The Most Perfect of Them All - Part 2
Last year, following Mark Buerhle's perfect game, we put together a measure that allowed us to quantify and rank Major League Baseball's perfect games. Now, with Dallas Braden's recent perfect game, we update the database to see how Braden's game measures up.
Braden's feat is still monumental and worthy of celebration - but compared to previous perfect games, Braden's pitching only put him as the next to last most perfect of them all, one step above Mark Buerhle's game last year which remains the least perfect of MLB's perfect games.
The measure is a composite score of an adjusted pitch count and strikeouts. Why? Well, there are two paths to a truly perfect game: either throwing 27 pitches that lead immediately to put outs, or striking out all 27 batters. Neither of these is very realistic, so let's combine the two to come up with a more realistic definition of perfection:
- Throw as many strikeouts as you can, and among batters you do not strikeout throw the minimum number of pitches needed to put them out.
The actual calculation works like this: we adjust the pitch count by removing three pitches for each strikeout; normalize the strikeout and adjusted pitch data, and multiply the two together. (be sure to read the original post for all the details and reasoning behind our calculations).
Ultimately, Braden's 6 K's on 109 pitches were too far off from Sandy Koufax's 14 K's on 113 pitches to bring him into the top ranks. Though Braden's performance does improve one spot when we add into our metric the opposing team's On Base Percentage (OBP).
Below, you'll see the all time ranking of perfect games as determined by our perfection metric, and you can see all of the data and play around with it yourself here: link
The Most Perfect of Them All 2010 Update
- Alex Lundry
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