On June 2, 2010, umpire Jim Joyce preemptively erased Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga's name from the record books by making the wrong call. Instead of correctly calling Indians' Jason Donald out at first base, and giving Galarraga an improbable perfect game, Joyce signaled safe and instantly became mortal enemy number one throughout baseball.
↵Not to Galarraga, though. Surprisingly, he displayed the utmost composure and compassion throughout the whole ordeal while Joyce, an otherwise revered umpire, showed genuine remorse in that he egregiously wronged the kid.
↵More than half a year later, ESPN's Amy K. Nelson has written a great piece on how Jim Joyce has coped with the memories of the imperfect call, which still haunts him every day:
↵↵↵But what if the memories only reinforce what Joyce calls the biggest mistake in umpiring history? What happens when one action not only annihilates a career-long, concentrated effort at invisibility and accuracy, but also wholly contradicts it? What happens when you're Jim Joyce and you try to resume your normal life?
↵"I think about it still, almost every day," Joyce says. "I don't want to be known as Jim Joyce, the guy that blew the perfect game. But I think that's inevitable."
↵Why? "Because I'm Jim Joyce," he says, "the umpire who blew the perfect game."
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I highly recommend you take 10 minutes out of your day to read the whole thing. All 2,316 words of it (and do forgive her when she says, "the ninth starts easily enough with a first-pitch fly out," downplaying Austin Jackson's incredible catch to record that first out and increasing the pressure for everyone around Galarraga to be perfect).
↵The 'Outside the Lines' report on Jim Joyce will air on ESPN on Sunday at 9 a.m. ET. Wake up to watch or set your DVRs; this is a great, great story.
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