Each major professional sport has its great individual feats.
Golf has the hole-in-one, basketball has triple doubles, football has feats in terms of yardage depending on the position you play and baseball has perfect games.
They all have their pedestal at which they stand in their respective sports but it’s tough to argue against anything that has happened only 22 times in over a century of its existence. So much done in 27 outs that so little was done by the other team. It’s hard to compare anything to something that itself is titled “perfect”.
From a fantasy perspective a perfect game would obviously affect only the pitching side of your 5-by-5 league while other leagues that are points based would have extra points awarded to your team if someone sat 27 guys down in a row.
For example, in a league I’m in, Cain was awarded his normal points for strikeouts, inning pitched, the win, complete game and the no-hitter, which accumulated to 94 points for my team when it was all said and done.
Each year there are a handful of hole-in-one shots made on the PGA Tour. Enough to where the number of times they occurred wouldn’t even go a decade into the Tours’ history to match the 22 perfect games had by baseball’s best pitchers. Tiger Woods himself has had 18 in his lifetime, one of which he had before he was a teenager.
Guys like Miami forward Lebron James and Rajon Rondo have combined for more than 22 triple doubles in their short careers and we see NFL quarterbacks and running backs continue to have games like the players that they followed into the league; rushing for 100 or 200 yards and passing for 300, 400 or even 500 yards.
So while all of those individual feats are amazing in their own right, it’s hard to say that anything other than a perfect game is better than that.
Randy Johnson, Sandy Koufax, Cy Young and Catfish Hunter are just a few names that highlight the list of “perfect” arms. And there are a number of pitchers, who are considered to be the best at their art, yet they were unable to conquer this feat; Nolan Ryan, Roger Clemens, Warren Spahn and Bob Gibson just to name a few. The newest addition to the list being the perfect game pitcher by Matt Cain, which has been argued by some as the greatest perfect game ever. The most perfect of perfect games as Cain matched the 14 strikeouts had by Sandy Koufax in his 1965 perfect game performance against the Chicago Cubs.
Whether or not it is, we could argue that forever and a day, but what we do know is that it was one of the best performances had by any player in any sport, one of which we call perfect.
