Bobby Witt At Peace At Having Missed Out on Perfect Game With Athletics
Bobby Witt knows how Armando Galarraga feels. Both were starting pitchers whose careers saw them lose more games than they won.
And both came within one bad call by a first base umpire of getting some measure of baseball immortality with a perfect game.
Galarraga has been in the news lately by making it known that he’d like Major League Baseball to correct the error and credit him with a perfect game on June 2, 2010. The Tigers’ right-hander retired 26 consecutive Cleveland batters, then first base umpire Jim Joyce blew a call at first base, calling Indians’ baserunner Jason Donald safe. Galarraga is in the books with a one-hit shutout.
Witt traveled much the same course with the A’s on June 23, 1994. He set down the first 16 batters before the 17, Greg Gagne, tried to break Witt’s rhythm with a bunt for a single. A’s second baseman Brent Gates got to the ball and got it to first baseman Troy Neel in time, but umpire Gary Cederstrom missed the call.
Witt, Neel and manager Tony La Russa argued the call vociferously, but in 1994, as in 2010, there was no instant replay and no recourse. Witt had a one-hit shutout and 14 strikeouts for what would be the best game of his career. Perfectly imperfect.
“The one thing that was different for me is that it wasn’t a televised game,” Witt says. “There was an in-house feed, but that was it. I was very upset at the time, but I had a game to finish. Gary Cederstrom and I had some words, went back and forth, but finally the home plate ump (Ted Hendry) came up and said `OK, let’s get going.’
“From that moment for the rest of the day, my mindset was that I was going to show him and everybody else that he was wrong.”
La Russa didn’t like to spend too much time arguing with umpires if he could avoid it. In this day, there was no avoiding it.
“I was taught that you don’t ever go that far with umpires; you think about what’s best for your team,” La Russa says. “These guys are men, not machines. It came to a point where Bobby had to make his pitch, then get on with it. He was great that day.”
Witt says he feels what Galarraga feels, that perfection was denied. And he will follow what happens with Galarraga’s quest for a change with more than your average amount of interest. But he’s not going to make a pitch that things be changed. Not now, anyway.
“For one thing, his was in the ninth inning and mine was in the sixth,” Witt says. “And there were all kinds of cameras at his game, not at mine. And there was social media around his, too. We didn’t have that back then. The entire world saw what he did. Not that many people saw what I did.”
Witt said he never spoke to Cederstrom about the play in the final seven years he pitched; Cederstrom retired after the 2019 season. As for Gagne trying to bunt for a hit, Witt doesn’t have a beef.
“If it was the eighth or ninth inning and he’d done it, that might be something else,” Witt says. “Then I might be more upset. But I felt it was early enough in the game and it was close enough at the time (the A’s led, 3-0) that he was just trying to make something happen for his team.”
In talking last week with theathletic.com, Galarraga, who was out of the major leagues after 2012 and who spent time playing in Taiwan and Mexico before retiring in 2015, made his case for having the call reversed and perfection declared.
“I was like, what can I do to have a better finish to the story?” he said. “How can Major League Baseball give me the perfect game? Because it was perfect, right? Why not? Why wait for so long? I don’t want to die and the they’ll be like, `You know what, he threw a perfect game.’”
While Witt, who has become a player agent since leaving the field, shares some of that feeling, his prime baseball focus is currently on watching his son, Bobby Jr., try to make the big leagues as an infielder. Witt Jr., who was born about six years after the missed perfect game, was the second overall pick in the 2019 draft by the Royals, who see him as their shortstop of the future.
“Being a player and being the father of a player, those are two entirely different skill sets,” Witt said. I took my professional like, `I’m taking my lunch bucket and I’m going to work.’ But with Junior, I just love watching him play. It doesn’t matter if he succeeds or not. Just having him do what he loves the way he does it, any father would cherish that.”
Follow Athletics insider John Hickey on Twitter: @JHickey3
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