255. " ̶P̶E̶R̶F̶E̶C̶T̶ " 7" x 10.5" (Copy)

Size: 7 × 10.5 inches art print (not a comic book)
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From the Artist:  (coming shortly)

Pop Fly #255: PERFECT.

This week’s piece was suggested to me a couple weeks ago. Harvey Haddix is one of those baseball stories that has always been somewhere in the back of my mind, but hearing somebody suggest it while I was asking for ideas made me look at it a little differently. So here it is, Pop Fly #255 — PERFECT.

What I kept coming back to with this one was the strange way stories can change after they’ve already happened. I started thinking about my old grade-school yearbooks. The yearbook was the yearbook, but once I got ahold of it, some kid I didn’t like suddenly had horns and a mustache, and some girl I had a crush on had a heart drawn around her picture, and the insides were full of signatures and messages to me. None of that changed what actually happened that year, obviously, but it changed the book. It made that copy mine. It became this weird combination of what really happened and what I thought about it later.

That’s sort of how I started seeing the Haddix game. On May 26, 1959, Harvey Haddix retired 36 straight Milwaukee Braves. He was perfect for nine innings, then ten, then eleven, then twelve, which is already ridiculous. The Pirates, unfortunately, had also managed to score exactly zero runs. In the 13th, a runner finally reached on an error, so the perfect game was gone, and later in the inning Joe Adcock got the hit that ended the no-hitter and Milwaukee won 1–0. Twelve perfect innings and a loss. Baseball can be a real ass sometimes.

But the story somehow got even stranger. For more than 30 years, Haddix’s game was recognized as a no-hitter. Then in 1991 Major League Baseball changed the definition of what officially counted as one, moved the goal post and because Haddix had eventually allowed a hit in the 13th, his game came off the list. Nothing about May 26, 1959 had changed. Same pitches. Same 36 straight outs. Same impossible performance. Only the way it was labeled changed. Haddix’s response to all of that was pretty great: “It’s O.K. I know what I did.”

So I started imagining this piece as an actual old comic book that had been sitting around for years. Somebody owned it. Somebody knew how the story ended. And at some point they grabbed a pen and scribbled all over that giant word PERFECT, the same way I drew horns and hearts in my yearbooks. The printed cover tells one version of the story, and then somebody comes along later and adds their own version on top of it. That felt right for Haddix, because his story really did get rewritten more than once, and was heartbroken twice. The record book can call it whatever it wants. For twelve innings, he was perfect.