that would keep winning without him.

He pitched for seven more clubs over eight more years -- Kansas City, Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, Baltimore, back to Chicago, and a four-inning farewell with the 1967 Cubs. With the 1962 San Francisco Giants, he appeared in five games, saved ten, and earned a World Series ring as a reliever. In Game 4 of the 1962 Series, pitching at Yankee Stadium on October 8 -- six years to the day from the perfect game, in the same building -- Larsen earned the win. Baseball doesn't explain coincidences like that. It just puts them in the record book.

Idaho

Don Larsen retired to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, with his wife Corrine, and spent his final decades fishing and hunting in the mountains. He made card show appearances and returned to Yankee Stadium for Old-Timers' Days without apparent resentment -- gracious about being defined by ninety-seven pitches forever, which is a long time to be defined by anything.

In 2012, he auctioned the jersey he'd worn in the perfect game through Steiner Sports. It sold for $756,000. He used the money for his grandchildren's college education. A man who'd once needed a court order to support his first family sold baseball's most famous uniform so two grandchildren could go to school. People change.

Don Larsen died on January 1, 2020, at age ninety, of esophageal cancer. He was the last living pitcher who'd thrown for the original St. Louis Browns before the franchise moved to Baltimore.

Don Larsen was a drinking man, a night owl, a pitcher who lost twenty-one games in a season and got knocked out after five outs in his last postseason start. He was also the only person in the history of baseball to throw a perfect game in the World Series. These facts coexist without resolving into anything. The imperfect man who found a ball in his cleat one October morning and didn't mess it up.

Ninety-seven pitches. Twenty-seven outs. The only one ever.