Cone threw 88 pitches Sunday, an astounding 3.25 per batter, and a significant 32 fewer than David Wells did 14 months ago. A guy ought to be embarrassed to throw a 120-pitch perfect game, right? BY DEFINITION, you can’t get any better than perfect. Unless you want to make the case that David Cone was.
True, 27-up-and-down is 27-up-and-down, whether it is a feat performed by a career nobody like Len Barker or Sandy Koufax, the most dominant left-handed pitcher ever. On the multiple-choice test major league pitchers have been taking daily since 1880, only 16 of them have ever gotten them all right.
But two essays with scores of 100, even graded by the same person, are not equally good, and neither, of course, were the teams the perfect pitchers of history faced, nor the plays their fielders made to save their days.
Cone threw 88 pitches Sunday, an astounding 3.25 per batter, and a significant 32 fewer than David Wells did 14 months ago. A guy ought to be embarrassed to throw a 120-pitch perfect game, right? So give Wells credit for so graciously congratulating his ex-teammate after being shown up for his utter inefficiency.
Next time, we expect Wells to get it right, just like we expect Cone to do it again Friday night against the Indians, a real team. “You know, if he has the same stuff he had [Sunday], he could,” said Joe Torre. So while we wait, expectedly, spoiled as rotten as that two-strike James Mouton seventh-inning swing, let’s split some of the hairs that Cone said yesterday he actually could feel growing on his head during the ninth inning. And wonder: Did he pitch the absolute greatest game in history?
No. Harvey Haddix of the Pirates did in 1959, when he threw 12 perfect innings at Milwaukee, only to lose in the 13th after Don Hoak threw away a ground ball. A bunt and intentional walk put men on first and second for Joe Adcock, whose three-run homer turned into a one-run double when Henry Aaron, who was on first, neglected to touch them all.
A rules committee, arguing that the Haddix’s game couldn’t have been perfect if somebody got on no matter how many extra innings it took, eventually removed his performance from the list of perfectos, but nobody else has ever gone past 27 in a row, let alone all the way to 36. So case closed.
But for garden variety perfect games, Cone’s was about as good as it ever has gotten. To the best of our research, most of which was done by Andre Freeman in The Post’s library, only one other perfect pitcher ever beat Cone’s 88 pitches: The Phillies’ Jim Bunning needed only 86 against the Mets at Shea Stadium in 1964. Bunning struck out 10, but needed only one superior play, a diving stop by second baseman Tony Taylor to rob Jesse Gonder in the fifth inning.
Mike Witt pitched his perfect game for the Angels against the Rangers in 1984 on 94 pitches. Barker never threw more than two balls to any hitter, but still needed 103 pitches to beat Toronto. Catfish Hunter, on May 8, 1968, went 3-2 to one Twins’ batter.
Cone never got as far as ball three on anybody, got behind 2-0 only once, when Jose Vidro hit a smash up the middle that Chuck Knoblauch grabbed off a nice hop. Knoblauch threw out Vidro by three steps, a solid play that became more celebrated only because of his recent throwing problems.
Scott Brosius cut off Wilton Guerrero’s bouncer for the hole in the seventh, but on an otherwise unremarkable day, it would have been an unremarkable play. The sun turned Ryan McGwire’s flyball in the ninth into a instrument of Ricky Ledee’s torture, but really, the only real save by an above-average play was by Paul O’Neill, who ran down Terry Jones’ drive in the first.
“Wells loads up and fires,” said Joe Torre. “And when you see how the opposition is going down pretty easily as the [Twins] were last year, you begin to think he had a chance.
“But Coney [Sunday], it was like a walk in the park, watching it go on. Put yourself in the hitter’s place and its hard to figure it out.
“With David, you don’t know where it’s coming from. He kept them off balance from having a good swing. He had so many weapons, and it looked like he could use them any time he wanted. So unless you flat out guess right, you are going to have a tough time putting a good swing on the ball.
“That’s not to say you can’t bloop one.”
Even somebody from an inexperienced Expo lineup, not one member of which had ever faced Cone, could have done that. There have been teams of higher grass, tougher to mow down 27 in a row, for sure. There have also been worse major league teams than this Montreal one that never had perfect games pitched against it.
Don Larsen did his in 94 pitches, against the World Champion Dodgers. It’s hard to think of a tougher spot, or a tougher lineup. Hunter’s perfect game was against the American League champion Twins of Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, Bob Allison, Rod Carew. You have to factor in the opposition, the pitcher’s efficiency, the circumstances to add pluses to the pitchers who couldn’t have been better, to argue how somebody else, on a given day, might have been.
