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50 Years Ago Today John Grace Threw A Perfect Game For TCU
TCU has been playing baseball since 1896 with an overall record of 2215-1663-25. That is 3,903 games over the course of 126 years. Of those 3,903 games, some were good, some were bad, some were ugly. Some were even great.
One was Perfect.
Fifty years ago today, April 8, 1972, John Grace and his TCU teammates played the perfect game. The one and only perfect game in TCU history.
"It's a good thing it was fifty years ago and a bad thing it was fifty years ago," Grace joked. "I think James Street pitched a perfect game against Texas Tech while he was playing at Texas. I'm the only one for TCU, and the way things are going with these aluminum bats and everything else it's probably not going to get broken anytime soon."
"They [TCU] have these goggles that you can put on and its a virtual reality deal. They now have the capability of filming opposing pitchers, cause there is just so much film available today, they can put an opposing pitcher in there for the batters to be able to react to curveballs, sliders, fastballs and so it is actually like taking batting practice off them virtually. "
"It's got to be an advantage to the hitter because if you've seen the guy and you've seen his motion and any quirks you know if he comes in from a different direction on different pitches you can recognize that then. So I think it is a much better tool for the hitter."
The game of baseball has changed dramatically in a lot of ways in the fifty years since Grace's perfect game in Fort Worth.
"I'm from Wichita Falls, and I actually signed a football scholarship. I came in as one of the quarterbacks that year ('68) but my senior year of high school had torn my knee up in my last football game and had surgery but was ready my senior year in baseball. When I was recruited they said I could play either one. After the first couple of weeks, I said this isn't going to work, so I checked in and we concentrated on baseball after that. I was a better baseball player than I was football player."
John Grace, who pitched the only perfect game in TCU history, sat down with KillerFrogs to reflect upon that game 50 years ago.
Rema Rhone
Grace threw several no-hitters at the high school level in Wichita Falls but no perfect games.
"You can get beat four to zero and still pitch a no-hitter. But in a perfect game, the whole team has to be perfect. They can't make a mistake anywhere the whole game. In the perfect game, I think I had four strike outs, so that means 80% of all the outs made were by my teammates; and to be able to do that, for them to share that honor, it's special."
"It's a team accomplishment, and I promise you any player that ever played in a perfect game will remember that game the rest of their lives."
"We are all close friends, and get back together every once in a while. Everybody talks about it, things that happened, what took place. It's special for all of them, so I'm proud of them. We had an All-American at second Phil Turner. He's in the Letterman's Hall of Fame as well as our third baseman Don Bodenhamer, he's in the Letterman's Hall of Fame. Jimmy Torres was our center fielder and he's in the Letterman's Hall of Fame. Short stop Glenn Monroe went to the Tigers."
"A teammate named Rod Monahan from Odessa, TX taught me how to throw a slider. My fastball wasn't fast enough to throw it by too may people. I didn't throw 90 mph, probably more in the 85-86 range, to be honest. But I had really good control. So, I never really walked people. My senior year, I averaged 1.7 walks per 9 innings. What kept me effective was I could hit the corners, hit the knees, keep the ball on the ground so our fielders could make the play. But I learned how to throw a slider that looked like a fastball and would break about six inches and come down maybe 2 inches. So the guy thinks it's a fastball and all of a sudden he's knocking it into he ground. If I wouldn't have learned that pitch, I wouldn't have been very successful in college at all."
"The team we were playing against was The University of Texas Pan American. Who the previous year, I believe, they were in the College World Series, and when they played us, they were still ranked 2nd in the country. It was a good team, Pan America was really good. They had a couple of guys James and Wayne Tyrone who went on and played professional baseball afterword."
"This was a weekend series. I think we played Pan American in a double header on Friday and a double header on Saturday. So, I was the fourth game, and it was just a normal game, a normal Saturday, a normal everything until you finally get into the 5th inning and go, 'Gosh they haven't gotten a hit yet.' All of a sudden, it kind of got word around campus what was going on. We may of only had a few hundred people at the start of the game, but three or four times as many by the time it ended. Through the years it seems like everyone claims they were there."
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