Germán was suspended 10 games after being ejected for using sticky substances in May. And he’d spun himself into other frustrations. He was allowing more hard contact across the board, on all his main pitches, and he was walking more batters, too. His fastball seemed to have lost its zip: Hitters were barreling up 23% of his four-seamers compared to just 9% last season. With a 5.10 ERA, and peripheral stats just as bad, he was on track for his least memorable campaigns in years. Yankees starter Domingo Germán entered Wednesday having one of the worst seasons of his career. 800.) Their whole season has been a sad, slow exercise in what happens to a team when its roster is systematically starved and stretched, and the effect is harder to ignore some days than others. They had just two hitters in the lineup Wednesday with an OPS above. 219 batting average is the lowest in MLB if it holds, it would be among the lowest ever recorded in a season, currently tied for ninth-worst in league history with the 1963 Mets. The A’s entered Wednesday with one of the worst offenses in the game. With so few perfect games in so many years? Accidents do not exist here. But the bar for perfection is high enough that there is no backing into it. Baseball is full of flukes and quirks and capricious twists of fate.

Until this week, MLB had seen just 23, not even two dozen across nearly a century and a half of history. The feat remains far too rare to argue with. Such is the nature of perfection: It does not allow room for but or almost or well, actually… There are only the smooth zeroes of the box score.

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