When Felix Hernandez struck out Tampa Bay's Sean Rodriguez on Wednesday, the Seattle Mariner completed a remarkable achievement, just the 23rd perfect game in 15 decades of major league baseball.
What might be equally remarkable is three of those 23 perfect games have been tossed this year, with a quarter of the season left to play.
In June, the San Francisco Giants' Matt Cain frustrated 27 straight Houston Astros in a 10-0 victory.
And in 2012's first perfect game, the Chicago White Sox Philip Humber breezed past 27 straight Mariners. Like Hernandez's, Humber's completed gem came at Seattle's Safeco Field.
Add to the perfect games, three other no-hitters this season, and you have even the most casual of baseball fans asking, what makes 2012 so perfect for pitching?
After Cain's perfect game in June, SI.com's Jay Jaffe offered up a few theories: more games, more than twice as many as each team once played; lower batting averages leading to a major league average that's at a four-decade low; record-high strikeout rates; and better defense as teams use an avalanche of statistics to position their fielders more effectively, as with an infield shift.
SI.com baseball columnist Tom Verducci made a few similar points and added another, the effect on pitching of baseball's Steroid Era, the time when hitters were bulking up with performance-enhancing drugs. Baseball now tests for steroids, but Verducci says the Steroid Era in a way benefited those on the mound.
"The need and emphasis on pitching development was a response to the wild offensive years of The Steroid Era," Verducci wrote.
And just look at how pitchers have developed. ESPN.com baseball writer Jayson Stark put forth this: The number of pitchers with an average fastball velocity of 95 mph or more as has more than tripled in the past five seasons, from 11 in 2007 to 35 in 2011.
And they're getting faster at younger ages, according to Stark's report.
"Just about every guy (on a scouting director's radar) throws 90, and most of them throw 92. And you never saw amateur guys throwing in the upper 90s. Now you see it all the time. It's unbelievable," Stark quotes John Mirabelli, the Cleveland Indians vice president of scouting operations, as saying.
Writing on BigLeadSports, Jason Lisk points to better defense, i.e., fewer errors, as one reason behind the wave of perfection.
"Error rates are also much lower now, and you can’t have the ingredients for a perfect game if a fielder commits an error," Lisk says.
In a blog post after Humber's perfect game, the number-savvy publication The Economist looked at the math behind the increase in no-hitters and perfect games.
"The first reason baseball is seeing more perfect games than ever before is because it is playing more games than ever before. From 1904 to 1960, Major League Baseball had 16 teams playing 154 games a year. It now has 30 teams playing 162 each. All other things equal, that should double their frequency.
Another is that after years of high (offense), pitchers as a group have regained the upper hand over hitters of late. In 1999 and 2000 batters reached base 34.5% of the time. Last year this ratio fell to 32.1%. That decline alone makes perfect games 2.6 times more likely now than they were a decade ago.
The Economist blog also notes that Humber pitched his perfect game in Safeco Field, as did Hernandez on Wednesday, and the effect Safeco has on hitters, using the Mariners' 2011 season as an example.
Last year (Mariners) hitters reached base a mere 28.9% of the time when playing at home. That means that an opposing pitcher would be 3.5 times more likely to throw a perfect game at Safeco than he would facing an average lineup in an average stadium.
Of course, if you think The Economist has some baseball numbers clout, you need to see what the Society for American Baseball Research has put together on the math behind no-hitters and perfect games.
There are actual equations and graphs in this report as scary as those you saw in high school trigonometry.
But after all that math and countless computations, the report gives this:
"Those who have pitched no-hitters and perfect games had, in general, far superior pitching ability than the average pitcher in baseball history."
I guess that's just baseball.
© 2012 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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What's behind baseball's run of perfect games?
Terrible batting!
Id say a mix between pitchers having to try very hard in a steroid infested era and batters not being so good because those steroids are no longer being excepted in to the game.
No, it must be global warming...
I absolutely love this photo of Mr. Hernandez.
Pure, unadulterated joy!
Congratulations to him!
He looks just like Max doing his dance in "Where the Wild Things Are". It is a pretty awesome picture.
The author forgot to factor in a general expansion of the strike zone by umpires. This, at a time when there are calls, strongly resisted by the umpire's union, to go to fully automated calls of balls and strikes. Instead, they are providing ammunition for the other side.
Give that back! That's my sign!
Its like Hal 9000 always said: "the cake is a lie."
Major error in the first paragraph. Nobody proof reads?
Oh my poor colon ...
@Jeremy Tharp:
Lol. Yep!
Steroids helped hitters more than pitchers. Why all the home runs before? Now batting skills need to be re-learned, you can't just inject them.
Who told you that you could "Inject" skills? If the tools aren't there, no amount of doping will make an average player into a "Great player".
You actually believe that crap they tell you about steroids not giving skill? Well thats a lie steroids will give you the power, agility, and speed to connect with the ball if thats not skill i dont know what sports are anymore.
Another major reason other than the ptichers throwing harder today is the "cutter" pitch has been learned by so many pitchers now. It's not just Mariano throwing it today.
The answer is all the reasons given plus just plain luck. A ground ball or line drive missed being stopped by inches. A perfect game goes in the record book. The team's Win-Loss record only changes by 1 in the league standings.
hgh works for me
King Felix!!
All of the reasons given are likely true. But an important one is missing:
Never in MLB history, before the steroids era, did starters pitch so few innings, with so many good relief pitchers. Pitchers don't get tired or wear out as fast as they always did.
Example: in three of his last four full seasons, Sandy Koufax pitched more than 300 innings and struck out more than 300 batters. He pitched SEVENTY-FOUR COMPLETE GAMES in those three years (and 15 in the in-between year when he was on the DL part of the year).
Steven Strassberg ... 160 to 180 innings this year.
They wore Koufax out.
Warren Spahn pitched 290+ innings six seasons and fell one out short of 290 another season.
Pitchers can be better for a full game because they aren't being worn out every four days.
I think you hit the nail right on the head with this one.
Lots of Luck, really!
162 games: "more games, more than twice as many as each team once played"
When did "each team" played less than 81 games in a Major League season?
Felix Hernandez was one of 9 palyers on the field when the perfect game occurred; lets not forget the contributions of the other 8 players.