NEW YORK — You’ll have to forgive me for not shouting for joy when Domingo German completed his perfect game Wednesday night in Oakland.
Nothing against him. He had no way knowing, of course, that he had just destroyed a special little niche I had enjoyed for the last two decades as one of the few people who could claim to have been present at Yankee Stadium for all three Yankee perfect games — Don Larsen’s on Oct. 8, 1956, David Wells’ May 17, 1998 and David Cone’s July 18, 1999.
It was after Cone hurled his perfecto, on Yogi Berra Day with a 33-minute rain delay interruption no less, that Joe Torre and Don Zimmer got to talking in the Yankee manager’s office about how both of them had been at all three Yankee perfect games. Torre explained that he had been to Larsen’s as a fan, sitting in the left-field seats, while Zimmer was in the visiting Dodger dugout as an inactive player having suffered a severe beaning back in June that limited him to 17 games that season.
