In today’s major league era, when strikeouts are rampant, the fact that the Giants’ Matt Cain struck out fourteen batters would not make the front page of any newspaper except on the West Coast. Yet a few more details from that game from five years ago remain unmatched even today.

For example, those fourteen puffs represented more than half of the hitters Cain faced that day, and four of them were against future batting champion Jose Altuve. Removing all 27 batters from Houston’s lineup could mean only one thing, and that’s that Matt Cain pitched a perfect game that day.

Certainly a rare feat, a perfect game had only been accomplished 20 times prior to that 2012 season, and Cain was just 22nd in baseball history. Surprisingly, just a few weeks earlier, White Sox right-hander Philip Humber pitched a perfect game for Chicago against the Seattle Mariners.

Even though Humber managed to sniff out MVP Ichiro Suzuki, the Chicago starter finished with five fewer strikeouts than Cain during his perfect game. In fact, Humber came close to losing his flawless fight in the bottom of the ninth, when he went to the full count on two of three batters in that inning before they both rocked and missed.

However, the fact that two perfect games had been thrown in the same season, remarkable as it was, did not set a record. Just two years earlier, in 2010, Major League Baseball had witnessed two perfect games in the same season. Believe it or not, those two launch gems happened in the same month, a little over two weeks apart.

On May 9, Oakland left-hander Dallas Braden retired all twenty-seven Tampa Bay batters, handling just six strikeouts in a game that took just over two hours to complete. Exactly twenty days later, Roy Halladay of the Philadelphia Phillies pitched a one against the Florida Marlins, striking out eleven batters in a 1-0 victory.

Therefore, the almost impossible feat of the 2012 season had already been achieved two years earlier, but on August 15, Félix Hernández turned it into a historic year. The Seattle Mariners ace had a flawless outing against the Tampa Bay Rays, the same team that had been the victim of Oakland’s Dallas Braden just two years earlier.

The former Cy Young Award winner stoked twelve Tampa Bay hitters, while making the only run scored by his teammates serve up the narrow victory. Hernadez’s jewel was the third of that season, and no other pitcher has played a perfect game since.

Remembering the last perfect game in Major League Baseball

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