Don Larsen's perfect game

Background

Don Larsen of the New York Yankees made his first start in a World Series game in the 1955 World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers. Larsen lost the game.

The Yankees and Dodgers faced each other in the 1956 World Series. Behind Sal Maglie, the Dodgers defeated the Yankees in Game 1. Casey Stengel, the manager of the Yankees, selected Larsen to start Game 2 against the Dodgers' Don Newcombe. Despite being given a 6–0 lead by the Yankees' batters, he lasted only  1 ²⁄₃ innings against the Dodgers in a 13–8 loss. He only gave up one hit, a single by Gil Hodges, but walked four batters, which led to four runs in the process, but none of them were earned because of an error by first baseman Joe Collins. The Yankees won Games 3 and 4 to tie the series at two games apiece.

Game 5

With the series tied at two games apiece, Larsen started Game 5 for the Yankees. Larsen's opponent in the game was Maglie. The Yankees scored two runs on Maglie, as Mickey Mantle hit a home run and Hank Bauer had a run batted in single. Larsen retired all 27 batters he faced to complete the perfect game.

Larsen needed just 97 pitches to complete the game, and only one Dodger batter (Pee Wee Reese in the first inning) was able to get a 3-ball count. In 1998, Larsen recalled, "I had great control. I never had that kind of control in my life." The closest the Dodgers came to a hit were in the second inning, when Jackie Robinson hit a line drive off third baseman Andy Carey's glove, the ball caroming to shortstop Gil McDougald, who threw Robinson out by a step, and in the fifth, when Mickey Mantle ran down Gil Hodges' deep fly ball. Brooklyn's Maglie gave up only two runs on five hits and was perfect himself until Mantle's fourth-inning home run broke the scoreless tie. The Yankees added an insurance run in the sixth as Hank Bauer's single scored Carey, who had opened the inning with a single and was sacrificed to second by Larsen. After Roy Campanella grounded out to Billy Martin for the second out of the 9th inning, Larsen faced pinch hitter Dale Mitchell, a .311 career hitter. Throwing fastballs, Larsen got ahead in the count at 1–2. On his 97th pitch, Larsen struck out Mitchell for the 27th consecutive and final out. Mitchell tried to check his swing on that last pitch, but home plate umpire Babe Pinelli, who would retire at the end of this World Series, called the last pitch a strike. Mitchell, who only struck out 119 times in 3,984 at-bats (or once every 34 at-bats) during his career, always maintained that the third strike he took was really a ball.

In one of the most iconic images in sports history, catcher Yogi Berra leaped into Larsen's arms after the final out. With the death of Berra on September 22, 2015, Larsen is the last living player for either team who played in this game.

Broadcast

NBC televised the game, with announcers Mel Allen (for the Yankees) and Vin Scully (for the Dodgers). In 2006, it was announced that a nearly-complete kinescope recording of the Game 5 telecast (featuring Larsen's perfect game) had been preserved and discovered by a collector. That kinescope recording aired during the MLB Network's first night on the air on January 1, 2009, supplemented with an interview of both Larsen and Yogi Berra by Bob Costas. The first inning of the telecast is still considered lost and was not aired by the MLB Network or included in a subsequent DVD release of the game.

Aftermath

The Dodgers won Game 6 of the series, but the Yankees won the decisive Game 7. Larsen's performance earned him the World Series Most Valuable Player Award and the Babe Ruth Award. When the World Series ended, Larsen did a round of endorsements and promotional work around the United States, but he stopped soon after because it was "disrupting his routine".

Larsen's perfect game remained the only no-hitter thrown in the MLB postseason until Roy Halladay of the Philadelphia Phillies threw a no-hitter on October 6, 2010, against the Cincinnati Reds in the first game of the 2010 National League Division Series. Halladay, who had already thrown a perfect game earlier in the 2010 season, faced 28 batters after giving up a walk (to Jay Bruce of the Cincinnati Reds) in the fifth inning. Larsen's perfect game would remain the only postseason game in which any team faced the minimum 27 batters until Kyle Hendricks and Aroldis Chapman of the Chicago Cubs managed to achieve the feat in Game 6 of the 2016 National League Championship Series. In that game, the Cubs gave up two hits, a walk and committed a fielding error, but managed to put out all four opposing baserunners (three via double plays and one on a pick off).