Perfection and a New Era, Perhaps?

I can’t help but wondering if the rash of perfect (and unofficially perfect) games recently is the signal that the steroid era is officially over. Maybe I’m naïve, but I’d certainly like to think so. If Armando Galarraga’s game last night had been accurately officiated, there would have been as many perfect games in the past eleven months (dating back to Mark Buehrle’s July 23, 2009 victory over the Devil Rays) as there had been in nearly an entire decade between July 28, 1994 (Kenny Rogers over the Angels) and May 18, 2004 (Randy Johnson).

In all fairness, it’s easy to manipulate statistics to tell any number of stories. For instance, there was a gap of over five years between the Big Tool’s 2004 game and Buehrle’s, during which time the league took various measures to assess and address the steroids problem. And perfect games have always been few and far between; even in the dead ball era. Not counting Galarraga’s un-hitter, that even Bud Selig will kind-of-sort-of admit probably should have been a perfect game, there have only been twenty in the last 130 years.

The first two perfect games were less than a week apart (just as Halladay’s and Galarraga’s  could have been), and then nearly 24 full years went by before Cy Young had the first ‘modern’ perfect game.  And there was a 34.5-year gap (1922-1956) as the landscape of the game changed in countless ways that had nothing to do with B-12 shots. There was another lag of thirteen years (and one week) after Catfish Hunter’s 1968 perfect game that could have as much to do with random luck and Sandy Koufax’s early retirement as what may or may not have been rampant use of “greenies.”

Statistically speaking, there is no sound reason to read any significance into three (or four games) out of the roughly 2,500 games a year (including the postseason). Still, a girl can dream, right? There are those who know more about the game than I do who will point out that steroids are just part of a long history of inequities and scandals and all manner of embarrassments to the game. There may have never been a true Golden Age of baseball, but maybe things are actually getting a little bit better.