Twenty-Seven Up,
Twenty-Seven Down

Rick Waits needed ninety-eight pitches. That was all. Ninety-eight pitches to retire twenty-seven consecutive Street Sweeper Social Club batters, complete the rarest feat in baseball, and hand the Sweepers the most historically significant loss of their season. A String of Poloponies won 3–0 on a sunny afternoon at Forbes Field, and the final score is already a footnote. What happened on that mound is the thing that lasts.

A perfect game is the rarest event in the sport. Rarer than a no-hitter, rarer than a cycle, rarer than an unassisted triple play. It requires the pitcher to be flawless and his defense to be flawless behind him, for twenty-seven consecutive batters, with zero margin for anything. No walks. No hit batsmen. No errors. No catcher’s interference. Nothing. Waits did all of that against a lineup that included Bobby Bonds, Chase Utley, and Josh Donaldson, and he did it with the quiet efficiency of a man who never seemed to be working particularly hard.

Twenty-seven batters. Twenty-seven outs. Zero hits, zero walks, zero everything. We were part of history at Forbes Field. The wrong side of it.

The stunning part was not the dominance. It was the method. Waits struck out only two batters in nine innings — Gene Oliver and Chuck Carr were the only Sweepers who did not put a ball in play. Everyone else made contact. Grounders found fielders. Fly balls found gloves. Line drives went straight at people. Twenty-five balls in play, twenty-five outs recorded. Sixty strikes out of ninety-eight pitches. Waits trusted his defense to handle the rest, and they did not let him down once. Not a single bobble, not a single throw that pulled a first baseman off the bag. His fielders were as perfect as he was.

The Sweepers did not go down like a team that quit. Dale Alexander led off the first and was retired. Zack Wheat followed and was retired. Bobby Bonds. Chase Utley. Josh Donaldson. Shane Halter. Down the order, back to the top, around again. Three up, three down, nine times in a row. There was no moment of near-escape, no close call on the basepaths, no umpire’s gift that could have broken the spell. The LOB column at the end of the night read zero — not because the Sweepers stranded no one in scoring position, but because no one reached base at all. The zeroes were total and absolute.

Trevor Bauer deserved a better outcome. He went eight full innings, allowed six hits and three earned runs, struck out seven, and walked three. His 129 pitches told the story of a man competing hard into the late frames. A 3.82 ERA after the loss. On most nights, against most arms, that line wins the ballgame. On this particular afternoon, it got him a 1–3 record and a place on the wrong end of the most lopsided historical ledger in baseball.

The Poloponies scored all the runs they would need in two innings. In the third, Dwayne Murphy lined an RBI single to bring home Mickey Tettleton, and Mark Teixeira followed with another RBI single to score Horace Clarke. Two–nothing. In the fourth, Tony Conigliaro singled and later came around to score on Tettleton’s RBI groundout. Three–nothing. That was the entire offensive story — six hits, three runs, three RBI, spread across two innings. A String of Poloponies did not need to be extraordinary at the plate. They just needed to be adequate while their pitcher was being perfect.

By the seventh inning, the dugout knew. You always know. The opposing pitcher is no longer just pitching well. He is doing something that belongs to the record book, and every man on the bench can feel it. By the eighth, it was less a ballgame and more a vigil. Utley went down. Donaldson went down. Halter went down. Three more outs closer to the thing nobody could say out loud.

The ninth was business. Oliver came to the plate and was retired. Juan Beniquez pinch-hit for Carr and was retired. And then Charlie Dexter, the twenty-seventh batter of the afternoon, stepped in. One more out. One more ball in play. One more glove closing around it. Done.

We were part of history at Forbes Field on December 8th. The wrong side of it, but still history. You can look at the box score a hundred times and the numbers will not change: twenty-seven batters faced, twenty-seven batters retired, zero in the hit column, zero in the walk column, zero in every column that matters. Rick Waits was perfect. And some afternoons, there is nothing to do but tip your cap and walk off the field.