The cries for the Baseball Commissioner to award Armando Galarraga his perfect game remind me a bit of the outcry about Joe the Plumber: “But he isn’t a licensed plumber.”
Some people get too hung up on the official categories. Joe is a plumber, licensed or not, and Armando Galarraga pitched a perfect game, whether or not it goes into the official record books that way.
Russ Roberts helped me understand by writing the following:
Galarraga threw a perfect game. The blown call wasn’t in the seventh. It was the last out of the game. The replay is incontrovertible. He got the guy. He threw a perfect game. Everybody knows it. The other team knows it. The ump admits it. He threw a perfect game.
In any discussion of perfect games over the next 20 years, Galarraga’s name will be mentioned. So essentially his achievement is a perfect game with an asterisk or an un-asterisk because presumably his name will not be on the list. But I could see that happening.
The other irony is that there have been no-hitters that were preserved by bad scoring that changed a hit to an error. Those were not “really” no hitters but they go into the pantheon of great pitching performances. Galarraga is in the pantheon in everyone’s mind other than the official list and box score of the game.