On October 8, 1956, a New York Yankees pitcher who had been rocked for four runs in one and two-thirds innings three days earlier retired all 27 Brooklyn Dodgers he faced at Yankee Stadium without one reaching base; no pitcher has repeated it in a World Series since.

Don Larsen took the mound at Yankee Stadium on October 8, 1956, with a career line barely better than a coin flip: 30 wins against 40 losses across four uneven big-league seasons. Nothing in that record suggested he was about to pitch the best-known game in the sport's history.

Three days earlier, in Game 2 of the same World Series, he had lasted just one and two-thirds innings against the Brooklyn Dodgers, walking four batters and leaving with the Yankees still ahead 6-0 in a game New York went on to lose 13-8. Manager Casey Stengel needed a reason to trust him with the ball again. By Larsen's own telling, even he wasn't sure he had given him one.

Was Don Larsen a good pitcher before his perfect game?

Not obviously. He broke into the majors with the St. Louis Browns in 1953 and went 3-21 for the Baltimore Orioles the year after the franchise moved, then came to New York in a massive trade with Baltimore that also brought over pitcher Bob Turley. Around the Yankees clubhouse he was better known for his nightlife than his fastball. His own motto, he said later, was to let the good times roll; manager Jimmy Dykes once cracked that "the only thing Don fears is sleep."

That reputation caught up with him that same spring. Driving back from a night out in St. Petersburg, Florida, at four or five in the morning, Larsen wrapped his brand-new Oldsmobile around a telephone pole. He walked away unhurt. Asked about it, Stengel shrugged the whole thing off: Larsen, he told reporters, was "probably mailing a letter."

He was pitching better by October, though. Sometime that season he had scrapped his old windup for something simpler, throwing every pitch from something close to a standstill, and posted an 11-5 record down the stretch.

What happened in Don Larsen's perfect game?

Facing the Dodgers again on October 8, Larsen worked from that stripped-down, no-windup motion for all nine innings. It gave Brooklyn's hitters one less thing to read, and it worked from the first batter on.

Mickey Mantle put the Yankees ahead in the fourth, turning on a fastball from Brooklyn starter Sal Maglie and driving it into the right-field seats. Hank Bauer singled home a second run in the sixth, and Larsen needed nothing more. His defense gave him two real scares: in the fifth, Mantle ran down a deep Gil Hodges drive with a backhanded catch in left-center, and in the same inning a Jackie Robinson liner glanced off third baseman Andy Carey's glove straight to shortstop Gil McDougald, who threw Robinson out by a step.

Then came the ninth.

The final out, and the argument that never quite ended

With two outs, the Dodgers sent up Dale Mitchell to pinch-hit: a left-handed veteran who had struck out only once every 33 career at-bats. On a 1-2 count, his 97th pitch of the afternoon, Larsen threw a fastball that plate umpire Babe Pinelli, working the last game of his career, called strike three. Mitchell started to check his swing and never finished it. Yogi Berra sprinted out from behind the plate and leaped into Larsen's arms, a photograph that has since been reprinted about as often as any in the sport and now sits in the Library of Congress.

Here the record is genuinely contested, and it is worth saying so. Mitchell always maintained the pitch was high and outside, a ball rather than a strike, and film reviewed decades later has never fully settled the argument either way. What nobody disputes is the line score: 27 Dodgers came to bat, and 27 were retired. It remains the only no-hitter of any kind ever thrown in a World Series.

Has anyone else pitched a perfect game in the World Series?

No pitcher has finished one since, in seventy years of trying. The closest anyone has come was Roy Halladay, whose own no-hitter in the 2010 NL Division Series (the second no-hit postseason game ever) was broken up only by a two-out walk in the fifth, and even that one wasn't a World Series game. Larsen won that Series' Most Valuable Player award, and later the Babe Ruth Award as the postseason's outstanding player.

The rest of his career stayed exactly as ordinary as the record before it. Larsen pitched ten more seasons, closing out a career that ran from 1953 to 1967 and touched seven organizations in all, including the Kansas City Athletics, the Chicago White Sox, the San Francisco Giants and the Chicago Cubs. His 1956 season, the one with the perfect game in it, stayed the best of his career; he finished with a career mark of 81-91.

In 2012, needing money for his grandchildren's college tuition, Larsen retrieved the pinstriped jersey he had worn that day from the San Diego Hall of Champions, where it had sat on loan for decades, and put it up for auction. It sold for $756,000. Berra's mitt from the game, along with a ball and photographs from the afternoon, now belongs permanently to the National Baseball Hall of Fame's collection in Cooperstown; the jersey itself went to a private buyer.

Some pitcher takes a no-hit bid into the late innings of a postseason game most Octobers now, in an era of harder throwers and deeper bullpens than 1956 ever had. Almost all of them lose it before the ninth. What made one Monday afternoon at Yankee Stadium different was never that a pitcher had his best stuff; plenty have had that since. It was that, for nine innings, absolutely nothing else went wrong either.

Sources

• Society for American Baseball Research, "October 8, 1956: Don Larsen throws a perfect game in the World Series," gamesproj entry, sabr.org
• Society for American Baseball Research, "Don Larsen," SABR Biography Project, sabr.org
• National Baseball Hall of Fame, "Don Larsen defined World Series perfection," baseballhall.org
• Wikipedia, "Don Larsen's perfect game"
• Associated Press, "Larsen's jersey from perfect game auctioned off," December 2012
• Society for American Baseball Research, "October 6, 2010: Phillies' Roy Halladay throws postseason no-hitter," gamesproj entry, sabr.org