"Imperfect Man Throws Perfect Game": R.I.P., Don Larsen

Joe Trimble, the longtime Daily News reporter, was stuck on how to describe Don Larsen's World Series perfect game, with a deadline staring him in the face.

Dick Young, in one of his generous moments—as opposed to his many appallingly asinine moments—gave Trimble his lede:  "The imperfect man pitched a perfect game yesterday."  

That day was October 8, 1956.  It was not only the first ever perfect game in a World Series—a mark that will probably stand for a long, long time—but the first perfect game in the majors, period, since 1922.  

Yankees Herb Pennock, Monte Pearson, and Floyd "Bill" Bevens had come close to pitching World Series no-hitters before, and Jim Lonborg pitched a one-hitter for the Red Sox in 1967, and Roy Halladay pitched a no-hitter against the Cincinnati Reds in an NL Division Series game.  But that's not quite the same thing.

Larsen was indeed an imperfect man.  A notorious carouser and womanizer, he was divorced by 1956 and being sued by his ex-wife for non-support of her and their child.  He often drank to excess and wrapped a car around a tree one spring training, though according to longtime p.r. man and character Arthur Richman he had not been drunk the night before his big game.  

According to Richman, "We just had a couple a toddies" down on 57th St., before Larsen headed back to the Concourse Plaza Hotel, saying, "Hey, I'll probably pitch a no-hitter tomorrow."

He was erratic on the field as well, compiling a lifetime record of only 81-91 in 14 seasons.  Of course, that included a 3-21 combined record in his first two years, spent with the awful St. Louis Browns in their last season, and then the reborn Baltimore Orioles.  

With the New York Yankees, he was quite a bit better, going 45-24, and winning three World Series games.  Much of this came after someone—Jim Turner?  Johnny Sain?—convinced him to pitch at all times from the stretch.  But still he never won more than 11 games in a season, never was able to sustain the brilliance he was capable of.

"You keep thinkin' he's gonna be great.  But he ain't," Casey Stengel said, finally exasperated by Larsen's inconsistency after he went just 6-7 in 1959, exiling him to Kansas City that winter, as part of the trade that brought the Yanks Roger Maris.

Even so, "Gooney Bird" would come back to bite the Yanks, winning a game against them in relief in the 1962 World Series.  In later years he would become a talismanic figure, on hand for fellow San Diegan David Wells' perfect game in 1998, and for David Cone's in 1999.

In his masterpiece, he got a little luck and some nice plays behind him.  

His opposite number, 39-year-old Sal Maglie, who also pitched superbly that day, hit a ball right on the nose early on—but right to Mantle, playing a shallow center.  There was a hard liner from Jackie Robinson that Andy Carey managed to deflect to Gil McDougald, who then threw Jackie out, and another hard shot from Robinson back to the box that Larsen fielded himself, and a low liner from Gil Hodges that Carey stabbed then juggled, a few inches off the ground, but held on to.

The luck came when Sandy Amoros hit a ball Trimble said went foul to right field by only four inches—a ball that could have made Sandy one of the all-time great Yankee nemeses.  The best play of all was made by Mantle, making a backhanded, running catch off Hodges to left-center.  It's a play that doesn't look so spectacular when you see it...until you realize how far out The Mick was, the ball already  a home run at Ebbets Field. 

Mantle also provided all the offense Larsen needed with a long home run, a typically phenomenal, all-around game in this, Mickey's greatest season.  He was still just 25, Larsen just 27.

It was the apex of New York's great, gaudy postwar years.  That December, on the same field, Frank Gifford's New York Giants—with Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry on the sidelines—crushed the Bears to win the NFL championship, and it seemed as if it could all just go on forever, but the rot was there already, in the city and its sports.  

The 1956 World Series was the 13th Subway Series in 36 seasons, the 8th in the last 16, and part of 10 straight seasons when at least one New York team would appear in the Series—but there wouldn't be another one until 2000.  In the lockerroom afterwards, Walter O'Malley solicited an autographed baseball from Larsen, with a big, good-sportsmanship grin on his face, and evil in his heart. 

Larsen's perfect game was the very last of those mighty contests to be played at the original Stadium, the Cathedral of Baseball, and as the shadows lengthened in the dark recesses of the upper deck, if you listened very carefully between the roar of the subway and the cheers of the crowd, you could hear something ending.