PITCHING a perfect game is baseball's most sublime individual achievement. Batters have no equivalent accomplishment: hitting four home runs in a game might be the closest, but even batters who manage that could conceivably have hit five, or even six, if they had got enough at-bats. In contrast, there are only 27 outs in a game (unless a tie calls for extra innings). Sending 27 men in a row back to the dugout without reaching base is the theoretical pinnacle of the pitching profession—it can never get any better than that. The only major sport in which it has a direct parallel is bowling, in which perfect games with a score of 300 are no longer an extreme rarity among elite players. (It is mathematically possible for a golfer to hit 18 straight holes-in-one, but only the late Kim Jong Il of North Korea has ever come close to doing so outside the realm of video games with cheat codes).
