On the triple play in fact and fancy

"I was not successful as a ball player, as it was a game of skill." —Casey Stengel

I won't let the week pass without publicly celebrating the astonishing unassisted triple play completed by Troy Tulowitski of the Colorado Rockies ballclub this past Sunday. Even the notoriously foreign newspaper The Guardian couldn't fail to take proper note of the thing on its website. What an unusual, remarkable event.

A perfect game is a rare rare thing; in all the overmeticulously documented annals of the game of baseball the number of perfect games is small, very small indeed. Admittedly the tendency of the game is for the batter, on appearing at the plate, to make an out in any of the ways provided by the rules of the game and retire from the field.

But, interspersed among all the regularly hopeful comings and understandably dejected goings represented by those outs, and in spite of the strongest possible indications otherwise to the uninitiate, who may be forgiven for believing that since nothing is apparently happening, nothing apparently ever will happen, by and by during the course of a ballgame something else will happen besides another out, that very something's probability supported by the vast available library of recorded instances of the game in which it is evident that baserunners will in almost every instance take their bases eventually in some inning or other of the game, finally to interrupt the otherwise consistent failure of the team at bat to make much of anything but an out of its batters' appearances at the plate.

Over the past 130 years of Major League Baseball history, there have been only 17 official perfect games by the current definition (approximately one every eight years); the status of the two that took place in the 19th century is debated by baseball aficionados, as the rules and playing conditions were markedly different from those of the so-called modern era beginning in 1900. In sum, a perfect game is thrown once in about every 20,000 major league contests.[…] For comparison, more people have orbited the moon than have pitched a Major League Baseball perfect game.
—From Wikipedia

Discounting those disputed couple of perfect games in the 19th century if we must leaves us with a scant 15 certified and true instances of the thing occurring in all the recorded games of Major League Baseball going all the way back to its beginning.

And in all those years there have only been 13 unassisted triple plays, making the recent beautiful feat of Tulowitski of the Colorado club rarer even than that rare rare thing, a perfect game.

In the foggy ocean side of San Francisco, on one of its streets, I learned the urban variants of the game of baseball, those subsets of its skills of throwing and running and catching and hitting, the fundamental glove-optional subsets of the game of baseball that fitted into the container of the urban street, giving due deference to the inevitable broken window or ball lost on the roof entailed by the public exercise of those fundamentals right there on that street instead of taking the whole lot of it down to a playground as was often suggested.

And of course with all the fundamentals there was the talk about the actual game of baseball itself, talk about the the way the fundamentals of the game came together when played out somewhere else, on a properly laid field with its level lawn between the marked foul lines and the familiar diamond formed by the bases and the little mound where the pitcher perches on the slab set right there at the zero point of the whole enterprise, the full enjoyment of which the utterly urban scheme of our street denied us. We had the parts of it, Strikeout, and running bases, and fielding the erratically bounding ball before it went under the parked car, but little enough experience of the whole, except by what was passed on in talk of baseball, supported by the well kept raft of record and rumor of notable players and what they'd done elsewhere, on baseball's actual field of play.

This is not to say that local experience went undiscussed. For howevermuch the sweet sacramental seeming-singularity of the idea of a triple play thrilled us once we could explain the idea to each other and did, demonstrating our understanding of the concept and appreciation of all the necessary contingencies fulfilled to make way for the unfolding of that unlikely event, to see, to be witness to the locally famous catch made by Bill on the street, for example, Bill chasing a fly gone suddenly aslant where it met the telephone pole, Bill reacting with the gloved hand so swiftly that the ball was intercepted on its new trajectory in the instant, just as its watchers' instant suspicion that the catch must not be possible was intercepted by the evidence before them, that was to witness a marvel of improbability rarer than an unassisted triple play in the agreed view of its witnesses, a baseball play unlikely to be ever seen again, truly singular.

Although I've witnessed many truly singular plays in baseball, I've never witnessed its rare yet replicable triple play, or a no-hitter, for that matter, let alone a perfect game, and I don't expect I ever will. They are of a different, nameable unlikelihood from that of the irreplicable play of Bill, for example, which has a story, but no formal name in baseball.