The Perfect Game Nobody Saw Coming

A Ball in the Shoe

Don Larsen walked into the Yankees clubhouse at Yankee Stadium on the morning of October 8, 1956, and found a baseball sitting in one of his cleats. That was the club's quiet way of telling a pitcher he was starting that day, and Larsen had not expected the news at all^3,4.

Accounts differ on who put it there. Some credit manager Casey Stengel directly, others point to coach Frank Crosetti, whose job it reportedly was to leave the ball as a signal^3,4. Either way, Larsen later said he simply stared at it and thought something like: don't mess this one up.

It was a strange assignment to hand him. Three days earlier, in Game 2 of the same World Series, Larsen had lasted just one and two-thirds innings, walking four batters and getting pulled after allowing four runs^5,6. His career to that point had been defined less by results than by inconsistency: a 3-21 season with the Baltimore Orioles in 1954 remains one of the worst single seasons by a pitcher in modern baseball, and he was traded to the Yankees that winter almost as an afterthought in a seventeen-player deal^9,10.

Larsen was also known around the league as someone who enjoyed a drink and a late night. The night before Game 5, according to one account, he had a few beers with a sportswriter and told him, half joking, that he might just pitch a no-hitter the next day. He said it without knowing he'd even be pitching⁹.

What happened that afternoon against the Brooklyn Dodgers became the answer to a question nobody had thought to ask: what if the least reliable pitcher on the roster had his one perfect day on the sport's biggest stage?

Twenty-Seven Up, Twenty-Seven Down

Larsen faced Pee Wee Reese to open the game and worked him to a three-ball count, the only time all afternoon any Dodger got that close to a walk¹⁰. He retired Reese, then Jim Gilliam, then Duke Snider, and the Dodgers never got another batter on base for the rest of the game.

The Dodgers sent out a lineup carrying four future Hall of Famers: Reese, Snider, Jackie Robinson, and catcher Roy Campanella, along with Gil Hodges and Carl Furillo⁸. Opposing Larsen was Sal Maglie, who had thrown a no-hitter of his own just two weeks earlier and was pitching nearly as well this day, allowing only two runs and five hits over eight innings^10,7.

The game's closest brush with imperfection came in the second inning. Robinson hit a hard grounder that caromed off third baseman Andy Carey's glove and bounced directly to shortstop Gil McDougald, who threw Robinson out by a step^5,11. In the fifth, Mickey Mantle ran down a deep Hodges fly ball in left-center with a backhanded catch that Larsen later said would have been a home run in most other parks¹.

Mantle had already provided the only offense anyone needed, taking Maglie deep in the fourth inning for a 1-0 lead⁷. The Yankees added an insurance run in the sixth when Hank Bauer singled home Carey, making it 2-0⁵.

Larsen worked fast and ahead in the count almost all day, ahead on 21 of the 27 batters he faced, and needed only 97 pitches total^10,1. He struck out seven, the last of them coming on the final out of the game.

In the ninth, with three outs standing between him and history, Larsen retired Furillo on a flyout and Campanella on a grounder to second. That brought up pinch-hitter Dale Mitchell, a .312 career hitter who rarely struck out, batting for Maglie's spot^7,8.

On a 1-2 count, Larsen threw a fastball that Mitchell appeared to start to swing at and pulled back. Home plate umpire Babe Pinelli, working the final game of his career, called it strike three^5,8. Yogi Berra sprinted from behind the plate and jumped into Larsen's arms, an image that has outlived almost everything else about the 1956 season^1,7.

What's Disputed

The most argued-over moment of the game is also its final one. Mitchell appeared to check his swing on the last pitch, and whether the bat crossed the plane of the plate has been debated ever since, including by Mitchell himself, who maintained for the rest of his life that the pitch was a ball⁵. Film analysis later suggested the swing did travel far enough to count as a strike by today's standards, but the call stood as official in 1956 and the perfect game has never been in doubt as a matter of record^5,8.

The other open question is smaller but good for a dinner-table argument: who actually put the baseball in Larsen's shoe. Some sources name Casey Stengel as the one who tipped Larsen off that morning, while others credit third-base coach Frank Crosetti with the shoe-ball tradition itself^3,4,9. No source disputes that it happened, only who did it.

The Line Score

• Date: October 8, 1956, Game 5 of the World Series¹
• Venue: Yankee Stadium, attendance 64,519¹
• Final score: Yankees 2, Dodgers 0⁵
• Batters faced: 27, all retired, with no hits, walks, hit batters, or errors^1,2
• Pitches: 97, with 72 of them strikes¹
• Strikeouts: 7, including the final out against Dale Mitchell^5,10
• Larsen's regular-season 1956 record: 11-5 with a 3.26 ERA, the best numbers of his career⁹
• Larsen's career record: 81-91 over 14 seasons and eight teams¹⁰

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