It was tough enough for the Rays to have a perfect game thrown against them on May 9, 2010, for the second time in as many seasons, but now the Oakland A’s pitcher who shut them down says he was hung over.
Dallas Braden was burdened by a virulent hangover when the left-hander hurled the 19th perfect game in major-league history, against visiting Tampa Bay.
“I wasn’t following protocol,” Braden, now 36, told the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this week. “Until that day, I had never treated a start or the day before a start the way I did that day.
"There are things you don’t do (before starts). Partaking in libations or adult beverages, that was something I never did before a day game. The night before Mother’s Day, though, I did. We were getting after it a little bit.
“It’s not like I was telling myself, ‘Let’s get crushed and tomorrow will be awesome.’ It was more like, ‘Let’s just forget about tomorrow.’”
Braden, who lost his mother, Jodie, to cancer in 2001, was scheduled to pitch the 2010 Mother’s Day game against Tampa Bay. It’s a holiday Braden disliked due to the painful memories it brought of his mother’s passing when he was a high school senior.
“It’s just a day you’re trying to be get by,” he said. “You’re waiting for 12:01 to roll around so it’s over."
It was the second time the Rays had a perfect game thrown against them, the first coming the previous year courtesy of the White Sox’s Mark Buehrle. In 2012, the Rays tied a major-league record with a third perfect game thrown against them, this time the Mariners’ Felix Hernandez doing the honors in Seattle.
Braden’s grandmother, Peggy, had beaten him to the Coliseum that day, all the way from Stockton, about 70 miles northwest of Oakland. “Before I had even gotten out of bed (she was there), that’s kind of how I was doing that day,” Braden told NBC Sports California in March of this year.
It’s not an untold story in baseball of a player having a stellar performance after a rough night of partaking.
In 1970, Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis threw a no-hitter against the Padres with — he said — LSD in his system. “I started having a crazy idea in the fourth inning that Richard Nixon was the home plate umpire, and once I thought I was pitching a baseball to Jimi Hendrix, who to me was holding a guitar and swinging it over the plate,” he said years after the fact.
Twenty-eight years later, the Yankees’ David Wells pitched a perfect game against the Twins. In his autobiography, Wells said he got one hour of sleep after attending an all-night Saturday Night Live cast party. He said he was half-drunk with bloodshot eyes and monster breath.
In Ball Four, author Jim Bouton recounted the day that a hobbled Mickey Mantle, who was not anticipating playing, was called on to pinch-hit. In the throes of a Hall of Fame hangover, Mantle walloped a mighty home run to the huzzahs of the Yankee Stadium faithful. “Those people don’t know how tough that was,” Mantle said, per Bouton.
Information from the San Jose Mercury News contributed to this report.
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