Eury Pérez was one out from baseball immortality Sunday afternoon in Sacramento, and the Marlins still nearly turned the whole thing into a disaster.
The right-hander carved through the Athletics for seven perfect innings at Sutter Health Park, needing just 92 pitches to retire all 21 batters he faced. Pérez struck out eight, got seven groundouts and rarely gave the A’s anything to square up. He allowed hard contact only three times, and even those balls never really threatened the perfect-game bid.
Then the Marlins made the move that changed everything.
Manager Clayton McCullough lifted Pérez after seven, and lefty Lake Bachar came in for the eighth. The crowd let the visitors hear it, with fans chanting “SHAME!”
toward the dugout. Bachar then walked the first hitter he faced, ending the perfect game immediately.
A single followed. Then a run.
Before the Marlins could even record an out in the inning, the perfect game, no-hitter and shutout were all gone.
It only got uglier from there. The Athletics pushed across five runs against Bachar without him recording an out, turning a historic afternoon into a full-blown bullpen fire.
And yet, somehow, the Marlins still escaped with a 9-8 win after closer Pete Fairbanks had to survive a shaky ninth.
For Miami, the decision to pull Pérez was always going to invite second-guessing, but there was real injury context behind it. Pérez had Tommy John surgery in 2024 and didn’t come back until June of last season.
He also missed a month recently with a hamstring injury, and Sunday was just his third start since returning. He threw 68 pitches on June 24, 86 on June 30 and reached 92 in this one.
The Marlins were never going to let him push far beyond that, even with history dangling in front of him.
There’s also the broader track record to consider. Pérez has never thrown a complete game in the majors across 53 starts.
He had never gone beyond seven innings before Sunday, and he had only finished the seventh inning twice before. He had only gotten an out in the seventh four times, including this start.
By any measure, this was the best outing of his career, even if the perfect-game dream vanished before it could become official.
The Marlins, meanwhile, keep stacking wins. They went 20-6 in June and have now won three straight while completing a sweep in Sacramento.
That leaves them at 49-42, in a virtual tie with the Cardinals for the third wild-card spot and 4 ½ games behind the Braves in the NL East. They’ve already erased a deficit as large as 14 games this season.
The franchise has had six no-hitters since debuting in 1993 - by Al Leiter in 1996, Kevin Brown in 1997, A.J. Burnett in 2001, Anibal Sánchez in 2006, Henderson Alvarez in 2013 and Edinson Volquez in 2017 - but never a perfect game.
MLB has had 24 perfect games and 327 no-hitters overall, and the sport still hasn’t seen an individual no-hitter since Blake Snell on Aug. 2, 2024, or a perfect game since Domingo German on June 28, 2023. Miami was chasing something even bigger: becoming the first team ever with a combined perfect game.
Instead, the night turned into a reminder of how quickly baseball can flip. One pitch count.
One bullpen call. One walk.
And the whole thing was gone.
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