The ultimate heartbreak of baseball has to be pitchers who come within one out of a perfect game. In the history of the major leagues, 16 hurlers have joined this unenviable fraternity. In "Almost Perfect," each of these 16 gets his story retold, accompanied by the box score and the circumstances of the sad ending. Several of these near-perfect gems went even beyond nine innings, but none was a match for what author Joe Cox calls the greatest pitching masterpiece in baseball history. That occurred in 1959, when Harvey Haddix of the Pittsburgh Pirates retired 27 batters in a row only to lose in the bottom of the 13th inning when third baseman Don Hoak made a throwing error to end the perfect game, and then Joe Adcock drove in the winning run with blast over the fence.
Here’s an excerpt from Almost Perfect:
“Three decades after his glory days with the Detroit Tigers, Milt Wilcox found himself again aiming for perfection. Just like an early spring day in 1983 when he battled for baseball immortality, Wilcox paused with the ball in his right hand. The crowd leaned in, awaiting his next delivery. With a championship and a shot at the record book on the line, Wilcox gathered himself and carefully made a pitch. But instead of trying to fire pitches past major-league hitters, Wilcox was lobbing tennis balls or other toys in the air, to be grabbed by leaping dogs. Instead of baseball, Milt Wilcox’s game became dog jumping, and he was not only the Cy Young of the game, he was the Abner Doubleday of his own sport.”
