It is the rarest individual feat in baseball: a pitcher takes the mound, faces 27 batters, and sends every single one of them back to the dugout. No hits, no walks, no errors, nobody on base, ever. Across nearly 150 years and hundreds of thousands of games, it has happened exactly 24 times. More astronauts have walked on the Moon.
What makes the list so fascinating is who is on it. Some perfect games were thrown by all-time greats like Sandy Koufax and Cy Young. Others came from journeymen and underdogs who never did anything else like it, proving that on the right afternoon, perfection is available to almost anyone with a glove and a little luck.
Below is the complete list of every perfect game in MLB history, with the date, the opponent, and the story behind each one. Take a look, then we’ll dig into the most memorable performances.
The two that stand apart
Of the 24, two performances tower over the rest for sheer historical weight. The first is Don Larsen’s, thrown for the Yankees in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers. It remains the only perfect game ever thrown in the postseason, and it happened on baseball’s grandest stage, by a pitcher who finished his career with a losing record. The image of catcher Yogi Berra leaping into Larsen’s arms is one of the most famous in the sport’s history.
The second is Sandy Koufax’s 1965 masterpiece against the Cubs, in which the Dodgers’ lefthander struck out 14 batters, a perfect-game record that stood alone for 47 years until Matt Cain matched it in 2012. Koufax was at the absolute peak of his powers, and the game is often cited as the finest single pitching performance of his era. Seven of the 24 perfect-game pitchers are now in the Hall of Fame, including Koufax, Cy Young, Randy Johnson, and Roy Halladay.
The unlikeliest names on the list
What makes the list so beloved is that perfection is not reserved for the greats. Philip Humber, who threw his in 2012, was a 29-year-old journeyman with a career ERA above 5.00, and that perfect game turned out to be the only complete game he ever recorded in the majors. Charlie Robertson did it as a rookie in 1922 and never came close again. Dallas Braden, an underdog drafted in the 24th round, threw his on Mother’s Day in 2010 with the grandmother who raised him in the stands.
Domingo German’s 2023 perfect game, the most recent on the list, fit that same underdog mold. He threw it just days after a disastrous outing in which he gave up 10 runs in barely three innings, and his gem broke a perfect-game drought of more than ten years. It was also the first perfect game thrown under MLB’s new pitch clock, a small modern footnote on a very old feat.
The famous near-misses
No list of perfect games is complete without the ones that got away, because they show how cruel the margin can be. In 2010, Detroit’s Armando Galarraga retired 26 straight batters and appeared to get the 27th on a groundout, only for the first-base umpire to mistakenly call the runner safe. Replays confirmed the runner was out, but the call stood, and Galarraga lost his perfect game to an error he had no control over. His gracious reaction made him a folk hero and helped accelerate baseball’s move toward expanded instant replay.
Earlier, in 1959, Pittsburgh’s Harvey Haddix threw 12 perfect innings against the Braves, only to lose both the perfect game and the game itself in the 13th. Because the feat is officially defined as a complete nine-inning game with no baserunners, performances like Haddix’s, brilliant but unfinished or unlucky, do not make the official count. That strict definition is exactly what keeps the list at a select 24.
Final Word
Twenty-four times in nearly 150 years, a pitcher has been flawless from the first batter to the last. The list runs from Lee Richmond in 1880 to Domingo German in 2023, and it includes legends and journeymen alike, which is the whole charm of it. A perfect game is the one feat in baseball that requires not just elite talent but a full nine innings of clean defense and a healthy dose of luck, and no pitcher has ever managed it twice.
That rarity is what makes it must-see television every time a bid reaches the late innings. If a pitcher takes a perfect game into the seventh, eighth, or ninth, you are watching a shot at history that, on average, succeeds less than once a year. For more on how this feat differs from its more common cousin, see our explainer on the difference between a no-hitter and a perfect game.