There is no caveating a perfect game.
Such is the nature of perfection: It does not allow room for but or almost or well, actually… There are only the smooth zeroes of the box score. The feat remains far too rare to argue with. Until this week, MLB had seen just 23, not even two dozen across nearly a century and a half of history. Baseball is full of flukes and quirks and capricious twists of fate. But the bar for perfection is high enough that there is no backing into it. With so few perfect games in so many years? Accidents do not exist here.
The A’s entered Wednesday with one of the worst offenses in the game. Their .219 batting average is the lowest in MLB; if it holds, it would be among the lowest ever recorded in a season, currently tied for ninth-worst in league history with the 1963 Mets. They had just two hitters in the lineup Wednesday with an OPS above .700. (They had none above .800.) Their whole season has been a sad, slow exercise in what happens to a team when its roster is systematically starved and stretched, and the effect is harder to ignore some days than others.
