Don Larsen, who hurled World Series perfect game for Yankees, dies at 90

Don Larsen was such an unlikely candidate for baseball immortality that the most famous description of his singular great achievement said, “The imperfect man pitched a perfect game yesterday.”

There was no disputing the journeyman’s impeccable timing, as he came up with the performance of his life in 1956 and became the only pitcher ever to throw a perfect game in the World Series.

The Yankee, who carved his name forever in baseball history on Oct. 8 in Game 5, a moment frozen forever with the black-and-white image of catcher Yogi Berra leaping into his arms after the final called strike, died Wednesday. He was 90.

He spent the rest of his life being remembered for that one game in Yankee Stadium, ending with a called third strike on a checked swing by Brooklyn Dodgers pinch-hitter Dale Mitchell, and was fine with that. He just never could explain it. “I didn’t pick the spot,” he told Newsday’s Joe Gergen in 1989. “Everybody has a good day. Everybody’s entitled to a good day.”

But not everyone has a perfect day and no one else has done it in that same context. It put a lasting sheen on a career that yielded only 81 regular-season victories against 91 losses in 14 seasons with eight major-league teams. Larsen stood out largely because he was not a standout.

He was like every other pitcher who ever took the mound in that he was imperfect, but he seemed to fit the “imperfect man” moniker given him in the lead sentence of Joe Trimble’s New York Daily News story about the perfect game. At the time, Larsen was known as much for his taste for nightlife as he was for strong pitching.

Later in that same game story, Trimble referred to Larsen as “an affable, nerveless man who laughs his way through life, doesn’t know how to worry.” The righthanded pitcher, who wore No. 18 in pinstripes, had begun the 1956 season with a near tragic spring training incident: he drove his car into a light pole in St. Petersburg, Fla., because he had fallen asleep at the wheel.

Manager Casey Stengel, in an attempt to motivate him, named Larsen as his Opening Day starter, then eventually demoted him to the bullpen before reinstating him to the starting rotation late in the season. Larsen pitched poorly in Game 2 of the World Series against the defending champion Dodgers (as he had in Game 4 of the 1955 Series) and was unsure whether he would get another start. But he found a ball in his shoe before Game 5, a signal that he was to start.

He threw only 97 pitches that day and seemed totally poised. “There’s a tradition in baseball that when you’re pitching a no-hitter, you don’t talk about it. Nobody does,” Mickey Mantle said years later. “He was going up and down the bench, trying to get somebody to talk to him: `Hey Mick, I’m pitching a perfect game here. What do you think about that?’ I’m going, `Get out of here.’ I’m trying to walk off, leave him by himself. He was going up to everybody, talking about it.”

That was in character for a player who described himself as “The Nightrider” and whose teammates nicknamed him “Gooney Bird” for his whimsical approach to his job and life. Mantle, who homered in that Game 5 and preserved Larsen’s feat with a running backhand catch on Gil Hodges’ line drive, was quoted by author Lew Paper (“Perfect: Don Larsen’s Miraculous World Series Game and the Men Who Made It Happen”) as saying, “Larsen was easily the greatest drinker I’ve known and I’ve known some pretty good ones in my time.”

Larsen ultimately settled on a much more subdued lifestyle in retirement through a long marriage to his second wife, the former Corrine Bruess. They lived near the Canadian border in Hayden Lake, Idaho, from which Larsen regularly flew to attend Old-Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium.

Don James Larsen was born Aug. 7, 1929, in Michigan City, Indiana. In 1944 he moved to San Diego with his parents James (a department store salesman) and Charlotte (a housekeeper). He attended Point Loma High School, which later became the alma mater of David Wells, who pitched a regular-season perfect game for the Yankees in 1998. As a basketball standout, he received college scholarship offers but instead chose to sign with the St. Louis Browns, who sent him to pitch for the Class C Aberdeen (S.D.) Pheasants in 1947.

After two years in the Army, he made it to the majors in 1953 and moved with the Browns to Baltimore, where they were renamed the Orioles in 1954.

Although he never won more than 11 games in a season, and only one other time won 10, Larsen did have a knack for being in auspicious places before and after his perfect game.

The deal that sent him to the Yankees on Nov. 18, 1954 was a 17-player transaction, the largest in history at the time. When the Yankees parted ways with him in 1959, it was no middling trade. They sent him to Kansas City in a package that brought Roger Maris to the Bronx. Maris would win the next two American League Most Valuable Player awards and broke Babe Ruth’s hallowed single-season home run record with 61 in 1961.

Larsen was the winning pitcher for the San Francisco Giants in the finale of a three-game tiebreaking series against the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1962 and won Game 4 of the World Series against the Yankees that year. He retired, after one last season in the minors in 1968, with a career record of 4-2 with a 2.75 earned run average in the World Series.

He threw the ceremonial first pitch on Yogi Berra Day at Yankee Stadium on July 18, 1999, then turned the mound over to David Cone, who pitched his own perfect game.

Throughout his post-baseball life, which included 25 years as a salesman for the California-based Blake, Moffitt and Towne paper company, the Yankees and the Stadium retained a special place in the heart of a man who also pitched for the White Sox, Athletics, Astros and Cubs. At Old-Timers’ Day in 2008, the last one on the original Stadium site, he said, “I don’t know why they’re doing this, moving right next door. Memories are here in this park, for me.”

Memories of Larsen’s one perfect afternoon transcend any one spot and any one era. As he said in 1989, “I don’t know why it happened. And I don’t want to have a cocktail with the Man Upstairs to find out, either. ‘Cuz that would mean I have to stay.”