Baseball · 1956 · New York, USA
The Only Perfect Game
A New York Yankees pitcher with an unremarkable regular season retires all 27 Brooklyn Dodgers he faces, still the only perfect game thrown in a World Series.
Yankees 2-0 Dodgers
Result
27, all retired
Batters faced
97
Pitches thrown
Don Larsen had gone 11-5 for the Yankees in the 1956 regular season and had been pulled early from his previous World Series start against the Brooklyn Dodgers after losing the strike zone, which is not the usual preface to this. He started Game 5 at Yankee Stadium on 8 October working from a no-windup delivery he had adopted only recently, and had command of everything from the first inning.
Twenty-seven Dodgers came to the plate and twenty-seven went back: no hits, no walks, no baserunners by any route at all. It was the fifth perfect game in modern major league history and the only one ever thrown in a World Series, before or since. Brooklyn's lineup that afternoon held several future Hall of Famers, Jackie Robinson among them, and not one of them reached base.
The final out was a called third strike on the pinch hitter Dale Mitchell, after which Yogi Berra came out from behind the plate and leapt into Larsen's arms, which is the photograph everyone knows. The Yankees won the game 2-0 and took the series in seven.
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