Driving Mrs. Malo to the airport last night, I caught a little late-night ESPN radio. The entire focus was Mark Buehrle, who certainly deserves tons of congratulations for his perfect game. Even from the President. (“Mark, you pitched stupidly! And I mean that in the best way!”)
Now, I didn’t listen to ESPN radio or watch SportsCenter or catch any other national media after Jonathan Sanchez’s no-hitter, but I have to wonder if he got the same amount of slavish, drooling coverage. The whole theme of the ESPN radio show: Perfection. Buehrle was perfect. The hostess of the show — I didn’t catch her name — even called him a “perfect man.”
The DeWayne Wise catch helped the hype, too. As I and many others noted, it’ll go down as one of the best in the game’s history.
But hype and perfection and Obama aside, Jonathan Sanchez was better. The one baserunner he “allowed” was not his fault — the error by Juan Uribe. If we ignore baseball tradition (generally a good thing to do), we see rationally that Sanchez shouldn’t be penalized for one small mistake by a teammate. We can’t call it a “perfect game,” because it wasn’t 27 up, 27 down, but without a walk (like Buehrle, obviously) — and with 11 strikeouts, compared to Buehrle’s six — Sanchez was more dominant.
In the annals of baseball, fueled so much by lofty semantics and popular imagination, Buehrle will go down as perfect, joining Sandy Koufax, Randy Johnson and only a handful of others, while Jonathan Sanchez will be a notch below. That’s too bad, because Sanchez deserves credit for being perfect, too, even though one of his teammates wasn’t.
