By: Kevin Plaza
To be perfect is to be without fault, to be flawless. To establish perfection is to be in an unsurpassable degree of accuracy or excellence. Well Dallas Braden of the Oakland Athletics was exactly that after he threw his last pitch this last mothers day, PERFECT. 27 batters came to the plate and all 27 sat down without getting walked, hit by a pitch, or getting a hit. Dallas Braden did something that only 18 pitchers have done within the past 134 years. He did something that people can only dream about, something that some all time great pitchers have not even come close to. He has achieved baseball immortality.
What a great story huh, Mr. Braden, you have just pitched a perfect game with your grandmother in the stands, the same grandmother that has raised you, on Mothers Day. Is there a better Mothers Day present then that? It sure as hell beat my card and scratch off lotto card idea. I can not even imagine what Dallas or his grandmother were going through watching and partaking in this perfect game. But I definitely have an idea what Alex Rodriguez was thinking…..uh oh spaghetti-o.
Hey remember when you were younger, playing pickup games of wiffle ball or baseball or anything like that, and you did something that really pissed someone off? Lets say like taunting them after a strikeout, or fouling somebody alittle to hard, and then that person that you pissed off, goes off and scores like the next 10 buckets and wins the games, or hit’s the game winning home run off of you, you ever been in that situation? Well yea that must be how Arod feels. If you don’t remember the incident that sparked this little Arod-Braden controversy, here is a tid bit of it via the NY post…
Dallas Braden told Alex Rodriguez to stay off the mound twice in the sixth inning yesterday.
When Rodriguez cut across the mound to get back to first base on a foul ball, Braden told Rodriguez, “This is my mound, my rubber.” He repeated that message after getting Robinson Cano to bounce into a 3-6-1 double play to end the inning.
Rodriquez responded after the game with “He told me to get off the mound,” he said. “I was a little surprised because I never heard that, especially from a guy with a handful of wins [17] in his career.”
Well Alex, make that 18 wins and now a perfect game. Arod, you may have just woke up a sleeping giant. This guy was the young ace of the Oakland staff last year and this year was predicted to have a break out year. So far so good Dallas. Now I know Arod is going to break every Homerun record in the history books when it is all said and done in his career, and maybe this is Dallas Braden’s only highlight of his career, but who cares, because atleast there wont be a asterisk next to Braden’s name in the record books, unlike Arod. Can you tell that I am a Mets fan?
