Surviving 27 Outs: A Data‑Driven Look at Perfect Games
I don’t think there’s a more celebrated feat in baseball than a perfect game. There are rarer feats, such as four home runs in one game (21 times) or 20 strikeouts in a 9-inning game (only five times), but I think what separates a perfect game is it’s less about matching a numeric record and more about accomplishing literal perfection. In a sport loaded with failure and random variation, a perfect game is not only pretty awesome by definition but also incredibly rare. There have only been 24 perfect games in history (including one in the playoffs by Don Larsen in 1956). Think about the 150+ years of baseball and hundreds of thousands of starts it took to accomplish those 24. To gain some appreciation, I wanted to calculate just how rare it is to accomplish a perfect game, out-by-out. How rare is it to even get half-way through a perfect game? How many outs do you have to be perfect through to have accomplished better than 99% of starts? Furthermore, of those starts that were per...