The Pursuit of Perfection

One of the joys of baseball is every game's potential for the spectacular. Even a contest between last-place teams--or between seemingly mismatched teams--could feature a player hitting for the cycle (a single, double, triple and home run in one game), or a no-hitter, or that rarest of baseball gems, a perfect game.


In a perfect game, a pitcher allows no base-runners: 27 men come to the plate, and 27 men return, defeated, to the dugout. In over one-hundred years of major league baseball, there have been 18 perfect games. 18! There have been about three times as many blue moons.


But what makes baseball so enchanting is not just the (vanishingly remote) possibility of seeing a perfect game, but the fact that baseball, unlike virtually any other field of human endeavor, can manifest perfection. Is there such a thing as a "perfect" film, novel, or painting? You may say, "Yes," but this is a subjective judgment. People argue about the merits of even the academy's "best" movie of the year; how likely are they to reach consensus about perfection.

Even in the realm of sports, baseball is unique in this regard. There is no such thing as a "perfect game" of football or basketball. What would that even mean? Shutouts in football are fairly common, but a defense that allows zero points has not achieved perfection. Presumably a defense could allow its opponent to gain zero yards, but that be attributable at least as much to offensive ineptitude as defensive excellence. Football does, in fact, have its own form of perfection in the oddball statistic popularly known as the "quarterback rating," an unwieldy formula whose maximum value is 158.3. We won't bewilder you with the actual formula itself; suffice to say that no one understands it. And any field of endeavor where perfection is represented by the number 158.3 can hardly be taken seriously.

Basketball? The only way you'll ever have a shutout is in the event of a forfeit. And, as with football, if a defense were somehow able to shut out the opposition in a regular game, it would be a testament to lack of offensive skill more than anything else. If the Lakers played the Solipsist's old yeshiva basketball team, they would allow no points, but they would not be lauded across the land. Some might say that Wilt Chamberlain played a perfect game when he scored 100 points. A spectacular result, to be sure, and a mark that may never be broken, but perfection? What if he had scored 102?

Olympic gymnastics and figure skating can result in "perfect" scores, but these, too, are at least partially subjective judgments. And perfection leaves something to be desired if it depends upon the scoring vagaries of the Soviet judge.

The only other sport with a legitimate claim to perfection is bowling. If you bowl a 300, you can reasonably say that you could not have done any better. But all you really did was the same thing over and over again. Strategic considerations are minimal. No, for the purest expression of perfection that you are ever likely to see, nothing beats the simple mathematical elegance of 27-up and 27-down.