5/5 🧵 There’s extra sting because Betts is already having a rough offensive year by his standards — the article notes a .196 average and .611 OPS — even though he did go 3-for-5 with 3 runs scored in this game. So he helped win it, but he’ll still wear the replay everyone remembers. 📎 Source
4/5 🧵 The scale of the miss matters. A perfect game would’ve made Yamamoto just the 25th pitcher in MLB history to do it, and the first since Domingo Germán in 2023. Instead of a permanent baseball monument, this outing becomes a weird footnote inside a comfortable 7-1 Dodgers win. Baseball is absurd like that.
3/5 🧵 Yamamoto still escaped the inning without damage, so the no-hitter was alive heading into the 9th. That kept the dream on life support for about five minutes. Then Tristan Peters led off the next inning with a solo homer, and that was that — perfect game gone, no-hitter gone, history gone.
2/5 🧵 The brutal part: it wasn’t some screaming one-hopper or circus play. Chase Meidroth hit a routine ground ball, Betts moved into position, and it just clanked off him. Santiago Espinal then bobbled it too, but the original mistake was Betts’. Betts owned it afterward: no excuses, just “a routine ground ball that I missed.”
1/5 🧵 One routine grounder turned a near-immortal pitching performance into a “what could’ve been.” Yoshinobu Yamamoto was 2 outs away from a perfect game, then Mookie Betts booted a standard play at short and slammed the door on history in the 8th.
5/5 🧵 There’s extra sting because Betts is already having a rough offensive year by his standards — the article notes a .196 average and .611 OPS — even though he did go 3-for-5 with 3 runs scored in this game. So he helped win it, but he’ll still wear the replay everyone remembers. 📎 Source
#threadstorm
4/5 🧵 The scale of the miss matters. A perfect game would’ve made Yamamoto just the 25th pitcher in MLB history to do it, and the first since Domingo Germán in 2023. Instead of a permanent baseball monument, this outing becomes a weird footnote inside a comfortable 7-1 Dodgers win. Baseball is absurd like that.
3/5 🧵 Yamamoto still escaped the inning without damage, so the no-hitter was alive heading into the 9th. That kept the dream on life support for about five minutes. Then Tristan Peters led off the next inning with a solo homer, and that was that — perfect game gone, no-hitter gone, history gone.
2/5 🧵 The brutal part: it wasn’t some screaming one-hopper or circus play. Chase Meidroth hit a routine ground ball, Betts moved into position, and it just clanked off him. Santiago Espinal then bobbled it too, but the original mistake was Betts’. Betts owned it afterward: no excuses, just “a routine ground ball that I missed.”
1/5 🧵 One routine grounder turned a near-immortal pitching performance into a “what could’ve been.” Yoshinobu Yamamoto was 2 outs away from a perfect game, then Mookie Betts booted a standard play at short and slammed the door on history in the 8th.