Nobody's Perfect

Two Men, One Call, and a Game for Baseball History

Armando Galarraga, Jim Joyce, Daniel Paisner

• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN:
  9780802195593
• Print ISBN:
  9780802145871

The Detroit Tigers, an umpire, a pitcher, and a mistake—one of the "classic, human, baseball stories" (Ken Burns, creator of the PBS mini-series Baseball).
 
The perfect game is one of the rarest accomplishments in sports. In nearly four hundred thousand contests in over 130 years, it has happened only twenty times. On June 2, 2010, Armando Galarraga threw baseball's twenty-first. Except that's not how it entered the record books. That's because Jim Joyce, voted the best umpire in the game in 2010 and 2011, missed the call on the final out. But rather than throwing a tantrum, Galarraga simply turned and smiled, went back to the mound, and finished the game. "Nobody's perfect," he said later in the locker room.
 
"You might think everything that could have been said, replayed, and revealed about that night has already been uttered, logged, and exposed. You would, however, be as wrong as the unfortunate Mr. Joyce" ( The Detroit News). In  Nobody's Perfect, Galarraga and Joyce come together to tell the personal story of a remarkable game that will live forever in baseball lore, and to trace their fascinating lives in sports. The result is "a masterpiece", an absorbing insider's look at two careers in baseball, a tremendous achievement, and an enduring moment of pure grace and sportsmanship ( The Huffington Post).

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• SETUP
• PROLOGUE
• My Blessings
• Tossing, Turning
• ONE
• Caracas
• Toledo
• PREGAME
• Rinoceronte
• Heading Home
• TWO
• Tommyjohn
• Fly-Away Arms
• GAME
• Like a Video Game
• Business as Usual
• THREE
• Up and Down
• Catch/No-Catch
• THE CALL
• I Can Only Smile
• Explosion
• POSTGAME
• Big Belly
• Safe at Home
• APPENDIX
• Acknowledgments