Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Fandemonium! Pitcher Cain Tosses Perfect Game And Giants Fans Go Nuts

Matt Cain: His no-no (a perfect game) is in the record books.
Jason O. Watson
/
Getty Images
Matt Cain: His no-no (a perfect game) is in the record books.

Let's put the serious stuff aside for a moment to celebrate something fun.

San Francisco pitcher Matt Cain Wednesday night pitched the first perfect game in his team's 130-year history as the Giants beat the Houston Astros 10-0 in San Francisco.

It took a couple great plays by his fielders to preserve the perfect performance — be sure to check the video replay at MLB.com of center fielder Gregor Blanco's diving catch in the seventh inning.

But Cain did most of the work on his own. He had a career-high 14 strikeouts, as the San Francisco Chronicle notes, on his way to retiring all 27 batters he faced.

"You know what? It felt like the World Series," Cain said after the game, according to the Chronicle, "but it almost felt a little bit louder, a little bit crazier than that. Every strike, they were going nuts for. It was truly amazing. I've never had that much excitement in every pitch, every strike, every swing."

It's the second perfect game so far this season. Philip Humber of the Chicago White Sox has the other. There have already been five no-hitters.

There have only been 22 perfect games — when no batter reaches base — in Major League history.

MLB controls sharing of videos from the game, and we can't its embed clips. But we can share this fan's view of what it was like at the end of the game as the last out was made. As the headline says, it was fandemonium in the stands. Note: there is one "fleeting expletive" in the audio.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.