The Chicago White Sox have had some brilliant pitching performances over the years. Philip Humber’s perfect game was one of the stranger ones of all time.
The Chicago White Sox were in Seattle on a random day in April to take on the Seattle Mariners. It ended up being one of the strangest events in modern-day baseball. The White Sox were a pretty good team in 2012. They were 85-77 but missed out on the playoffs. They seemed to be a lock to make the playoffs but they lost 11 out of their last 15 games to blow it.
Before that collapse, their pitching rotation was pretty good. Jake Peavy, Chris Sale, Jose Quintana, Gavin Floyd, and Philip Humber made up a pretty strong rotation. Chris Sale might be the one you would expect from that group to do something as special as throwing a perfect game on any given night but that wasn’t the case.
Yesterday was the anniversary of Philip Humber being the guy to accomplish such a feat. He threw the 21st perfect game in the history of Major League Baseball on April 21st, 2012. It was one of the oddest perfect games of all time. No disrespect to Humber at all, but he isn’t the type of player that you would expect to throw one of those.
When you look at the list of 20 players before him to accomplish the feat, they are almost all Hall of Fame level players. Mark Buehrle had one for the White Sox and it is right there with winning the World Series as the best accomplishment of his career. It is incredibly difficult to go out there and retire 27 straight batters without ever letting one reach base in any way.
You need a bit of luck, good pitches, and good defense behind you in order to have such a performance. Humber was an okay player at times but his numbers aren’t amazing. He went 16-23 in his MLB career with a 1.420 WHIP and 5.31 ERA. His career WAR was only a 0.9. It was a great accomplishment to do something like that but it will forever be remembered as the most random perfect game of all time.