Don Larsen retired all 27 batters he faced on October 8, 1956, in the fifth game of the World Series at Yankee Stadium, and it has not been done in a World Series since. The Brooklyn Dodgers got no hits, no walks and no runners of any kind in a 2-0 loss, and Larsen threw 97 pitches and did not go to a three-ball count on a single batter, which is the sort of line that looks as if it had been made up afterwards. Yogi Berra caught him and said later that he called the game the way he would have called any other, because changing anything would have been tempting it.
Nobody expected it. Larsen had started the second game of the series and been pulled in the second inning after walking four men, and he was a journeyman with a losing career record who had come from Baltimore. He worked without a windup, which was unusual at the time and which he had taken up because he had trouble repeating his delivery with men on base. The Dodgers had the better line-up on paper, with Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese and Roy Campanella, and they had won the third and fourth games.
The Yankees scored in the fourth on a home run by Mickey Mantle, which was all Larsen needed, and added an unearned run in the sixth. Mantle made a running catch in left-centre in the fifth that is usually described as the play that saved it. Larsen struck out three. The last man was Dale Mitchell, a pinch hitter who had batted .312 that season, and the umpire Babe Pinelli called a third strike that replays have never settled.
Larsen was named the most valuable player of the series and was briefly one of the most famous men in the country. Brooklyn took the sixth. The Yankees won the seventh 9-0 the next day. In fifteen seasons his career record was 81 wins against 91 losses, which is the detail that makes the afternoon what it is: a perfect game, thrown by a man who was not supposed to be pitching one.