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The Dartmouth
July 10, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

YOU DON'T KNOW BEANS: Pitcher Perfect

On Thursday, July 23, White Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle achieved perfection.

During the Sox's game against the Tampa Bay Rays that day, he did something that only 17 other pitchers have done in the 116-year history of modern professional baseball, he threw a perfect game. Twenty-seven batters up to the plate; 27 back down. No walks, no errors, no baserunners.

Athletes and spectators alike cherish moments of perfection in sports. Even the Philadelphia Phillies cheered Buehrle on from their clubhouse when, in the in the top of the ninth, center fielder DeWayne Wise made one of the greatest catches of all time. The Phillies went nuts when Wise leapt into the air and reached over the fence to catch a fly ball, thus preventing the batter from scoring a home run and saving Buehrle's perfect game. Everyone even the competition appreciates perfection.

After watching Buehrle's perfect game, I began to think about the issue of perfection in sports. In baseball, perfection has a very succinct definition: don't let anybody on base. But what is perfection in other sports? Does it even exist?

Hoping to understand how perfection relates to sports, I looked to find a few examples.

The star of last summer's Olympic Games was undoubtedly Usain Bolt, an outgoing and spotlight-embracing Jamaican track star who posted unbelievably fast times for every event in which he participated. He was the first person to break the 9.7-second barrier in the 100-meter dash, and might have done even better had he not begun a premature celebration fifteen yards before reaching the finish line.

Later in the Games, Bolt broke Michael Johnson's 12-year old record in the 200-meter sprint. Bolt is, empirically, the fastest sprinter to ever compete at the Olympics, and it may not be a stretch to call him the fastest man to walk the face of the earth. But is that perfection?

The NFL uses an odd statistic called quarterback (or passer) rating to measure a quarterback's success on the field. This rating system uses completion percentages, interceptions and touchdowns, among other factors, to spit out a value on a scale of 158.3. So, if a quarterback achieves the maximum rating in a given game, did he have a perfect game?

In 1962, former NBA player Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in a single game nineteen more than any other player has scored in the history of the league. It is unlikely that another player will ever achieve this feat again, but can we justly call it perfection?

Perfection implies that there is nothing better to be achieved, which makes perfection an incredibly difficult level to reach. Yes, there are the rare cases of perfection the perfect game in baseball and tennis' golden match, in which a player wins without losing a point, are prime examples. Yet no golden matches exist on record, and perfect games are the rarest of the rare. They come along even less often than the fabled no-hitter.

In most sports there really is no such thing as perfection. Theoretically, almost any performance can be topped, no matter how unlikely. Just because one quarterback posts a perfect quarterback rating doesn't mean another can't throw just one more touchdown and top him. Maybe some day a basketball player will score 101 points, taking Chamberlain's place in the record books.

One of the reasons people watch sporting events is because they want to see a spectacle. They want to see something done better than they've ever seen before. I expect that, when the 2012 Olympic Games in London roll around, everyone will be watching Bolt to see if he can break his own record by running the 100 in under 9.6 seconds.

The lack of perfection in sports is what makes watching sports so attractive. A performance can always be topped and the greatest can always become second-best. The possibility, or perhaps the impossibility, of perfection drives athletes to work harder, in turn energizing the fans. Every game is a new spectacle because of its potential to make history. And, since perfection can never truly be reached, I forecast we'll be watching sports for years to come.