For 7 innings, Eury Perez was doing something almost nobody in baseball gets to do. The Marlins right-hander retired every Athletics hitter he faced, working with a comfortable cushion as Miami built an 8-0 lead in Oakland's temporary home in Sacramento. Perfect games are rare enough that fans start doing the math by the 5th inning, and by the 7th, everyone in the building knew exactly what was on the line.
Perez working through the 7th still perfect, then walking off the mound after his day ended.
Then came the number that decided everything: 92 pitches. Marlins management pulled Perez right there, perfect game and all, prioritizing his arm over the milestone. It's the modern-baseball dilemma in a nutshell — pitch counts and long-term health now routinely trump history, and teams have shown they'll make that call even with perfection sitting in the balance.
The bullpen did not make that decision look good. Almost immediately after Perez left, the Athletics started putting the ball in play against Miami's relief corps, and the perfect game evaporated. Fans in Sacramento, sensing exactly what was happening, broke into "SHAME" chants directed at the Marlins' bullpen for letting the moment slip away that fast.
The scene in Sacramento as the perfect game bid unraveled and fans let the bullpen hear it.
It got worse from there. Oakland kept chipping away, including a long home run off the bat of Heim that cleared 370 feet at over 104 mph off the bat, turning what had been an 8-0 laugher into an actual game. Miami's lead held, but the storyline of the day wasn't the win — it was watching a shot at history get erased inning by inning right after the guy who earned it walked off the field.
The bullpen's response to inheriting a perfect game: a parade of hard contact, capped by a Heim home run.
Perez still gets to walk away with 7 perfect innings on his ledger, which is nothing to scoff at even if the box score won't say "perfect game" anywhere. But this is exactly the kind of afternoon that fuels the pitch-count debate for another decade — a guy dealing, a number on a chart, and a bullpen that couldn't hold the line for even one inning.